He thought much of the Bayreuth festivals, but he dissembled or only half avowed his regrets. "I am well content that I cannot go," he wrote to Lou Salomé. "And, nevertheless, if I could be at your side, in good humour to talk; if I could say in your ear this, that, well, I could endure the music of the _Parsifal_ (otherwise I could not)." _Parsifal_ triumphed. Nietzsche mockingly welcomed the news. "Long live Cagliostro!" he wrote to Peter Gast. "The old enchanter has again had a prodigious success; the old gentlemen sobbed." The "young Russian" came to rejoin him as soon as the festivals were over; Lisbeth Nietzsche accompanied her. The two ladies installed themselves in the hotel where Friedrich Nietzsche awaited them; then he undertook to initiate his friend. She had heard the Christian mystery at Bayreuth, the history of human sorrow traversed like an ordeal and consoled at last by beatitude. Friedrich Nietzsche taught her a more tragic mystery: sorrow is our life and our destiny itself; let us not hope to traverse it; let us accept it more entirely than the Christians ever did! Let us espouse it; let us love it with an active love; let us be, like it, ardent and pitiless; hard to others as to ourselves; cruel, let us accept it; brutal, let us accept it. To lessen it is to be cowardly; and let us meditate on the symbol of the Eternal Return to practise our courage. "Unforgettable for me are those hours in which he revealed to me his thoughts," wrote Miss Salomé. "He confided them to me, as though they were a mystery unspeakably hard to tell; he only spoke of them in a low voice, with every appearance of the most profound horror. And truly life had been for him such bitter suffering that he suffered from the Eternal Return as from an atrocious certainty." That Miss Salomé listened to these confessions with great intelligence and real emotion, the pages which she afterwards wrote assure us. She conceived a brief hymn which she dedicated to Friedrich Nietzsche: "As friend loves friend, So love I thee, life surprising! Do I weep or joy in thee, Givest thou me joy or suffering, I love thee with thy joy and pain. And if thou must destroy me, I shall suffer, leaving thee. As the friend who teareth himself from the arms of the friend, I caress thee with my whole strength: Hast thou no other joy for me? So be it, I have still--thy suffering." Friedrich Nietzsche, delighted with the gift, wished to reply to it by another gift. For eight years he had forbidden himself musical composition, which enervated and exhausted him. He undertook to compose a sorrowful dithyramb on the verses of Miss Salomé. This work was too moving and caused him great pain: neuralgia, crises of doubt, barrenness and satiety. He had to take to his bed. Even from his room he addressed short notes to Lou Salomé. "In bed, terrible attack. _I scorn life_."