The publisher read the manuscript, but understood it ill; he displayed no enthusiasm. In April, Nietzsche, still at Genoa, was still waiting for his proofs. He had hoped to surprise his friends by despatching an unexpected piece of work, and had said nothing to anyone, Peter Gast excepted. At last he renounced the pleasure of having a secret. "Good news!" he wrote to his sister. "A new book, a big book, a decisive book! I cannot think of it without a lively emotion...." In May, he rejoined Peter Gast in a village of Venetia, Recoaro, at the foot of the Alps. His impatience grew every day. The delays of his publisher prevented him from clearing up the new thoughts which already pressed hard on him. _The Dawn of Day_--this was the title which he finally selected--appeared at the most unfavourable time of the year, in July. [1] Lit. torchlike. [2] This is an evangelical reminiscence, thinks Peter Gast. Scriptural suggestions are frequent in the language and thought of Nietzsche. [3] _The Dawn of Day,_ cxiv. This book, published in June, 1881, gives very reliable autobiographical indications on the period here studied. [4] _The Dawn of Day,_ p. 301. This passage is taken from Miss Johanna Volz's translation. London: T. Fisher Unwin. CHAPTER VI THE LABOUR OF ZARATHUSTRA I _The Conception of the Eternal Return_ Friedrich Nietzsche regarded _The Dawn of Day_ as the exercise of a convalescent who amuses himself with desires and ideas, and finds in each a malicious or a delightful pleasure. It had been a game which must have an end. I must now choose from among these half-perceived ideas, he thought, I must lay hold of one, express it in its full force, and close my years of retreat and hesitation. "In times of peace," he had written, "the man of warlike instinct turns against himself." Hardly done with his combats, he sought a new occasion for battle. He had remained, up to mid-July, in Venetia, on the lower slopes of the Italian Alps. He had to seek a cooler refuge. He had not forgotten those high Alpine valleys which had given him, two years earlier, in his ill-health a respite and a rapid joy. He went up towards them and installed himself in a rustic fashion in the Engadine, at Sils-Maria. He had, for one franc a day, a room in a peasant house; a neighbouring inn furnished him with his meals. Passers by were rare, and Nietzsche, when he found himself in talkative humour, used to visit the curé or the schoolmaster. These good people always remembered this very singular German professor who was so learned, so modest, and so good.