ve up the ghost in Venice."

With the exception of the ten days occupied in composing the first part
of this book, my brother often referred to this winter as the hardest
and sickliest he had ever experienced. He did not, however, mean thereby
that his former disorders were troubling him, but that he was suffering
from a severe attack of influenza which he had caught in Santa
Margherita, and which tormented him for several weeks after his arrival
in Genoa. As a matter of fact, however, what he complained of most was
his spiritual condition--that indescribable forsakenness--to which he
gives such heartrending expression in "Zarathustra". Even the reception
which the first part met with at the hands of friends and acquaintances
was extremely disheartening: for almost all those to whom he presented
copies of the work misunderstood it. "I found no one ripe for many of my
thoughts; the case of 'Zarathustra' proves that one can speak with the
utmost clearness, and yet not be heard by any one." My brother was very
much discouraged by the feebleness of the response he was given, and as
he was striving just then to give up the practice of taking hydrate
of chloral--a drug he had begun to take while ill with influenza,--the
following spring, spent in Rome, was a somewhat gloomy one for him.
He writes about it as follows:--"I spent a melancholy spring in Rome,
where I only just managed to live,--and this was no easy matter. This
city, which is absolutely unsuited to the poet-author of 'Zarathustra',
and for the choice of which I was not responsible, made me inordinately
miserable. I tried to leave it. I wanted to go to Aquila--the opposite
of Rome in every respect, and actually founded in a spirit of enmity
towards that city (just as I also shall found a city some day), as a
memento of an atheist and genuine enemy of the Church--a person very
closely related to me,--the great Hohenstaufen, the Emperor Frederick
II. But Fate lay behind it all: I had to return again to Rome. In the
end I was obliged to be satisfied with the Piazza Barberini, after I had
exerted myself in vain to find an anti-Christian quarter. I fear that
on one occasion, to avoid bad smells as much as possible, I actually
inquired at the Palazzo del Quirinale whether they could not provide a
quiet room for a philosopher. In a chamber high above the Piazza just
mentioned, from which one obtained a general view of Rome and could
hear the fountains plashing far below,