"A considerable table allowance was appointed for the governor—if I do not mistake, 12,000 thalers monthly—which was raised by an extraordinary tax. A household was formed, and the pensioned Münster officials were again employed. The Court Marshal von Sch. acted in this capacity at the table of the French governor; he issued the invitations for dinners and evening assemblies, on which occasions he wore his old court marshal's uniform, with his marshal's staff in his hand, and under him was the court quartermaster with his sword, &c. When we saw this servile conduct the first time, the president of the administration, Von Sobbe, speaking to me, called the one an arrant fool, and the other the court fool.
"Besides this, there was a volunteer guard of honour established for General Loison, who equipped themselves. They furnished the daily guard at the castle, and accompanied the General, when with a troop of soldiers he made a progress into the county of Mark. At the head of this guard of honour there were members of the Münster nobility.
"In the noble ladies' club, from which every respectable German had been excluded who did not belong to their caste, they received the French General with his mistress, in order to exercise more influence upon him.
"Nevertheless, they were not so successful with General Loison; he was too wary for them, made fun of them in secret, and only cared for the presents that were partly given to him and partly promised. They had offered him a costly sword as a present, which he accepted graciously. The sword was ordered and made at Frankfort, but it only arrived after Loison had left the government. Now they were sorry for this too hasty offer, and they had no desire to send him the sword, as they had not found that complaisance in him which they expected. All this courtly empressement became so repugnant to Loison, that he himself prevailed on Napoleon to recall him to the army.
"With his weaker successor, Canuel, it succeeded better. My worthy friend the president, Von Vinke, was the first to experience it. An incidental expression thrown out by him in a remonstrance, 'that otherwise he could no longer carry on his office,' was readily laid hold of as signifying a resignation, and he was dismissed from his post.
"In order to overcome my grief at things that could not be altered, I endeavoured to find distraction in a great work. The yet incomplete state of the laws of mortgages in the county of Münster, offered me the handiest and best material I devoted myself to this tedious work with the greatest zeal, and with the assistance of many referendaries, I accomplished the registry of all the title deeds which had to be recorded in the mortgage book of the government of Münster. Thus I succeeded in a certain measure in occupying myself, and I learnt by experience that hard work is in truth a soothing balsam, which precedes the slow healing powers of time.
"But much as I believed myself to have acquired a kind of philosophic tranquillity by this withdrawal into my narrow sphere of business, yet I could not escape agitating feelings when the Peace of Tilsit really separated us from the Prussian State, and removed its frontier as much as forty miles to the east of us. The moving words with which our unhappy King took leave of his subjects, in the ceded provinces, and discharged the officials from their oath of allegiance, made us feel our loss still deeper. 'Dear children, it is an indescribably sorrowful feeling when the old ties of allegiance, of love, and confidence, which have bound us through long successive years to our ancestors, our State, and rulers, are at once violently rent, when a new and foreign ruler is forced upon a people, for whom no heart beats, who is received with despairing doubts, and who on his side feels nothing for his subjects.'"
Here we conclude the narrative of the good Prussian. Münster and the county of Mark were attached to the new grand-dukedom of Berg; Sethe himself became procurator-general of the Court of Appeals at Düsseldorf. But not for long, the firm uprightness of the German appeared suspicious to the foreign conqueror; he had not offered his aid in supporting the acts of tyranny of the French government; therefore he was called with threats to Paris, and there arrested, because, in fact, they feared his influence on the patriotic disposition of the country. When, in 1813, he was released, and the Prussian rule was restored in his Fatherland, he conducted the organisation of the legal authorities in the Rhine country. From that time he led a long, useful life of activity in his office, one of the first Prussian jurists who supported trial by jury, publicity, and verbal evidence, against the State government. A firm independence of character, truthful, devoted to duty, with deified earnestness and simplicity, he was a model of old Prussian official honour. The blessing of his life rests on his children.
It is not without an object that in this and the preceding chapter two portraitures from the circle of German citizens have been placed in juxtaposition. They represent the contrasts that were to be found in German life, through the whole of the eighteenth century up to the war of freedom. We see Pietists and followers of Wolf; Klopstock and Lessing; Schiller and Kant; Germans and Prussians; a rich contemplative mind, and a persevering energy, which subjects the external world to itself.