His mother and sister blamed him; he knew it, and their hostility did not displease him: "All the virtues of Naumburg are against me," he wrote, "it is well that it is so ..." Two months later, the friendship was broken. Perhaps we may perceive what had happened. Lou Salomé came to find Nietzsche at Leipsic, as she had promised; but Paul Rée accompanied her. No doubt she wished Nietzsche to understand once and for all the nature of a friendship which was always open to him: free, not slavish; sympathy, not intellectual devotion. Had she well weighed the difficulties of such an enterprise, the dangers of such an attempt? These two men were in love with her. What was her attitude between them? May she not have yielded, when she tried to keep them both by her, to some instinct, perhaps an unconscious one, of intellectual curiosity, of conquest and feminine domination? Who can say, who will ever know? Friedrich Nietzsche became melancholy and suspicious. One day he imagined that his companions, talking together under their breath, were laughing at him. A piece of gossip reached him, and upset his mind. The story, puerile though it be, must be told. Rée, Nietzsche, and Lou Salomé had been photographed together. Lou Salomé and Rée had said to Nietzsche: "Get into this child's cart: we will hold the shafts; it will be a symbol of our union." Nietzsche had answered: "I refuse; Miss Lou will be in the cart; we will hold the shafts, Paul Rée and I." This Miss Lou did. And she (according to the story repeated to him) sent the photograph to numerous friends, as a symbol of her supremacy. A more cruel thought soon began to torture Friedrich Nietzsche: Lou and Rée are in agreement against me, he thought; their agreement condemns them, they love one another and are deceiving me. Then all became poor and vile around him. A miserable strife terminated the spiritual adventure of which he had dreamed. He lost his strange and seductive disciple; he lost the best and most intelligent friend of his last eight years. Finally, affected and impaired by these humiliating conditions, he himself did a wrong to friendship and denounced Rée to Lou. "He has a marvellous mind," he said, "but it is feeble and aimless. His education is the cause of the trouble: every man should have been brought up in some sort for a soldier. And every woman, in some sort, for a soldier's wife." Nietzsche had neither the experience nor the necessary resolution to decide an infinitely painful situation. His sister, who detested Miss Salomé, encouraged his suspicions and his rancours. She intervened in a brutal manner, and, it seems, without authorisation, wrote the young girl a letter which determined the rupture. Miss Salomé was angry. We have the rough draft of the last letter which Friedrich Nietzsche addressed to her; it throws little light on the detail of these difficulties.