He left, and stopped in the first instance at Genoa. "Cold, sick. I suffer," he wrote briefly to Peter Gast. He left this town, where he was importuned perhaps by memories of a happier time, and moved away along the coast. At the time of which we speak, Nervi, Santa Margherita, Rapallo, Zoagli, were places unknown to the tourist, market towns inhabited by fishermen who, each evening, drew in their barques to the recesses of the coves and sang as they mended their nets. Friedrich Nietzsche discovered these magnificent spots, and chose, to humiliate his misery there, the most magnificent of them, Rapallo. He relates, in simple language, the circumstances of his sojourn: "I spent my winter, 1882 to 1883, in the charming and quiet bay of Rapallo that is hollowed out by the Mediterranean not far from Genoa, between the promontory of Portofino and Chiavari. My health was not of the best; the winter was cold, rainy; a little inn,[6] situated at the very edge of the sea, so near it that the noise of the waves prevented me sleeping at night, offered me a shelter very unsatisfactory from all points of view. Nevertheless--and it is an instance of my maxim that all that is decisive comes 'nevertheless '--it was during this winter and in this discomfort that my noble Zarathustra was born. In the morning I would climb towards the south by the magnificent mountain road, towards Zoagli, among the pines and dominating the immense sea; in the evening (according as my health permitted it) I would go round the bay of Santa Margherita as far as Portofino.... On these two roads came to me all the first part of Zarathustra (_fiel mir ein_); and more, Zarathustra himself, as type; more exactly he fell upon me (_überfiel mich_)...." In ten weeks he conceived and completed his poem. It is a new work and, if one affects to follow the genesis of his thought, a surprising one. No doubt, he meditated a lyrical work, a sacred book. But the essential doctrine of this work was to be given by the idea of the Eternal Return. Now, in the first part of Zarathustra, the idea of the Eternal Return does not appear. Nietzsche follows a different and opposing idea, the idea of the Superman, the symbol of a real progress which modifies things, the promise of a possible escape beyond chance and fatality. Zarathustra announces the Superman, he is the prophet of good tidings. He has discovered in his solitude a promise of happiness, he bears this promise; his strength is sweet and benevolent, he predicts a great future as the reward of a great work. Friedrich Nietzsche, in other times, will put a more bitter speech into his mouth. If one reads this first part, and takes care not to confound it with those which immediately follow, one will feel the sanctity, the frequent suavity of the accent.