My situation changes every moment. Sometimes I am in favor, sometimes in disgrace. My chief happiness consists in my being absent from him. I lead a quiet and tranquil life with my regiment at Ruppin. Study and music are my principal occupations. I have built me a house there, and laid out a garden where I can read and walk about.
ONE:Frederick had become very ambitious of high intellectual culture and of literary renown. He gathered around him a numerous class of scholarly men, and opened an extensive correspondence with the most distinguished philosophers, poets, and historians all over Europe. He commenced and persevered in a course of very rigorous study, rising at an early hour, and devoting the unbroken morning to intellectual pursuits. The renowned men of earth have not attained their renown but by untiring exertions.166 For six or seven consecutive hours every day the prince was busy in his library, when no one was allowed to interrupt him. He wrote to a friend about this time:On the first of May, 1747, Frederick took formal possession of this beautiful chateau. The occasion was celebrated by quite a magnificent dinner of two hundred covers. Here, for the next forty years, he spent most of his leisure time. He had three other palaces, far surpassing Sans Souci in splendor, which he occasionally visited on days of royal festivities. Berlin and Charlottenburg were about twenty miles distant. The New Palace, so called, at Potsdam, was but about a mile from Sans Souci. He had also his palace at Rheinsberg, some thirty miles north of Berlin, where he had spent many of his early days.
FREDERICK ON THE FIELD OF BAUMGARTEN.It is impossible, writes Lord Dover, not to perceive that the real reason of his conduct was his enmity to his son, and that the crime of the poor girl was the having assisted in making the sons existence more supportable. The intention of Frederick William apparently being that the infliction of so infamous a punishment in so public a manner should prevent the possibility of Fredericks ever seeing her again.14One clause in the kings will was judiciously disregarded. As a last mark of his contempt for his own species, Frederick had directed that he should be buried at Sans Souci by the side of his dogs.
路见不平Eason吼
