She was prone to every excess and proved the ultimate ruin and destruction of his very hearth.

After sundry adventures she had returned home, and he had taken her back in a spirit of Christian resignation and forgiveness.

She haunted him as his living disgrace, but he grew more and more indifferent and at last ceased suffering from these distresses.
Heaven took him out of his wife's hands in order to restore him to the arms of God, and so the voluptuous pleasures he had enjoyed with Nana were prolonged in religious ecstasies, accompanied by the old stammering utterances, the old prayers and despairs, the old fits of humility which befit an accursed creature who is crushed beneath the mire whence he sprang.

In the recesses of churches, his knees chilled by the pavement, he would once more experience the delights of the past, and his muscles would twitch, and his brain would whirl deliciously, and the satisfaction of the obscure necessities of his existence would be the same as of old.
On the evening of the final rupture Mignon presented himself at the house in the Avenue de Villiers.

He was growing accustomed to Fauchery and was beginning at last to find the presence of his wife's husband infinitely advantageous to him.