Minna joined him in Paris on the 17th November 1859. Their relations were soon as embittered as usual. Wagner was playing for high stakes, living feverishly and expensively, entertaining largely, giving disastrous concerts, accumulating new and heavy debts. The clear-sighted and careful Minna was appalled at the prospect of the ruin that was threatening them once more: and Wagner made the mistake of not confiding in her. She felt herself shut out from his inner life. Apparently he was also giving her fresh cause for jealousy, the lady this time, it is said, being Liszt\'s eldest daughter Blandine, the wife of the Paris lawyer Ollivier.[202]

After the disastrous Tannh?user performances in March 1861, Wagner fluctuated for a while between Paris, Karlsruhe and Vienna, at length settling down on the 14th August in the last-named city, where it was proposed to produce Tristan. Minna had gone to Soden for a cure on the 10th July: from there she went on to Dresden once more.[203] In Vienna Wagner had the loan of Dr. Standhartner\'s house for some weeks during the physician\'s absence. His wants were attended to by a "pretty niece" of Standhartner\'s.[204] This pretty niece was one Seraphine Mauro. According to Kapp,[205] "Wagner was not insensible to so much beauty in his daily surroundings, and his \'dear little doll\' [Puppe], as he always called Seraphine, did not let him sigh in vain.... The suffering in this affair of Wagner\'s fell upon his friend Peter Cornelius, who ... had lost his heart to the beautiful Seraphine some time before."
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Standhartner having returned to Vienna at the end of September, Wagner had to leave his comfortable quarters, and as there seemed no prospect of an early performance of Tristan, and life at a hotel was expensive, he accepted an invitation from the Wesendoncks to meet them in Venice. He remained there only four days—"four miserable days" he calls them.[206] How unbridgeable was the gulf made between him and Minna by the memory of the Mathilde affair of three years before may be estimated from his letters to his wife of 19th October and 13th November 1861. The first is sensible and tender; he is full of pity for the poor suffering woman, and will gladly do anything in his power to alleviate her misery,—anything, that is, but give up the Wesendonck acquaintance. He still has plans for a reunion, and a quiet old age to be spent together. But as a preliminary to any rapprochement he insists, as he had always done on her consenting never again to mention the name of Mathilde, for whom, he declares, his passion has from beginning to end been absolutely pure. Of all the tragedies of Wagner\'s life this surely is the greatest, that his one truly noble love, the one that was so necessary to him as an artist, to which we owe Tristan and many of the finest moods of the Meistersinger and Parsifal, should have been the one to embitter his existence and his wife\'s beyond all hope of remedy while his less worthy attachments were either unknown to Minna or counted for little with her. With Wagner obstinately resolved not to give up the Wesendonck acquaintance, and Minna—blind to the ideal nature of the attachment, and seeing it, in all probability, merely as another Laussot affair[207]—as obstinately bent on making the cessation of this acquaintance a condition of a full reconciliation with her husband, it was impossible that the breach between the two tortured and self-torturing souls should ever be healed. That Wagner dreaded giving Minna any cause to be reminded of Mathilde\'s name is evident from the sophisticated version he gives her of his Venice excursion, in his letter of 13th November 1861: we can only regard as a piece of well-meant fiction his story that Dr. Standhartner, having been summoned in haste, as deputy physician in ordinary, to attend the Empress of Austria in Venice, pressingly insisted upon Wagner accompanying him for his health\'s sake. "I returned early this morning. I hope it has done me good; at least I had no talking to do for several days, but only to go sight-seeing, which really benefited me." Not a word, it will be observed, as to having gone to Venice at the request of the Wesendoncks, or even as to their being in Venice at that time.

So matters drifted on in the old way until Wagner had settled down in Biebrich (end of February 1862), after yet another visit to Paris. He took with him the furniture that had been in their Paris house. Minna came to help in the unpacking and arranging. She remained with him a week. According to the account he gives in Mein Leben "the old scenes were soon renewed," Minna being angry at his having removed from the custom-house the articles he required for his new home, without awaiting for her arrival.[208] The real reason of their quarrel, however—concealed from us, as usual, in Mein Leben—was once more Frau Wesendonck. By a most unlucky coincidence a letter and a box arrived from Mathilde on the second and third days of Minna\'s visit. They were quite harmless,[209] but Minna would not listen to reason; she was more than ever convinced that her husband was carrying on another intrigue with Mathilde behind her back. It was enough, as poor Wagner says, to drive him out of his senses—the same scenes as four years before, the same invective, word for word. Yet in spite of it all, once more the wretched pair began making plans for a home in common, Minna\'s importunities among the Dresden Government officials having made it possible for Wagner to obtain an amnesty by a formal petition to the King.

Biebrich remained his home until the autumn. He was working at the music of the Meistersinger, and perhaps, on the whole, not unhappy. He made several new friends, among them the actress Friederike Meyer—the sister of the Frau Dustmann who was to have "created" the part of Isolde in the Vienna production of Tristan—and a pretty and intelligent young girl, Mathilde Maier, the daughter of a deceased lawyer. The fire of his passion for Frau Wesendonck having already cooled, he fell in love with the gentle Mathilde Maier. Kapp conjectures that rumours of their "friendly relations" had come to Minna\'s ears, and that the renewed bitterness of her letters at this time decided Wagner to take the step that had long been urged upon him by his friends, and obtain a divorce from Minna. He commissioned his Dresden friend Dr. Pusinelli to sound Minna on the subject; she declined to oblige him.[210] His desire to marry Mathilde Maier, however, says Kapp, found a new and insurmountable obstacle. She was threatened with hereditary deafness; this, she thought, would unfit her to be the wife of a musician. "The full significance of this tragic love in Wagner\'s life cannot be estimated yet," says Kapp, "since the autobiography preserves complete silence on this matter, out of consideration for Cosima, and the large and carefully guarded collection of intimate documents from Wagner\'s hands that Mathilde left behind her will not be published during Cosima\'s life-time."[211]

Meanwhile his relations with Friederike Meyer—a lively actress-temperament—had become more and more friendly. When he left Biebrich for Vienna in November 1862, he was accompanied by Friederike, who had surrendered her engagement at the Frankfort theatre for his sake.[212] He soon became involved, as he tells us, in disagreements with his Isolde, Frau Dustmann, Friederike\'s sister. "It was impossible," he says, "to make her see how matters really stood; she regarded her sister as being involved in a liaison, and cast out by her family,[213] so that Friederike\'s settling in Vienna was compromising for her............