"It is necessary that I be misunderstood, better still, I go to meet calumny and contempt. My 'near ones' will be the first against me: last summer I understood that, and I was magnificently conscious that I was at last on my road. When it comes to me to think, 'I can no longer endure solitude,' then I experience an unspeakable _humiliation before myself_--I feel myself in revolt against what there is of highest in me...." In September he directed his steps towards Naumburg, where it was his intention to stay some weeks. His mother and sister inspired in him a mixed feeling, which baffles analysis. He liked his own people because they were his own, and because he was tender, faithful, infinitely sensible to memories. But every one of his ideas, every one of his desires, drew him from them, and his mind despised them. Nevertheless the old house of Naumburg was the only place in the world where there was, so long as he stayed there for a short time only, some sweetness of life for him. Mother and daughter were quarrelling. Lisbeth loved a certain Förster, an agitator, an idealogue of Germanist and anti-Semitic views, who was organising a colonial enterprise in Paraguay. She wished to marry him and to follow him; her despairing mother wished to retain her. Madame Nietzsche welcomed her son as a saviour and related to him the mad projects which Lisbeth was forming. He was overwhelmed; he knew the person and his ideas, he despised the low and dull passions which the propaganda excited, and suspected him of having spoken maliciously of his work. That Lisbeth, the companion of his childhood, should follow this man was more than he could allow. He called her, spoke violently to her. She answered him bravely. There was little that was delicate or subtle in this woman's composition, but she had energy. Friedrich Nietzsche, so weak in the depth of his soul, valued in her the quality which he lacked. He might sermonise, scold, but he could not get his way. * * * * * The late autumn came, and Naumburg was covered with fogs. Nietzsche left and went to Genoa. These quarrels had lessened his self-respect. "Things go badly with me, very badly," he wrote in October to Fräulein von Meysenbug; "my visit in Germany is the cause. I can live only at the seaside. Every other climate depresses me, destroys my nerves and eyes, makes me melancholy, puts me into a black humour--that awful tare; I have had to combat it in my life more than the hydras and other celebrated monsters. In trivial ennui is hidden the most dangerous enemy; great calamity adds to one's stature...." Towards mid-November he left Genoa, and, circling the western coast, began the quest for a winter residence. He passed by San Remo, Mentone, Monaco, and stopped at Nice, which enchanted him. There he found that keen air and that plenitude of light, that multitude of bright days which he needed: "Light, light, light," he wrote'; "I have regained my equilibrium."