There is a story told in connexion with this same great Frederic which is a good table trait in its way. Joachim von Ziethen was one of the bravest of the generals who stood by Frederic the Great in victory or defeat. He was the son of a poor gentleman, and had little education save what he could pick up in barracks, camps, and battle fields, in all of which he figured in early youth. If his head was not over-ballasted with learning, his heart was well freighted with that love for God, of which some portion, as the dismissed lecturer on Ecclesiastical History in King’s College tells us, is in almost every individual without exception, and forms the sheet-anchor which shall enable him to ride through the storms which keep him from his desired haven of rest. He became the terror of the foes of Prussia; but among his comrades, he was known only as “good father Ziethen.” He was remarkable for his swiftness at once of resolve and execution, and in remembrance as well as illustration thereof, a sudden surprise is spoken of by an astonished Prussian as “falling on one like Ziethen from an ambush.”
Now, old Ziethen, after the triumph achieved in the Seven Years’ War, was always a welcome guest at the table of Frederic the Second. His place was ever by the side of the royal master whose cause he had more than once saved from ruin; and he only sat lower at table when there happened to be present some foreign royal mediocrity, illustriously obscure. On one occasion, he received a command to dine with the king on Good Friday. Ziethen sent a messenger to his sovereign, stating that it was impossible for him to wait on his majesty, inasmuch as that he made a point of never omitting to take the sacrament on that day, and of always spending the subsequent portion of the day in private meditation.
A week elapsed before the scrupulous old soldier was again invited to the royal dinner-table. At length he appeared in his old place, and merry were the guests, the king himself setting an example of uproarious hilarity. The fun was running fast and furious,—it was at its very loudest, when Frederic, turning to Ziethen, smacked him familiarly on the back, and exclaimed, “Well, grave old Ziethen! how did the supper of Good Friday agree with your sanctimonious stomach? Have you properly digested the veritable body and blood?” At this blasphemy, and amid the thunders of pealing laughter, the saluting artillery of the delighted guests, Ziethen leaped to his feet, and after shaking his grey hairs with indignation, and silencing the revellers with a cry, as though they had been dogs, he turned to the godless master of the realm, and said—words, if not precisely these, certainly and exactly to this effect:—
“I shun no danger;—your majesty knows it. My life has been always ready for sacrifice, when my country and the throne required it. What I was, that I am; and my head I would place on the block at this moment, if the striking of it off could purchase happiness for my king. But there is One who is greater than I, or any one here; and He is a greater sovereign than you who mock Him here from the throne in Berlin. He it is whose precious blood was shed for the salvation of all mankind. On Him, that Holy One, my faith reposes: He is my consoler in life, my hope in presence of death; and I will not suffer His name to be derided and attacked where I am by, and have voice to protest against it. Sir, if your soldiers had not been firm in this faith, they would not have gained victories for you. If you mock this faith, and jeer at those who cling to it, you only lend a hand to bury yourself and the state in ruin.” After a pause he added, looking the while on the mute king:—“What I have spoken is God’s truth; receive it graciously.”
Frederic was the patron of Voltaire, who had dared to say at his own table that what it had taken God and twelve Apostles to build up, one man (Voltaire) would destroy. But Frederic was now, for the moment, more deeply moved by what had been uttered by the unphilosophical Ziethen than by anything that had ever fallen from the brilliant but irreligious Voltaire. He rose, flung his left arm over Ziethen’s shoulder, offered his right hand to the brave old Christian general, and exclaimed:—“Ziethen, you are a happy man! Would that I could be like you! Hold fast by your faith; and I will respect even where I cannot believe. What has occurred shall never happen again.”
A deep and solemn silence followed, and the dinner was spoiled, according to the guests, to whom the king gave the signal to disperse long before their appetites had been satisfied. Ziethen was preparing to withdraw with the rest, but Frederic, taking him by the hand, whispered:—“You, my friend, come with me to my cabinet.”
This anecdote was told by Bishop von Eylert to Frederic William III. That king, who had never heard of the incident, pronounced on it a three-piled eulogium of “excellent, pleasing, and instructive,” adding thereto a natural desire to know what passed between the king and Ziethen in the cabinet. It were doubtless well worth knowing, but I have sought for any notice of it, and all in vain. The good bishop, as he deserved, was invited to remain at Sans Souci, to supper. “I excused myself,” says the prelate, in his memoir of the king, “as having only a common upper coat on.” The king replied, smilingly, “I know very well that you have got a dollar and a dress-coat; you are the same person in either. I want you, not your coat; so, go in.”
The Prussian soldiers, in the days of the great Frederic, used to be allowed unlimited liberty in providing themselves with food in an enemy’s country. The like permission, but somewhat enlarged, was given to the Croat soldiers, under the name of foraging for “supper;” but in that permission they included every meal. They are as ready at it as Abyssinians; they cut a slice out of the first beast they fall in with, salt it, put it between the saddle and the horse’s back, gallop till it gets warm, and then eat it with Croat appetite. The sportsmen of Dauphiny eat beccaficoes after much the same fashion; they pluck the bird, sprinkle it with pepper and salt, carry it on their hat to dry in the air, and eat it with relish for supper, without any further cooking. They declare it is far better so than when roasted.
