Nietzsche went to Naumburg for the Christmas holidays. Wagner sent him word to ask him to stop at Bayreuth on his way home to Basle, but he was hard pressed by work and perhaps a little ill, and no doubt a secret instinct warned him that solitude would be best for the meditation of the problems which he had to determine for himself. He made his apologies. Besides, he had had for some weeks many opportunities of proving his attachment. He had written an article (the only one in all his work) in answer to an alienist who had undertaken to prove that Wagner was mad. He had offered a sum of money to help in the propaganda. This anonymous and distant manner was the only one that suited him at the time. Even at Basle he tried to found a Wagnerian Verein. He was therefore astounded when he discovered that the master was displeased at his absence. Already in the past year an invitation, also declined, had helped to provoke a mild lecture. "It is Burckhardt who is keeping you at Basle," wrote Cosima Wagner. Nietzsche wrote and remedied things, but the painful impression remained. "Everything is quieted," he told the friend who had informed him; "but I cannot quite forget. Wagner knows that I am ill, absorbed in work, and in need of a little liberty. I shall be, henceforth, whether I wish it or no, more anxious than in the past. God knows how many times I have wounded him. Each time I am astonished, and I never succeed in precisely locating the point in which we have clashed." This annoyance did not affect his thought; we can follow it to its smallest shades of meaning, thanks to the notes published in the tenth volume of his complete works. It is quite active and fecund. "I am the adventurer of the spirit," he was to write. "I wander in my thought. I go to the idea that calls me...." He was never to wander so audaciously as in the first weeks of 1876.