XIII.
Mistresses and favourites, Rosicrucians and valets, theosophists and femmes galantes, on the whole got on very well together and agreed surprisingly. It was but a step from the laboratory of the Rosicrucians to the boudoir of Madame Rietz, and these mystic personages cleared it without a scrap of shame. They formed a close alliance with the valet de chambre and his wife, the maîtresse d’habitude, who throughout all the matrimonial pranks of the King managed to preserve her credit by artifices analogous to those which at Versailles had so long maintained that of Madame de Pompadour.
Around them swarmed a crowd of subordinate intriguers, the “clique,” as they were called in Berlin, ready for all sorts of jobs behind the scenes at Court, in the Army, in politics, in diplomacy—above all, in finance. Needy and greedy, they had a firmly established reputation in Europe for venality. “I maintain,” declared Mirabeau, “that with a thousand louis you could, if need be, know perfectly all the secrets of the Berlin Cabinet.... So the Emperor has a faithful record of every step of the King, day by day, and could know everything he planned, if he planned anything.” These were the methods, as Custine affirmed in 1792, that every diplomatist in the world employed; all the Ministers who resided in Berlin used them with more success and more generally than elsewhere.