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 "Tannhäuser," 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, where she spent the rest of her life. Wagner's immortal hope was not even yet dead; as late as 1863 he wrote to Praeger from St. Petersburg: "I would Minna were here with me; we might, in the excitement that now moves fast around me, grow again the quiescent pair of yore. The whole thing is annoying. I am not in good spirits: I move about freely, and see a number of people, but my misery is bitter." Minna herself seems to have toyed with the idea of reconciliation, for she wrote to Praeger, who told Wagner, and received the following bitter complaint: