He returns to Stockholm, and the old life is resumed. Frequent calls on the Baroness, weak struggles to resist, are followed by mutual declarations of love. She visits his attic and the temple of pure adoration is made profane. Her tender conscience finds excuses in her husband's infidelities, her ardent lover is in the ecstasy of conquest. The husband is told everything. The scandal, the family quarrels, the intermixture of the criticism and condemnation of others which follow expel the sinners from their paradise. [Illustration: August Strindberg--1884.] Proceedings to dissolve the marriage are commenced, and the Baroness spends a few weeks in Copenhagen so as to comply with the legal necessity of having "deserted" her husband. On her return to Stockholm she is determined to realise her ideal of going on the stage. She succeeds in obtaining an engagement under the patronage of two famous actors and eventually makes a successful début. The requisite publicity is provided not only by lovers of art, but also by scandal-mongers. The process of disillusionment has begun. The iconoclast is already master of the idolater, and Strindberg sees the disjointed skeleton where a few months ago he saw the beautiful form of a goddess. "Everything was permitted to us now, but temptation had diminished," he writes in illustration of that lurking element of the _macabre_ which caused sudden satiety and shattered his love through the dissociation of his sexual personality. He does not stand by, a passive onlooker of the dissolution; he assists by bitter invective and gross abuse. The ex-Baroness on the stage is no longer to him the virginal mother with whom he had fallen in love; she is an actress "with insolent gestures, bad manners, boastful, overbearing." The sight of the stockings, destined to envelop the feet which a short time ago were heavenly, is now revolting. He notices that her room is untidy, her dress slovenly, that she wears old slippers, and that her gestures are reminiscent of the street. He discovers that he has no desire for her company, that she inspires him with disgust. Such were the first stages of Strindberg's union with the woman, who has been analysed, divided, multiplied and endowed with every variety of feminine crime in his writings. Eager to fly from "the repulsive heap of offal," to which he likens the whole tragedy of the divorce, he went to Paris in the company of a friend who enjoyed the sudden affluence of a legacy. This time he safely reached his destination, and experienced no uncontrollable impulse to abandon the journey. In Paris he received a letter from the Baroness, in which she told him that she was about to become a mother and begged him to save her from dishonour.