All that Thérèse had feared that she would suffer on Laurent's account if she became Palmer's wife, she suffered on Palmer's account when she became for the second time Laurent's companion. Ghastly retrospective jealousy, the worst of all forms of jealousy, because it takes offence at everything and can be sure of nothing, gnawed the unhappy artist's heart and sowed madness in his brain. The memory of Palmer became a spectre, a vampire to him. He obstinately insisted that Thérèse should tell him all the details of her life at Genoa and Porto Venere, and, as she refused, he accused her of having tried to _deceive him_! Forgetting that at that time Thérèse had written to him: _I love Palmer_, and that a little later she had written to him: _I am going to marry him_, he reproached her with having always held in a firm and treacherous hand the chain of hope and desire which bound him to her. Thérèse placed all their correspondence before him, and he admitted that she had said to him all that loyalty called upon her to say to cut him loose from her. He became calmer, and agreed that she had handled his half-extinct passion with excessive delicacy, telling him the whole truth little by little, as he showed a disposition to receive it without pain, and also as she gained confidence in the future toward which Palmer was leading her. He admitted that she had never told him anything resembling a falsehood, even when she had refused to explain herself, and that immediately after his illness, when he was still deluding himself with the idea of a possible reconciliation, she had said to him: "All is at an end between us. What I have determined upon and accepted for myself is my secret, and you have no right to question me."