Celebrated as the “petits soupers” of the French were during the last century, they were equalled in brilliancy, and perhaps surpassed in popularity, by those given in Paris by the Duchess of Kingston. The adventures of that very adventurous lady rendered her a favourite with our lively neighbours. When a rustic Devonshire beauty,—wayward, capricious, ignorant, and seductive, Elizabeth Chudleigh was suddenly transplanted to the court of the Princess of Wales, as maid of honour. She there captivated the youthful Duke of Hamilton, returned his affection, and accepted the offer of his hand. They loved intensely, quarrelled furiously, and were reconciled warmly; the enemies of both toiled incessantly to prevent the marriage, and each was daily told of the alleged infidelities of the other. One of these stories excited the ardent beauty to such rage that she dismissed her ducal lover, and in the whirlwind of her wrath gave her hand to Captain Hervey, brother of the Earl of Bristol. She married in haste, and repented quite as hastily. She hated her husband before they left the church together; and after six months of the most active domestic warfare, the ill-assorted pair separated by mutual consent. She went abroad to find solace for her disappointment, and was heartily welcomed at the courts of St. Petersburg, Prussia, and Saxony; she was the favoured guest of Catherine II., and of the great Frederic, at Berlin; and no electoral banquet took place at Dresden without being enlivened by her presence and her wit. When she accepted the invitation to resume her place at the English court, the reception she met with was enthusiastic: she played whist with the men, and she drove four-in-hand as if she had been the born daughter of a charioteer, brought up to her father’s business. Her accomplishments won the heart of the simplest of dukes and the gentlest of men, his grace of Kingston, and as an ecclesiastical court, in 1769, pronounced her marriage with Captain Hervey (now Earl of Bristol) null and void, she speedily espoused her ducal admirer, while her former husband bestowed an earl’s coronet on a second wife. The duke’s property was not entailed, and the duchess spent it with such reckless prodigality, that his grace was fairly frightened into consumption and death; and in 1773 she was a beautiful widow, with the large remnant of the duke’s fortune in her possession—as long as she did not marry again. Away she went to Rome, sailed up the Tiber in her own yacht, entertained the pope (Ganganelli) Clement XIV. at breakfast, dinner, and supper, and kept up such a state that the world had never beheld such extravagant splendour since the days of the most profuse and profligate of queens: the heirs of the duke, seeing their inheritance fast melting away, instituted against her the famous suit for bigamy, on the ground that the ecclesiastical court which broke her first marriage had no power to do so. To meet her accusers she hurried to England, where she considerably startled the modest among our grandmothers by her Sunday amusements, and the daily display afforded by the very lowest of dresses. But as she gave most splendid dinners she had no lack of friends, and few men could find it in their hearts to abandon a woman in distress, whose kitchen fires were never extinguished, who gave her guests green peas at Christmas, and whose commonest beverage was imperial tokay. The House of Lords judged her case, heard her defence, and pronounced her second marriage bigamy by overthrowing the decree of the ecclesiastical court with regard to her first union. To avoid the vulgar penalty she immediately fled, crossed the Channel in a storm, and proceeded to Munich, where she was royally entertained, especially as the law could not touch the property bequeathed her by the Duke of Kingston. The courtesy title of duchess was still allowed her, and the Elector of Bavaria added to it that of Countess of Warth. Great nobles gave entertainments in her honour, which lasted, for days, and ended with a ball, a banquet, and, instead of common-place fireworks, the storming of a town at midnight. Poor nobles vied with each other for her smiles and the life-interest of her possessions; but as she had once been nearly entrapped by a Greek Prince Warta, who turned out to be the son of an ass-driver in Trebizond, and who committed suicide in prison, she made and kept her resolution to be her own mistress for the future, and not that of either count or kaiser.
In France, where she ultimately resided, she purchased the estate of St. Assize au Port, which had formerly belonged to the Duke of Orleans, the father of “Egalité.” She paid down a million and a half of francs for it, and sold seven thousand francs’ worth of rabbits from it, during the first week of her residence there. A fricasee of the duchess’s rabbits was, for a long time, the chief dish at all the guinguettes round Paris. Her own great suppers were famous for their refinement and luxury. She was a lover of good living, a gourmet rather than a gourmande; an epicure of taste, but not a glutton; and the gastronomic art never could boast of a more liberal patronage than that she bestowed upon it, especially in her Paris residence; where her table, her wit, her dinners, and her diamonds, made of her, for a time, the most remarkable personage in the capital. She died suddenly, of the rupture of a blood-vessel, in 1788, and was completely forgotten before that year had also expired.