Meanwhile Albert Dürer, whose fame had begun to spread beyond the walls of Nuremberg, undertook a tour through Germany, and was absent for four years; and when he returned to settle in his native town, he married Agnes Frey, the daughter of a respectable and wealthy merchant in Nuremberg. If we may believe report, the union was unhappy, and darkened and shortened by cruel domestic troubles the life of the noble artist. The story has often been told how his imperious and greedy wife kept him continually at work, and how, as prints paid better than pictures, she would not allow him to sacrifice the burin to the brush. Dreading the reproaches and accusations of idleness to which she gave vent on the smallest provocation, Dürer bent beneath the yoke and rarely left his studio. One day, for instance, they relate that he was discovered in the street by his wife, whom he believed to be at the other end of the town, and was forced to return and to expiate his momentary idleness by working far beyond his usual time. The poor artist died at last of overwork and misery; and his hateful widow only regretted his death because it set a term to his earnings. Such is the account in all the books that deal with Dürer, from the work of the German Sandrart, in the seventeenth century, down to the biographical dictionaries published in our own time by French writers; such is the story which has served as text to so many denunciations of this new Xantippe, and to so many elegies upon her victim. But the facts of the case were not carefully examined. The result of Herr Thausing's scrupulous investigation of the subject, and the authentic testimony he has adduced, show, on the contrary, that Albert Dürer and his wife lived on pretty good terms till his death; so that we may banish as idle fables the torments which he was supposed to have suffered, and the sorrows that were said to have shortened his life. The story so frequently repeated after Vasari, of Dürer's quarrels with a certain forger of his works at Venice, where copies signed with his monogram were publicly sold as originals, rests on a surer basis. The said forger was a young man of no reputation who had conceived this idea of commanding a sale for his works, and of thus quickly realising a profit on the renown of Dürer and the simplicity of his customers. It was not long, however, before the fraud was discovered, when he tried, it is said, to turn it into a joke; but the German artist could not be brought to see it in that light. It was a case in which his wife was not concerned, and he could take his own part openly. He applied at once to the Senate, denounced the fraud, and obtained a decree condemning the offender thenceforth to affix to his plates no other name than his own. This name, destined to become celebrated, was no other than that of Marc Antonio Raimondi.