It was now midwinter. Frederick, having established his troops in winter quarters, took up his residence in Breslau. His troubles were by no means ended. Vastly outnumbering foes still surrounded him. Very vigorous preparations were to be made for the sanguinary conflicts which the spring would surely introduce. Frederick did what he could to infuse gayety into the society at Breslau, though he had but little heart to enter into those gayeties himself. For a week he suffered severely from colic pains, and could neither eat nor sleep. “Eight months,” he writes, “of anguish and agitation do wear one down.”
His sister Amelia and several other friends visited him at Breslau. Among others was his reader, Henry de Catt.
“Should you have known me?” the king inquired of De Catt.
“Hardly,” he replied, “in that dress. Besides, your majesty has grown thinner.”
“That may well be,” rejoined the king, “with the cursed life I have been leading.”
Frederick still sought recreation in writing verses which he called poetry. To D’Argens he wrote, “I have made a prodigious quantity of verses. If I live I will show them to you. If I perish they are bequeathed to you, and I have ordered that they be put into your hand.”
Again he wrote D’Argens on the 26th of December, “What a pleasure to hear that you are coming. I have sent a party of light horse to conduct you. You can make short journeys. I have directed that horses be ordered for you, that your rooms be warmed every where, and good fowls ready on all roads. Your apartment in this house is carpeted, hermetically shut. You shall suffer nothing from draughts or from noise.”
Frederick, having regained Silesia, was anxious for peace. He wrote a polite letter to Maria Theresa, adroitly worded, so as to signify that desire without directly expressing it. The empress queen, disheartened by the disasters of Rossbach and Leuthen, was rather inclined to listen to such suggestions; but the Duchess of Pompadour verified the adage that “hell has no fury like a woman scorned.” She governed the wretched Louis XV., and through him governed France. In her intense personal exasperation against Frederick she would heed no terms of compromise, and infused new energy into all warlike operations. Large subsidies were paid by France to Austria, Sweden, and Russia, to prepare for the campaign of 1758.
Frederick was soon aware that peace was out of the question without farther fighting. Before the 1st of April he had one hundred and forty-five thousand men ready for the field. Of these, fifty-three thousand were in Silesia. Many of the Austrian deserters were induced to join his standards. But the most important event secured was forming a subsidy treaty with England. The British cabinet, alarmed in view of the power which the successful prosecution of the war on the part of the allies would give to France, after much hesitation, came to the aid of Frederick, whom they hated as much as they feared France. On the 11th of April, 1758, a treaty was signed between the English court and Frederick, containing the following important item:
“That Frederick shall have six hundred and seventy thousand pounds ($3,350,000), payable in London to his order, in October, this year, which sum Frederick engages to spend wholly in the maintenance and increase of his army for behoof of the common object; neither party to dream of making the least shadow of peace or truce without the other.”