"The truth is, sire, that this was only the courage of cowardice, and that the prudent magistracy and merchants were perfectly delighted with your majesty's orders not to pay these bonds, and that I gave myself an immense amount of trouble in vain to remind them of their pledged word and their compromised honor."
"Oh! I know it," said the king. "My good Berliners love money as well as any other of the good-for-nothing children of men. Proceed!"
"Well, when I found them deaf to the voice of honor, I let them hear the words of cowardly prudence. I painted to them the horrors awaiting them if the enemy perchance should return as conquerors, and what a fearful revenge they would take on the perjured city. I reminded them that the enemy would immediately attack all our property in Courland, Dantzic, and Livonia, and that at the Russian headquarters they had threatened me that they would publish, us in all the open commercial marts as issuers of false bonds."
"You were then in the Russian camp?"
"A fortnight ago, sire. The Council of Berlin requested me to undertake this journey to complete the transactions left unfinished by the rapid retreat of General von Tottleben."
"And did you finish them?"
"I was obliged to give General Tottleben a written agreement that I would return in four weeks to the Russian camp to carry out the transactions in the name of these merchants."
"I have been told that the Russian general would not accept the bonds for the war-tax unless you indorsed them. Is that true, too?"
"It is true."
"And what did you do?"