The cosmopolitan city displeased him, and at first he rented a room in a house of the old Italian city, not Nice, but Nizza, as he always wrote. For neighbours he had quite simple people, workmen, masons, employés, who all spoke Italian. It was in similar conditions that in 1881 he had enjoyed at Genoa a certain happiness. He chased away his vain thoughts and made an energetic effort to complete _Zarathustra._ But then arose the greatest of his misfortunes: the difficulty of his work was extreme, perhaps insurmountable. To complete _Zarathustra_--what did that imply? The work was immense: it had to be a poem which would make the poems of Wagner forgotten; a gospel which should make the Gospel forgotten. From 1875 to 1881, during six years, Friedrich Nietzsche had examined all the moral systems and shown the illusion which is at their foundation; he had defined his idea of the Universe: it was a blind mechanism, a wheel which turned eternally and without object. Yet he wished to be a prophet, an enunciator of virtues and of purposes: "I am he who dictates the values for a thousand years," he said in those notes in which his pride bursts forth. "To imprint his hand on the centuries, as on soft wax, write on the will of millennia as upon brass, harder than brass, more noble than brass, there," Zarathustra was to say, "is the beatitude of the Creator." What laws, what tables, did Nietzsche wish to dictate? What values would he choose to honour or depreciate? and what right had he to choose, to build up an order of beauty, an order of virtue, in nature, where a mechanical order reigns? He had the right of the poet, no doubt, whose genius, the creator of illusions, imposes upon the imagination of man this love or that hatred, this good or that evil. Thus Nietzsche would answer us, but he did not fail to recognise the difficulty. On the last pages of the second part of his poem he avowed it. "This, this is my danger," says Zarathustra, "that my glance throweth itself to the summit, whereas my hand would fain grasp and rest upon--the void." He wished to bring his task to a head. He had felt, this very summer, as something very close and urgent, the tragic menace that hung over his life. He was in haste to complete a work which he could at last present as the expression of his final desires, as his final thought. He had intended to complete his poem in three parts; three were written and almost nothing was said. The drama was not sketched. Zarathustra had to be shown at close quarters with men, announcing the Eternal Return, humiliating the feeble, strengthening the strong, destroying the ancient ways of humanity; Zarathustra as lawgiver dictating his Tables, dying at last of pity and of joy as he contemplates his work. Let us follow his notes:-- "Zarathustra reaches at the same moment the most extreme distress and his greatest happiness. At the most terrible moment of the contrast, he is broken.