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Nice, January/Februry 1884: Drafts of letters to Franziska Nietzsche

But to come back a year later to things that occurred prior to my intimate meetings with Fräulein Salomé in Tautenburg and Leipzig—that was an act of incomparable brutality. And then to send me letter after letter informing me of things that were news to me, thus subsequently heaping filth on those months so full of self-sacrifice—I call that insidious. If Fräulein Salomé said of me that ''behind the mask of ideal goals” I pursued her “with filthy intentions,” ought I have been permitted to learn of it a year afterwards? I would have kicked her out with condemnations and curses, I would have rescued Rée from her.—That is only a sample of a hundred instances in which my sister’s fatal perversity toward me has shown itself. I've long known of course that she will have no rest till she sees me dead. Now my Zarathustra is finished! The moment I finished it and was steering into harbor, there she was, tossing handfuls of filth into my face.

Your letter hints at things that leave me speechless.

Am I not the one who last year showed the two of you a surfeit of undeserved kindness? Are you both ingrates? Or are you so utterly dishonest that you make the simplest truth stand on its head?

Who behaved wretchedly toward me, if it wasn’t the two of you? Who endangered my life, if not you? Who abandoned me totally the way you two did, so that when I needed consolation you replied by heaping scorn and filth on everything I live and strive for?

I well know the moral distance that has separated me, from childhood on, from the likes of you. I needed every ounce of gentleness, patience, and silence I could muster, in order to make that distance less palpable to you. Have you no idea of the revulsion I must try to overcome being so closely related to people like you! What is it then that causes me to throw up when I read my sister’s letters, when I have to swallow her concoctions of stupidity and insolence laced with moralizing?

For several years now I have had to defend myself against L[isbeth], to flee from her like an animal she was torturing to death; I conjured her to leave me in peace and she has not stopped tormenting me for a single moment. I was afraid to go to N[aumburg] last August, afraid of what I might do to her, and that’s why I appealed to O[verbeck] for advice. And now she strikes her little pose and acts as though she were guilty of nothing at all!

I don't know what’s worse, Lisbeth’s boundless, insolent mindlessness, such that she proceeds to instruct me—I who know human beings down to the bone—concerning two human beings I had the time and desire to examine quite closely; or her shameless tactlessness that never tires of chucking ordure at people who at all events shared an important part of my intellectual development and who therefore are a hundred times closer to me than the emptyheaded vengeful wretch she is.

My nausea—to be related to such a squalid creature.

Where did she get this nauseating brutality from? Where did she get that coy little way she has of injecting poison?

When a human being like me says “So-and-so belongs to my life’s plan,” as I did say to Lisbeth concerning Fräulein Salomé, then her’s is an obtuse mindlessness, a vindictiveness, and a desire to avenge herself on a superior nature. And then to work against me in such an infamous way. In the end, of course, I achieved what I wanted.

The silly goose went so far as to accuse me of being envious of Rée! and to compare me to Gersdorff and herself to Malwida!

You cannot empathize, you have no idea what solace Dr. Rée was to me for years—faute de mieux, obviously; and what an incredible blessing it was for me to have had dealings with Fräulein Salomé.

As far as Lisbeth’s letter is concerned—her judgments of me do not perturb me. I believe I've heard them before. Was it from Lisbeth? Or from Fräulein Salomé? At that time they agreed at least about me. Well, then, who is double-crossing whom?

Do not believe, dear mother, that I am in a bad mood. Quite the contrary! But whoever will not be loyal to me, let them go to the devil—or, as far as I’m concerned, to Paraguay.