"I beg you instantly to see Schmeitzner and engage him orally or by writing, as you think best, to give the second part of _Zarathustra_ to the printer as soon as the manuscript is delivered. This second part exists to-day: try to imagine it, the vehemence of such a creation; you will scarcely be able to exaggerate it. There is the danger. In Heaven's name, arrange things with Schmeitzner; I am too irritable myself." Schmeitzner promised and kept his word; in August the proofs arrived. Nietzsche had not strength enough to correct them and left the work to Peter Gast and his sister. The terrible things which he had said, the more terrible things which he had yet to say, bruised him. * * * * * Other vexations were added to the melancholy of his thought. An awkward step on his sister's part awoke again the dissensions of the previous summer. In the spring, during their reconcilement, he had said to her, aware of her quarrelsome nature: "Promise me never to go back on the stories of Lou Salomé and of Paul Rée." For three months she had kept her peace, then she broke her word and spoke. What did she say? We do not know; we are again in the obscurity of this obscure history. "Lisbeth," he wrote to Madame Overbeck, "absolutely wants to avenge herself on the young Russian." No doubt she reported to him some fact, some observation of which he was ignorant. A sickening irritation laid hold of him. He wrote to Paul Rée, and this is the letter, a sketch of which has been found. (Was it sent as we read it? It is not certain.) "Too late, almost a year too late, I learn of the part which you took in the events of last summer, and my soul has never been so overwhelmed with disgust as it is at present, to think that an insidious individual of your kind, a liar and a knave, had been able to call himself my friend for years. It is a crime, in my opinion, and not only a crime against me, but above all against friendship, against this very empty word, friendship. "Fie, sir! So you are the calumniator of my character, and Miss Salomé has only been the mouthpiece, the very unsatisfactory mouthpiece, of the judgment which you passed on me; so it is you who, in my absence, naturally, spoke of me as though I were a vulgar and low egoist, always ready to plunder others; so it is you who have accused me of having, so far as concerned Miss Salomé, pursued the most filthy designs under a mask of idealism; so it is you who dare to say of me that I was mad and did not know what I wanted? Now, of a surety, I understand better the whole of this business which has made men whom I venerated and many whom I esteemed, as my nearest and dearest, strangers to me.... And I thought you my friend; and nothing, perhaps, for seven years has done more harm to my prospects than the trouble that I took to defend you.