Here do I declare—I will seek no other revenge against my enemies than that of despising their evil deeds. It is my wish, and shall be my endeavour, to forget the past; and having committed no offence, neither will I solicit monarchs for posts of honour; as I have ever lived a free man, a free man will I die.
I conclude this part of my history on the evening preceding my journey to Berlin. God grant I may encounter no new afflictions, to be inserted in the remainder of this history.
This journey I prepared to undertake, but my ever-envious fate threw me on the bed of sickness, insomuch that small hope remained that I ever should again behold the country of my forefathers. I seemed following the Great Frederic to the mansions of the dead; then should I never have concluded the history of my life, or obtained the victory by which I am now crowned.
A variety of obstacles being overcome, I found it necessary to make a journey into Hungary, which was one of the most pleasant of my whole life.
I have no words to express my ardent wishes for the welfare of a nation where I met with so many proofs of friendship. Wherever I appeared I was welcomed with that love and enthusiasm which only await the fathers of their country. The valour of my cousin Trenck, who died ingloriously in the Spielberg, the loss of my great Hungarian estates, the fame of my writings, and the cruelty of my sufferings, had gone before me. The officers of the army, the nobles of the land, alike testified the warmth of their esteem.
Such is the reward of the upright; such too are the proofs that this nation knows the just value of fortitude and virtue. Have I not reason to publish my gratitude, and to recommend my children to those who, when I am no more, shall dare uprightly to determine concerning the rights which have unjustly been snatched from me in Hungary?
Not a man in Hungary but will proclaim I have been unjustly dealt by; yet I have good reason to suspect I never shall find redress. Sentence had been already given; judges, more honest, cannot, without difficulty, reverse old decrees; and the present possessors of my estates are too powerful, too intimate with the governors of the earth, for me to hope I shall hereafter be more happy. God knows my heart; I wish the present possessors may render services to the state equal to those rendered by the family of the Trencks.
There is little probability I shall ever behold my noble friends in Hungary more. Here I bid them adieu, promising them to pass the remainder of any life so as still to merit the approbation of a people with whose ashes I would most willingly have mingled my own. May the God of heaven preserve every Hungarian from a fate similar to mine!
The Croats have ever been reckoned uncultivated; yet, among this uncultivated people I found more subscribers to my writings than among all the learned men of Vienna; and in Hungary, more than in all the Austrian dominions.
The Hungarians, the unlettered Croats, seek information. The people of Vienna ask their confessors’ permission to read instructive books. Various subscribers, having read the first volume of my work, brought it back, and re-demanded their money, because some monk had told them it was a book dangerous to be read. The judges of their courts have re-sold them to the booksellers for a few pence or given them to those who had the care of their consciences to burn.