atience
with which I feel called upon not only to endure the consequences of
her illness, but personally to allay them."

Then he had gone to Venice to continue work on "Tristan," dreaming
there in loneliness of his Isolde, the Wesendonck, whose husband has
been well likened to King Mark. But Venice being within the sphere of
Saxon influence, he was afraid to remain long, for fear of arrest. In
1860 he was granted a partial amnesty, and went to Frankfort to meet
his wife, who had been taking treatment near Wiesbaden. Minna went with
him to Paris, and was there at the time of the violent riots, which put
an end to "Tannhaeuser," and doubtless to Minna's hopes of settling in
the Paris she was so fond of. She began again to vent her indignation
that he would not write for the gallery, and the storm grew fiercer and
fiercer. Wagner had written Liszt in 1861 with renewed hope and renewed
tenderness:

"For the present I spend all the good humour I can command on my wife.
I flatter her and take care of her as if she were a bride in her
honeymoon. My reward is that I see her thrive; her bad illness is
visibly getting better. She is recovering and will, I hope, become a
little rational in her old age. Just after I had received your 'Dante,'
I wrote to her that we had now got out of Hell; I hope Purgatory will
agree with her; in which case, we shall perhaps, after all, enjoy a
little Paradise."

But the hope was vain, and a friend of the family who wrote under the
name of the "Idealistin" describes the--

"almost daily trouble in the intercourse, increased by the fact that
the absence of children deprived them of the last element of
reconciliation. Nevertheless, Frau Wagner was a good woman, and in the
eyes of the world decidedly the better half and the chief sufferer. I
judged otherwise, and felt the deepest pity for Wagner, for whom love
should have built the bridge by which he might have reached others,
whereas now it was only making the bitter cup of his life bitterer. I
was on good terms with Frau Wagner, who often poured her complaints
into my ears, and I tried to console her, but of course in vain."

And now Minna, whose housewifely meekness had endured the Wesendonck
tempest and all the other multitudes of trials Wagner went through,
found herself unable to endure his fidelity to his artistic ideals. The
quarrels grew fiercer and fiercer, until finally she left Wagner for
ever, and went back to her people in Dresden