LETTER I
“Neuland, Feb 12th, 1787.
“I thought I had so satisfactorily answered you by my last, that you would have left me in peaceful possession of my sorrows! but your remarks, entreaties, and remonstrances, succeed each other with such rapidity, that I am induced to renew the contest. Cowardice, I believe, you are convinced, is not a native in my heart, and should I now yield, you might suppose that age and the miseries I have suffered, had weakened my powers of mind as well as body; and that I ought to have been classed among the unhappy multitudes whose sufferings have sunk them to despondency.
“Baron Trenck, that man of many woes, once so despised, but who now is held in admiration, where he was before so much the object of hatred; who now speaks so loudly in his own defence, where, formerly, the man who had but whispered his name would have lived suspected; Baron Trenck you propose as an example of salvation for me. You are wrong. Have you considered how dissimilar our past lives have been; how different, too, are our circumstances? Or, omitting these, have you considered to whom you would have me appeal?
“In 1767, I became acquainted, in Vienna, with this sufferer of fortitude, this agreeable companion. We are taught that a noble aspect bespeaks a corresponding mind; this I believe him to possess. But what expectations can I form from Baron Trenck?
“I will briefly answer the questions you have put. Baron Trenck was a man born to inherit great estates; this and the fire of his youth, fanned by flattering hopes from his famous kinsman, rendered him too haughty to his King; and this alone was the origin of all his future sufferings. I, on the contrary, though the son of a Silesian nobleman of property, did not inherit so much as the pay of a common soldier; the family having been robbed by the hand of power, after being accused by wickedness under the mask of virtue. You know my father’s fate, the esteem in which he was held by the Empress Theresa; and that a pretended miracle was the occasion of his fall. Suddenly was he plunged from the height to which industry, talents, and virtue had raised him, to the depth of poverty. At length, at the beginning of the seven years’ war, one of the King of Prussia’s subjects represented him to the Austrian court as a dangerous correspondent of Marshal Schwerin’s. Then at sixty years of age, my father was seized at Jagerndorf, and imprisoned in the fortress of Gratz, in Styria. He had an allowance just sufficient to keep him alive in his dungeon; but, for the space of seven years, never beheld the sun rise or set. I was a boy when this happened, however, I was not heard. I only received some pecuniary relief from the Empress, with permission to shed my blood in her defence. In this situation we first vowed eternal friendship; but from this I soon was snatched by my father’s enemies. What the Empress had bestowed, her ministers tore from me. I was seized at midnight, and was brought, in company with two other officers, to the fortress of Gratz. Here I remained immured six years. My true name was concealed, and another given me.
“Peace being restored, Trenck, I, and my father were released; but the mode of our release was very different. The first obtained his freedom at the intercession of Theresa, she, too, afforded him a provision. We, on the contrary, according to the amnesty, stipulated in the treaty of peace, were led from our dungeons as state prisoners, without inquiry concerning the verity or falsehood of our crimes. Extreme poverty, wretchedness, and misery, were our reward for the sufferings we had endured.
“Not only was my health destroyed, but my jawbone was lost, eaten away by the scurvy. I laid before Frederic the Great the proofs of the calamities I had undergone, and the dismal state to which I was reduced, by his foe, and for his sake; entreated bread to preserve me and my father from starving, but his ear was deaf to my prayer, his heart insensible to my sighs.
“Providence, however, raised me up a saviour,—Count Gellhorn was the man. After the taking of Breslau, he had been also sent a state prisoner to Gratz. During his imprisonment, he had heard the report of my sufferings and my innocence. No sooner did he learn I was released, than he became my benefactor, my friend, and restored me to the converse of men, to which I had so long been dead.
“I defer the continuance of my narrative to the next post. The remembrance of past woes inflict new ones. I am eternally.”