"I have just written to Malvida: thanks to Peter Gast, our friends the low comedians, the self-styled geniuses of music, gone hence very soon, will cease to corrupt taste. 'Gone hence very soon'--is, perhaps, a gross exaggeration. In a _democratic_ period few men discern beauty: _pulchrum paucorum est hominum,_ I rejoice that for you I am one of these 'few.' The profound and joyous men who please me, _avec des ames mélancoliques et folles_[1] like my defunct friends Stendhal and the Abbé Galiani, could not have stayed on the earth if they had not loved some musician of joy (Galiani without Puccini, Stendhal without Cimarosa and Mozart). "Ah, if you knew how alone I am in the world at present! and how I must play a comedy to prevent myself from spitting, now and again, in some one's face, out of satiety. Happily some of the courteous manners of my son Zarathustra exist also in his rather crazed father. "But when I shall be with you, and in Venice, then, for a time, there will be an end of 'courtesy' and 'comedy' and 'satiety' and of all the malediction of Nice, won't there, my good friend? "Not to be forgotten: we shall eat _baïcoli_! "Cordially, "F. N." In April and May Nietzsche sojourned at Venice, and found the joy for which he had hoped. He wandered through the little sheltered and murmurous streets, he contemplated the beautiful town. He listened to the music of his friend. The galleries of St. Mark's Square shaded his walks and he compared them to those porticoes of Ephesus whither Heraclitus went to forget the agitation of the Greeks and the sombre menace of the Persian Empire. "How easily," he thinks, "one here forgets the sombre Empire--our own; let us not defame our Europe; she still offers us beautiful refuges! It is my finest workroom, this Piazza San Marco...." This shortlived happiness awoke the poetic impulse in him. He wished to chant the triumph and death of Zarathustra, now for some hours drawn from oblivion. He wrote out a sketch, but soon abandoned it; it was his last.