The rich abbeys of the Roman Catholics were compelled to establish manufactures for weaving damasks and table-cloths. Some were converted into oil-mills, or “workers in copper, wire-drawers, the flaxes and metals, with water-power, markets, and so on.”
While on this tour of inspection, the celebrated French philosopher D’Alembert, by appointment, met the king at Geldern, and accompanied him to Potsdam. D’Alembert was in entire sympathy with the king in his renunciation of Christianity. In 1755 D’Alembert had, by invitation, met Frederick at Wesel, on the Rhine. In a letter to Madame Du Deffand, at Paris, dated Potsdam, June 25, 1763, D’Alembert wrote:
“I will not go into the praises of King Frederick, now my host. I will merely send you two traits of him, which will indicate his way of thinking and feeling. When I spoke to him of the glory which he had acquired, he answered, with the greatest simplicity,
“‘There is a furious discount to be deducted from said glory. Chance came in for almost the whole of it. I would far rather have written Racine’s Athalie than have performed all the achievements of this war.’
“The other trait I have to give you is this. On the 15th of February last, the day of concluding this peace, which is so glorious to him, some one said to him, ‘It is the finest day of your majesty’s life.’ The king replied,
“‘The finest day of life is the day on which one quits it.’”[177]
Helvetius, another of the distinguished French deistical philosophers, was invited to Berlin to assist the king in his financial operations. To aid the mechanics in Berlin, and to show to the world that the king was not so utterly impoverished as many imagined, Frederick, on the 11th of June, 1763, laid the foundation of the sumptuous edifice called “The New Palace of Sans Souci.”
Frederick, though now at peace with all the world, found no nation in cordial alliance with him. He had always disliked England, and England returned the dislike with interest. The Duchess of Pompadour, who controlled France, hated him. Maria Theresa regarded him as a highway robber who had snatched Silesia from her and escaped with it. Frederick, thus left without an ally, turned to his former subject, now Catharine II., whom he had placed on the throne of Russia. On the 11th of April, 1764, one year after the close of the Seven Years’ War, he entered into a treaty of alliance with the Czarina Catharine. The treaty was to continue eight years. In case either of the parties became involved in war, the other party was to furnish a contingent of twelve thousand men, or an equivalent in money.
On the 5th of October, 1763, Augustus, the unhappy King of Poland, had died at Dresden, after a troubled reign of thirty years. The crown was elective. The turbulent nobles, broken up into antagonistic and envenomed cliques, were to choose a successor. Catharine, as ambitious as she was able and unprincipled, resolved to place one of her creatures upon the throne, that Poland, a realm spreading over a territory of 284,000 square miles, and containing a population of 20,000,000, might be virtually added to her dominions. Carlyle writes:
“My own private conjecture, I confess, has rather grown to be, on much reading of those Rulhières and distracted books, that the czarina—who was a grandiose creature, with considerable magnanimities, natural and acquired; with many ostentations, some really great qualities and talents; in effect, a kind of she Louis Quatorze (if the reader will reflect on that royal gentleman, and put him into petticoats in Russia, and change his improper females for improper males)—that the czarina, very clearly resolute to keep Poland hers, had determined with herself to do something very handsome in regard to Poland; and to gain glory, both with the enlightened philosophe classes and with her own proud heart, by her treatment of that intricate matter.”