II.
One of the finest cities in Europe, wrote Forster in 1779; but the Berliners! Sociability and refined taste, he found, degenerated in them into sensuality, into libertinage (he might almost say voracity), freedom of wit and love of shining in shameless licence and unrestrained debauch of thought. The women in general were abandoned. An English diplomat, Sir John Harris, afterwards Lord Malmesbury, had the same impression: Berlin was a town where, if fortis might be translated by “honourable,” you could say that there was not a vir fortis nec femina casta.
If you consider that outside Jewish homes money was scarce, and that temptations are all the stronger the less means you have of satisfying them, you can see why in many minds disorder of ideas and corruption of morals opened a new wound, the most dangerous, in sooth, and the most repugnant in nations—venality. Mirabeau, in his “Secret History,” indelibly recorded all the vices of ce noble tripot, Berlin. On this head his famous pamphlet is a picture in violent colours, but true nevertheless. Cynicism there seems merely local colour. “‘Rottenness before Ripeness’—I am very much afraid that must be the motto of Prussian power.... What cannot money do in a house so poor?”