Colmar, the town at the foot of the valley, was for Albert “the big world”, where he sometimes went to stay with his godmother. One day, his godmother sent him out with a friend to play. The friend was a Colmar boy, a little older than Albert and a good deal more sophisticated, and Albert was put in his care with the strict injunction not to go near the river and above all not to go boating. The boy led Albert through narrow unfamiliar streets till eventually they reached the edge of the town - and the river. Albert was thrilled, for he had never before seen a real river with real boats on it "that floated on the water, with great loads of vegetables on board and a man in the stern to steer them." Besides, he had recently abandoned plans to become a coachman or a pastry-cook in favour of going to sea as a sailor.

"Let's find one that's not properly tied up," said the boy; and promptly did so, jumping aboard and telling Albert to follow. Albert was shocked. He begged the boy to remember what they had been told. "We mustn't do it," he said. Then came the revelation. "He didn't deign to reply, but looked at me as if I had fallen out of the moon and was speaking some unknown language. He didn't even try to find excuses for not obeying. He merely implied by his attitude that obedience, in his eyes, was a prejudice to be abandoned: a notion so far beneath him that there was no point in acknowledging it. It was an attitude of mind that I had not imagined possible. When later, towards 1893, as an undergraduate, I read what Nietszche had written a few years before - it was beginning to make something of a stir - I found nothing surprising in his intention to go 'beyond good and evil’; There was nothing in Nietszche that had not been revealed to me, without a word spoken, in that scene on the banks of the Lauch. And for an instant, as I boarded the boat under the imperious gaze of my companion, I had been one with Nietszche.”

His Nietszchean escapade ended badly. The boys were seen, reported, and punished. "Still," concludes Schweitzer, "guilty or not, I'd been out in a boat!"

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