VI.
He and those around him might be gulled by this “German candour.” Not so Frederick. In his Memoirs he draws his nephew as he was in 1765, at the age of twenty-one, at the time of his first marriage with Elizabeth of Brunswick: “The young husband, without any morals, given over to a life of debauchery, was daily guilty of infidelity to his wife. The Princess, who was in the flower of her beauty, was shocked at the slight regard shown for her charms. Soon she plunged into excesses almost as bad as her husband’s.” In 1769 they were divorced. Frederick William married a Princess of Darmstadt. The second marriage was no happier than the first. The Princess did not retaliate, though she did not lack incentives to do so. The Prince lapsed back into his dissolute habits. Apart from many passing fancies, he had a recognized mistress-in-chief. This person, who managed always to retain the favour, if not the love, of Frederick William, was the daughter of a humble musician. She married the Prince’s valet de chambre, became Madame Rietz, and was afterwards made Countess of Lichtenau. Frederick William by the first marriage had had a daughter, Princess Frederica, who was brought up by the Queen, the discarded, not to say repudiated, wife of Frederick the Great. The father, when visiting the girl, fell in love with one of her maids-of-honour. Her name was Mademoiselle de Voss, and she came of a good house, being cousin to one of the King’s Ministers, M. de Finckenstein, and sister of a President of the Chamber. “This beauty, who to my mind is very ugly,” wrote Mirabeau, “is a mixture of prudery and cynicism, of affectation and ingenuousness; she has a natural wit of a kind, some schooling, manias rather than desires, a gaucherie which she strives to cover by an appearance of naïveté.... All her charm lies in her complexion, and even that I find wan rather than white; a very beautiful neck. It was this mixture of unique licence, they say, which she combined with the airs of innocent ignorance and vestal severity, that captivated the Prince.”