My valued friend,
You will already have learned from a dear hand how welcome the "Blissful Youth" was to "Pater Seraphice." I know that you need no further assurance of this. You will also have heard of the blissful hours, which will live in my memory so long as I am capable of emotion. Therefore, I shall not tell you of all the "blessings," but rather speak of matters that require attention in quite another phase of life. This time, it is in regard to a letter from Bonfantini, written in Italian, to which I was obliged to reply in French, telling him that I would inform you of the agreement I have made with him in regard to the future correction of the proof-sheets of my autobiography. The man seems not to be getting on with the work at all, and is no doubt highly delighted at being able to shift the responsibility for his own dilatory methods to other shoulders. This he does by attributing it to the difficulty he has in communicating with a scholar so deeply engrossed as you are at times. I can understand this perfectly, but I am also mindful of the fact that I cannot continue to burden you in this way. I mentioned something of this kind to you in my last letter, and I again earnestly beg you to consider yourself relieved of the burden of this responsibility. But whenever you happen to be passing the office of our Italian, you would greatly oblige me by looking in and inspecting the work of my manuscript. . . . It is a curious circumstance that in the course of publishing this essentially Germanic autobiography, I should be called upon to translate an Italian letter!
You need never think, my dearest friend, that you will ever be denied an insight into these pages, for, as you know, it is you whom I have in mind as the custodian of these memoirs when I am dead and gone. Everything is going well here. Tomorrow, I expect to finish the sketches for the first act of Siegfried (Götterdämmerung, I meant to say!). Day after tomorrow, we celebrate my son's first birthday and at the same time the anniversary of your first visit to us. May the stars look down benignly upon this twofold celebration! At the time it seemed to me as if you had brought good luck to my son. Since then, a year full of difficulties and yet one rich in joys has passed over our heads, and now it almost seems as if the constellation which watched over my birth—I mean, Taurus!—is to be taken into the reckoning. All things come to him who waits! I dare to hope that within a few months the high-hearted mother of my son will become my wife.
Farewell, and be of good cheer—by that I mean not according to modern, but ancient Greek ideas!
Source: The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence, ed. Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, trans. Caroline V. Kerr (Boni and Liveright, 1921), No. 12