FLIGHT OF FREDERICK.The old serene highness himself, face the color of gunpowder, and bluer in the winter frost, went rushing far and wide in an open vehicle which he called his cart, pushing out his detachments; supervising every thing; wheeling hither and thither as needful; sweeping out the Pandour world, and keeping it out; not much fighting needed, but a great deal of marching, murmurs Frederick, which in winter is as bad, and wears down the force of battalions.79
ONE:270 Yes, Frederick replied; but for not less than six months (counting on his fingers from May to December)till December 1. The season then would be so far gone that they could do nothing.Never was there a place in the world where liberty of speech was so fully indulged, or where the various superstitions of men were treated with so much ridicule and contempt. God was respected. But those who, in His name, had imposed on mankind, were not spared. Neither women nor priests ever entered the palace. In a word, Frederick lived without a court, without a council, and without a religion.
TWO: 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.Two events occurred at this time highly characteristic of the king. There was a nobleman by the name of Schlubhut, occupying a high official position, who was found a defaulter to the amount of a sum equal to twenty-five thousand dollars. The supreme court sentenced him to three or four years imprisonment. The king was indignant at the mildness of the sentence. What, said he, when the private thief is sent to the gallows, shall a nobleman and a magistrate escape with fine and imprisonment? Schlubhut was immediately sent to prison. All night long he was disturbed with the noise of carpentering in the castle square in front of his cell. In the morning he saw directly before his window a huge gallows erected. Upon that126 gallows he was immediately hung, and his body was left to swing in the wind for several days, some say for weeks.
TWO:Even Wilhelmina had accepted the Prince of Baireuth, whom she had never seen, only to avoid being sacrificed to men whom she utterly loathed. Fortunately for the princess, her affections were not otherwise engaged, and when introduced to her intended she became quite reconciled to the idea of accepting him as her husband.The prince inquired, in quite an indifferent tone, respecting the marriages his father had in contemplation for him. He objected to the marriage with the Princess of Mecklenburg, niece of the Czar Peter, that it would require him to change his religion, which he would not do. He expressed himself as inclined to take the second daughter of the Emperor of Germany, if the emperor would throw in a duchy or two.
TWO:Wilhelmina was appalled in view of the difficulty and danger of the enterprise. It was a long distance from Dresden to the coast. Head winds might detain the vessel. The suspicious king would not long remain ignorant that he was missing. He would be pursued with energy almost demoniac. Being captured,80 no one could tell how fearful would be his doom. The sagacious sister was right. Fritz could not but perceive the strength of her arguments, and gave her his word of honor that he would not attempt, on the present occasion, to effect his flight. Fritz accordingly went to Dresden with his father, and returned.By order of the king, Fritz, who had also been condemned to die and was awaiting his doom, was brought down into a lower room of the fortress, before whose window the scaffold was erected, that he might be compelled to see Katte die. At his entrance the curtains were closed, shutting out the view of the court-yard. Upon the drawing of the curtains, Fritz, to his horror, beheld the scaffold draped in black on a level with the window, and directly before it.
These two events so exasperated his Prussian majesty that the next morning, at an early hour, he reopened upon the doomed236 city with renewed vigor his fire of bombshells and red-hot shot. Fire companies were organized throughout the city, to rush with their engines wherever the glowing balls descended, and thus the flames which frequently burst out were soon extinguished. All day Thursday, Thursday night, Friday, and until nine in the morning of Saturday, the tempest of battle, with occasional lulls, hurled its bolts and uttered its thunders. There was then a short rest until four oclock on Sunday afternoon, when the batteries again opened their action more vigorously than ever, nine bombs being often in the air at the same time.In his epistle Frederick had expressed the opinion that428 there was no God who took any interest in human affairs. He had also repeatedly expressed the resolve to Wilhelmina, and to Voltaire, to whom he had become partially reconciled, that he was prepared to commit suicide should events prove as disastrous as he had every reason to expect they would prove. He had also urged his sister to follow his example, and not to survive the ruin of the family. Such was the support which the king, in hours of adversity, found in that philosophy for which he had discarded the religion of Jesus Christ.The king, upon receiving these strange and unexpected tidings, immediately rode into Lowen. It was an early hour in the261 morning. He entered the place, not as a king and a conqueror, but as a starving fugitive, exhausted with fatigue, anxiety, and sleeplessness. It is said that his hunger was so great that he stopped at a little shop on the corner of the market-place, where widow Panzern served him with a cup of coffee and a cold roast fowl. Thus slightly refreshed, the intensely humiliated young king galloped back to his victorious army at Mollwitz, having been absent from it, in his terror-stricken flight, for sixteen hours.His Prussian majesty carefully examined the position of the Saxons. They were in a region of precipices and chasms, broken into a labyrinth of sky-piercing and craggy rocks. The eminences, in some cases, rose two thousand feet, and were covered with pine forests. There is no stronger position in the world, Frederick writes. All these passes were fortified, mile after mile, by batteries, ramparts, palisades, and abattis. But the Saxon troops, taken unawares, had but a small supply of provisions. Frederick decided to block every entrance to their encampment, and thus to starve them out. His Polish majesty sent frantic cries to France and Austria for help. Frederick was assailed with the title of the Prussian robber.
荣誉榜
THREE:DArgens spent the winter with the king at Leipsic. He gives the following incident: One day I entered the kings apartment, and found him sitting on the floor with a platter of fried meat, from which he was feeding his dogs. He had a little rod, with which he kept order among them, and shoved the best bits to his favorites.
THREE:That is not the question, I answered. The question is, whether such a being as God can, or can not, give existence to what, as yet, has none.
