CHAPTER IX. THE DEATH OF FREDERICK WILLIAM.I represented to him, continues M. DArget, that the house of Austria would never, with a tranquil eye, see his house in possession of Silesia.Three days after, on the 17th, the king wrote again to M. Jordan:
Director
Monsieur,I believe that it is of the last importance that I should write to you, and I am very sad to have things to say which I ought to conceal from all the earth. But one must take that bad leap, and, reckoning you among my friends, I the more easily resolve to open myself to you.Saturday night was very dark. A thick mist mantled the landscape. About midnight, the Russians, feigning an artillery attack upon a portion of the Prussian lines, commenced a retreat. Groping their way through the woods south of Zorndorf, they reached the great road to Landsberg, and retreated so rapidly that Frederick could annoy them but little.The unsuccessfulest negotiation well imaginable by a public man. Strehlen, Monday, 7th August, 1741Frederick has vanished into the interior of his tent, and the two diplomatic gentlemen, the wind struck out of them in this manner, remain gazing at one another. Here, truly, is a young, royal gentleman that knows his own mind, while so many do not. Unspeakable imbroglio of negotiations, mostly insane, welters over all the earth; the Belleisles, the Aulic Councils, the British Georges, heaping coil upon coil; and here, notably in that now so extremely sordid murk of wiggeries, inane diplomacies, and solemn deliriums, dark now and obsolete to all creatures, steps forth one little human figure, with something of sanity in it, like a star, like a gleam of steel, sheering asunder your big balloons, and letting out their diplomatic hydrogen. Salutes with his hat, Gentlemen, gentlemen, it is of no use! and vanishes into the interior of his tent. 139 I beg you labor at this affair. When one hates romantic heroines as heartily as I do, one dreads those timid virtues; and I had rather marry the greatest profligate21 in Berlin than a devotee with half a dozen bigots at her beck. If it were still possible to make her a Calvinist! But I doubt that. I will insist, however, that her grandmother have the training of her. What you can do to help me in this, my dear friend, I am persuaded you will do.