The lengthy plot continues to oscillate between brief periods of marital peace during Marie’s pregnancies, and tempests over her increasingly scandalous connections with women. Most of these are with Marie’s countrywomen, artists, and other bohemians who dress and act as much like men as possible, make love openly to one another, and “wallow in the lowest depths.” Many are militant suffragists, and all are devoted to the cause. Once Axel reaches the point of wanting to drown his wife, but he spares her for the sake of their children. Most of the action thus far has occurred in Paris or in Swiss resorts. There follows an interlude in Germany, “land of militarism where the patriarchate is still in full force.” There no one will listen to talk of women’s rights, and, for the first time, Marie is out of public life; consequently, Axel flourishes. Even his voice, “which had grown thin from everlastingly speaking in soothing tones to a woman, regained its former volume.”[22] When his wife rages against his new dominance he reflects that he has always known it was the weakling in him, “the page, the lap-dog, her child” that she loved. He now makes an effort to leave her, but is helplessly bound by his masochistic passion. This sign of dependence softens her for a few months. Then Marie is caught caressing the adolescent daughters of guests, and the rupture is final. Axel, intellectually concerned as to the cause of her aberration, tries to discover whether Marie had been a prostitute before her first marriage, but all evidence is negative. He does learn, however, that her lesbian habits and those of the Paris circle with whom she had most conspicuously misbehaved were common knowledge to everyone else. He finally decides to leave her and “to write the story of this woman, the true representative of this age of the unsexed.” The novel was published in Berlin in 1893, two years after his divorce from Siri von Essen, but “in a corrupt and mutilated text, so crude in its language that it was suppressed.”[23] The first authorized edition appeared in Sweden in 1912 after the author’s death.