The direct cause of Nietzsche's mental breakdown is not known. As a matter of fact, there was probably no direct cause. It was due to a number of influences--his excessive use of chloral which he took for insomnia, the tremendous strain to which he put his intellect, his constant disappointments and deprivations, his mental solitude, his prolonged physical suffering. We know little of his last days before he went insane. He was living alone in Turin and working desperately. Then suddenly to Professor Burckhardt at Bâle he wrote a letter which was obviously the work of a madman. "I am Ferdinand de Lesseps," he wrote. "I am Prado. I am Schambige.[1] I have been buried twice this autumn." This was the first indication of his insanity. Immediately after he wrote a similar letter to his old friend, Professor Overbeck. Other of Nietzsche's friends received disquieting and indecipherable notes. To Georg Brandes he sent a letter signed "The Crucified." To Peter Gast he wrote, "Sing me a new song. The world is clear and all the skies rejoice." To Cosima Wagner: "Ariadne, I love you." There was now no doubt of his condition. Overbeck went immediately to Turin. He found the philosopher playing wildly on the piano, and crying blasphemies to the empty room. Nietzsche was taken back to Bâle, and then placed in a private psychiatric institution at Jena. Here he stayed until the following spring when he was permitted to be taken to the home of his mother at Naumburg. It was three years later that his sister returned from Paraguay, where her husband had died, and Nietzsche was sufficiently recovered to meet her when she arrived. But though he lived for another seven years, his mind was irretrievably ruined. When his mother died in 1897, his sister removed him to a villa at Weimar. There on a great veranda, overlooking the hills and the river valley, he remained until the end, receiving a few of his friends and taking his old delight in music. His sister watched over him tenderly, and though he was never strong enough to resume work, he would often talk of his books. When shown a portrait of Wagner, he said, "Him I loved dearly." He was all tenderness toward the end. The mighty yea-sayer had become as a little child. "Elizabeth," he would say, "do not cry. Are we not happy?" Nietzsche died on the 25th of August, 1900, and was buried at Röcken, his native village. [Footnote 1: Schambige and Prado were two assassins whose exploits were then occupying the French journals.] II "Human, All-Too-Human" Volumes I and II