He stepped up to Rohde's rooms; the time was badly chosen. He found a busy and preoccupied man, who received this unexpected visitor, this too singular personage who had failed in life, with vexation and constraint. "I saw Nietzsche," Rohde wrote later in a few lines in which he explained his cold welcome. "All his person was marked with an indescribable strangeness, and it disquieted me. There was about him something that I had never known, and of the Nietzsche whom I had known many features were effaced. He seemed to have come from an uninhabited land." Nietzsche said: "I would like to hear you speak." Rohde brought him, and put him to sit among young men who were ignorant of his work and of his very name. Nietzsche listened, then went away. "I have heard Rohde at the University," he wrote to his sister briefly. "I can no longer communicate with any one. Leipsic is, it is clear, no place of refuge or of repose for me." He would have fled from Leipsic, as he had fled from Venice and Nice; but the difficulty of his negotiations obliged him to remain there. He applied to various publishers, and applied in vain. Finally, his dignity revolted. He wished his book to appear, and, however heavy the cost, he resolved to pay out of his own pocket the cost of the printing. His mother was waiting for him at Naumburg, where since Lisbeth's departure she lived alone. Nietzsche felt a very lively pity for her; he knew her to be desolated by the loss of her family, and in despair over the impieties which he published in his books. "Don't read them, ignore them," he told her ceaselessly: "it is not for you that I write." Nevertheless, she could not repress her curiosity, and her discontent was never appeased. Nietzsche did not wish to leave without giving her a little happiness. He went to spend a week at home; but he had not the strength to keep the secret of his vexations to himself; he bewailed himself, he grew exalted; he saddened the poor woman, whom finally he left in a more unhappy condition than ever. Passing through Munich, he called on the Baron and Baroness von Seydlitz. He wished to snatch a brief repose under the roof of his amiable host; but Seydlitz was away from home, and his house was shut up. Nietzsche, having left this Germany which he was never again to see, continued on his road towards the Upper Engadine, from which he always expected some benefit. Here in July he found himself among icy fogs, and felt the first symptoms of a long crisis of neuralgia and melancholy. II _The Will to Power_ Shall we say that he met friends? Is the word suitable to those vague figures, to those Russian, English, Jewish, and Swiss women who, seeing this charming man return each season, did not refuse him their quick sympathy? We set down their names: Mesdames Röder and Marasoff; Miss Zimmern and Fräulein von Salis Marschlins (this last a friend of Fräulein von Meysenbug); others, whose names remain unknown, may be guessed.