There was a time, indeed--some two or three years after the catastrophe--when he passed through a stage of mental and moral tumult, natural to a man of strong passions and physique. Even in their first married life, Phoebe had been sometimes jealous, and with reason. It was her memory of these occasions that had predisposed her to the mad suspicion which wrecked her. And when she had deserted him, he came violently near, on one or two occasions, to things base and irreparable. But he was saved--first by the unconscious influence, the mere trust, of a good woman--and, secondly, by his keen and advancing intelligence. Dread lest he should cast himself out of Eugénie's delightful presence; and the fighting life of the mind: it was by these he was rescued, by these he ultimately conquered.
And yet, was it, perhaps, his bitterest grievance against his wife that she had, in truth, left him _nothing_!--not even friendship, not even art. In so wrenching herself from him, she had perpetuated in him that excitable and unstable temper it should have been her first object to allay, and had thus injured and maimed his artistic power; while at the same time she had so troubled, so falsified his whole attitude towards the woman who on his wife's disappearance from his life had become naturally and insensibly his dearest friend, that not even the charm of Madame de Pastourelles' society, of her true, delicate, and faithful affection, could give him any lasting happiness. He himself had begun the falsification, but it was Phoebe's act which had prolonged and compelled it, through twelve years.
For a long time, indeed, his success as an artist steadily developed. The very energy of his resentment--his inner denunciation--of his wife's flight, the very force of his fierce refusal to admit that he had given her the smallest real justification for such a step, had quickened in him for a time all the springs of life. Through his painting, as we have seen, he wrestled out his first battles with fate and with temptation; and those early years were the years of his artistic triumph, as they were also the years of Madame de Pastourelles' strongest influence upon him. But the concealment on which his life was based, the tragedy at the heart of it, worked like 'a worm i' the bud.' The first check to his artistic career--the 'hanging' incident and its sequel--produced an effect of shock and disintegration out of all proportion to its apparent cause--inexplicable indeed to the spectators.