Parts ii and III of Zarathustra were written, we saw, in Nice, where Nietzsche had decided to spend the entire winter of 1883–4. This migratory life-style – summers in Sils alternating with winters in Nice – was designed to produce the ‘permanent, mild winter’ he now considered best for his health and would last almost to the end of his productive life. Not that, at first, he liked Nice at all: ‘a poor imitation of Paris, a pretentious half-big-city incredibly deficient in forest, shade and quietness’ was his initial impression. The search for silence drove him to his third move within as many months, taking him from the Villa Mazollini to the Pension de Genève in the Petite Rue St. Etienne, which recommended itself particularly on account of the Savorin family's excellent Swiss cuisine.

Joseph Paneth

Most of this first winter in Nice was punctuated by regular visits from Joseph Paneth. Paneth's record of these encounters recalls Nietzsche referring to the anti-Semitic movement as a ‘swinishness’ that had invaded even his own family, and as insisting on his Polish ancestry: his surname, Nietzsche gleefully claimed, came from ‘Niecki’, meaning ‘destroyer’ or ‘nihilist’. (Overbeck, too, records Nietzsche as harping on at rather tedious length on the same theme, but suggests that it was more a conceit than a serious belief.