“J'étudie beaucoup, et cela me soulage réellement; mais lorsque mon esprit fait des retours sur les temps passés, alors les plaies du cœur se rouvrent et je regrette inutilement les pertes que j'ai faites.”
Chasot, however, soon returned to Germany, and probably in order to be near the court of Strelitz, took up his abode in the old free town of Lübeck. He became a citizen of Lübeck in 1754, and in 1759 was made commander of its militia. Here his life seems to have been very agreeable, and he was treated with great consideration and liberality. Chasot was still young, as he was born in 1716, and he now thought of marriage. This he accomplished in the following manner. There was at that time an artist of some celebrity at Lübeck,—Stefano Torelli. He had a daughter whom he had left at Dresden to be educated, and whose portrait he carried about on his snuff-box. Chasot met him at dinner, saw the snuff-box, fell in love with the picture, and proposed to the father to marry his daughter Camilla. Camilla was sent for. She left Dresden, travelled through the country, which was then occupied by Prussian troops, met the king in his camp, received his protection, arrived safely at Lübeck, and in the same year was married to Chasot. Frederic was then in the thick of the Seven Years' War, but Chasot, though he was again on friendly terms with the king, did not offer him his sword. He was too happy at Lübeck with his Camilla, and he made himself useful to the king by sending him recruits. [pg 211] One of the recruits he offered was his son, and in a letter, April 8, 1760, we see the king accepting this young recruit in the most gracious terms:—
“J'accepte volontiers, cher de Chasot, la recrue qui vous doit son être, et je serai parrain de l'enfant qui vous naîtra, au cas que ce soit un fils. Nous tuons les hommes, tandis que vous en faites.”
It was a son, and Chasot writes:—
“Si ce garçon me ressemble, Sire, il n'aura pas une goutte de sang dans ses veines qui ne soit à vous.”
M. de Schlözer, who is himself a native of Lübeck, has described the later years of Chasot's life in that city with great warmth and truthfulness. The diplomatic relations of the town with Russia and Denmark were not without interest at that time, because Peter III., formerly Duke of Holstein, had declared war against Denmark in order to substantiate his claims to the Danish crown. Chasot had actually the pleasure of fortifying Lübeck, and carrying on preparations for war on a small scale, till Peter was dethroned by his wife, Catherine. All this is told in a very comprehensive and luminous style; and it is not without regret that we find ourselves in the last chapter, where M. de Schlözer describes the last meetings of Chasot and Frederic in 1779, 1784, and 1785. Frederic had lost nearly all his friends, and he was delighted to see the matador de sa jeunesse once more. He writes:—
“Une chose qui n'est presque arrivée qu'à moi est que j'ai perdu tous mes amis de cœur et mes anciennes connaissances; ce sont des plaies dont le cœur saigne long-temps, que la philosophie apaise, mais que sa main ne saurait guérir.”
How pleasant for the king to find at least one man with whom he could talk of the old days of Rheinsberg,—of Fräulein von Schack and Fräulein von Walmoden, [pg 212] of Cæsarion and Jordan, of Mimi and le Tourbillon! Chasot's two sons entered the Prussian service, though, in the manner in which they are received, we find Frederic again acting more as king than as friend. Chasot in 1784 was still as lively as ever, whereas the king: was in bad health. The latter writes to his old friend, “Si nous ne nous revoyons bientôt, nous ne nous reverrons jamais;” and when Chasot had arrived, Frederic writes to Prince Heinrich, “Chasot est venu ici de Lübeck; il ne parle que de mangeaille, de vins de Champagne, du Rhin, de Madère, de Hongrie, et du faste de messieurs les marchands de la bourse de Lübeck.”
Such was the last meeting of these two knights of the Ordre de Bayard. The king died in 1786, without seeing the approach of the revolutionary storm which was soon to upset the throne of the Bourbons. Chasot died in 1797. He began to write his memoirs in 1789, and it is to some of their fragments, which had been preserved by his family, and were handed over to M. Kurd de Schlözer, that we owe this delightful little book. Frederic the Great used to complain that Germans could not write history:—
“Ce siècle ne produisit aucun bon historien. On chargea Teissier d'écrire l'histoire de Brandebourg: il en fit le panégyrique. Pufendorf écrivit la vie de Frédéric-Guillaume, et, pour ne rien omettre, il n'oublia ni ses clercs de chancellerie, ni ses valets de chambre dont il put recueillir les noms. Nos auteurs ont, ce me semble, toujours péché, faute de discerner les choses essentielles des accessoires, d'éclaircir les faits, de reserrer leur prose traînante et excessivement sujette aux inversions, aux nombreuses épithètes, et d'écrire en pédants plutôt qu'en hommes de génie.”