For he knew the terrible consequences of his thoughts and feared for those who read them suffering similar to his own. He did not stay in Tuscany: the harsh, cold air which descended from the mountains upon Florence incommoded him. He was recaptured by memories of Nice, the town with two hundred and twenty days of full sunshine--it was from Nice that he wrote to his sister, on the 15th of November, 1885: "Do not be astonished, dear sister, if your brother, who has some of the blood of the mole and of Hamlet in his veins, writes to you not from Vallombrosa, but from Nice. It has been very precious to me to experiment almost simultaneously with the air of Leipsic, of Munich, of Florence, of Genoa, and of Nice. You would never believe how much Nice has triumphed in this group. I have put up, as last year, at the Pension de Genève, Petite Rue Saint-Etienne. I find it recarpeted, refurnished, repainted, become very comely. My neighbour at table is a bishop, a Monsignor who speaks German. I think of you a great deal. Your "PRINCE EICHORN." "Here I am returned to Nice," he wrote in another letter, "that is to say to reason." His pleasure is such that he observes with some indulgence the cosmopolitan city, and is amused by it. "My window looks out on the square of the Phœnicians," he wrote to Peter Gast. "What a prodigious cosmopolitanism in this alliance of words! Don't you laugh? And it's true, Phœnicians lived here. I hear sounding in the air something of the conqueror and the Super-European, a voice which gives me confidence and says to me: _Here thou art in thy place ..._. How far one is from Germany here--'_Ausserdeutsch!_' I cannot say it with force enough." * * * * * He returned to his habit of walking in the sun over the white roads which overlook the waves. The memories of seven years linked his thought with this sea, these strands, these mountains; his fantasy awoke, he listened to it and followed it. Not an hour passed vainly; each one was happy, and left, as the souvenir and witness of the gladness which it brought, an epigram, a poem in prose, a maxim, some _lied_ or song.