CHAPTER III
AURORA VON KÖNIGSMARCK, accompanied by a few servants and a small escort of Saxon cavalry, traveled secretly to the Swedish camp in Lithuania.
Karl was advancing on Grodno, and the affairs of Augustus looked daily more unfortunate; at the last moment he had wished to stop this journey of the Countess, and to send a formal embassy in his own name and that of the Polish Republic to ask the conqueror’s peace terms.
But Aurora was resolute that this depth of humiliation should not be reached, and confident that Karl could be persuaded to private means of agreement with Augustus.
In any case she was determined to try her influence on a man so singular and so famous.
“It has certainly never seen a woman like me,” she repeated to herself, not with vanity but as the calm statement of a fact.
She had no difficulty in obtaining an audience of Count Piper.
The minister was cynically interested in her mission; he was now no longer in the confidence of his master (if indeed he had ever been so), and performed his duties as a servant, not as a friend; perhaps he faintly disliked the King; in any case he was grimly amused at the idea of exposing Karl to the fascinations of a woman like Aurora von Königsmarck and facing the fair Countess with a man like the King.
He offered her little hope.
“The King is bent on conquest,” he said. “He has no idea of a tame peace, but intends to dethrone all his enemies.”