This very strong language contains no exaggeration. His mother and sister, who saw him suffer, bear witness to the awful days through which he passed. He accepted suffering as a test, as a spiritual exercise. He compared his destiny to that of men who were great in sorrow--Leopardi, for instance. But Leopardi was not brave, for, in his sickness, he defamed life, and--Nietzsche discovered this hard truth--an invalid has not the right to be a pessimist. Or the Christ. But even Christ weakened upon the cross. "Father, Father!" He cried out, "why hast Thou forsaken Me?" Friedrich Nietzsche had no God, no father, no faith, no friends. Every prop he had taken from himself, and yet he did not bend. To complain, even in a passing manner, would be to avow defeat. He refused to make the avowal. Suffering did not overwhelm him; on the contrary, it instructed him, and animated his thought. "The enormous tension of the intellect, bent on the mastery of pain," he writes, "shows everything in a new light: and the unspeakable charm of every new light is often powerful enough to overcome all the allurements of suicide, and to make the continuance of life appear as most desirable to the sufferer. Scornfully he reviews the warm and comfortable dream-world, wherein the healthy man moves unthinkingly; scornfully he reviews the noblest and dearest of the illusions in which he formerly indulged; this contempt is his joy, it is the counterpoise which enables him to hold his own against physical pain, a counterpoise the necessity of which he now feels.... Our pride revolts as it never did before: joyfully does it defend life against such a tyrant as pain, that tyrant that would force us to testify against life. To stand for life in the face of this tyrant is a task of infinite fascination."[3] Friedrich Nietzsche supposed that his end was close at hand. On the 14th of January, wishing to give a last indication of his thought to some friend, he wrote Fräulein von Meysenbug a letter which is a farewell and a spiritual testament. What an effort it must have cost him!