"In fine, as I was somewhat confused; and anxious, above all, to keep him from exploding with the secret, I cannot remember everything, But Derschau, who was more at his ease, will be able to give you a full account. He [the King] said more than once: 'THIS was his sickness; the thing that ailed him, this: it gnawed his heart, and would be the death of him!' He certainly did not affect; he was in a very convulsive condition. [JARNI-BLEU, here is a piece of work, Herr Seckendorf!]—Adieu, I have a headache." Whereupon to bed.
"GRUMKOW."
[Forster, iii. 135, 136.]
This Hansard Report went off direct to Prince Eugene; and ought to have been a warning to the high Vienna heads and him. But they persisted not the less to please Robinson or themselves; considering his Prussian Majesty to be, in fact, a mere rotatory Clothes-horse for drying the Imperial linen on; and to have no intellect at all, because he was without guile, and had no vulpinism at all. In which they were very much mistaken indeed. History is proud to report that the guileless Prussian Majesty, steadily attending to his own affairs in a wise manner, though hoodwinked and led about by Black-Artists as he had been, turned out when Fact and Nature subsequently pronounced upon it, to have had more intellect than the whole of them together,—to have been, in a manner, the only one of them that had any real "intellect," or insight into Fact and Nature, at all. Consummate Black-art Diplomacies overnetting the Universe, went entirely to water, running down the gutters to the last drop; and a prosperous Drilled Prussia, compact, organic in every part, from diligent plough-sock to shining bayonet and iron ramrod, remained standing. "A full Treasury and 200,000 well-drilled men would be the one guarantee to your Pragmatic Sanction," Prince Eugene had said. But that bit of insight was not accepted at Vienna; Black-art, and Diplomatic spider-webs from pole to pole, being thought the preferable method.
Enough, Seckendorf was ordered to manipulate and soothe down the Prussian Majesty, as surely would be easy; to continue his galvanic operations on the Double-Match, or produce a rotation in the purposes of the royal breast. Which he diligently strove to do, when once admitted to speech again;—Grumkow steadily declining to meddle, and only Queen Sophie, as we can fancy, auguring joyfully of it. Seckendorf, admitted to speech the third day after that explosive Session, snuffles his softest, his cunningest;—continues to ride diligently, the concluding portion (such it proved) of his 25,000 miles with the Prussian Majesty up and down through winter and spring; but makes not the least progress, the reverse rather.
Their dialogues and arguings on the matter, here and elsewhere, are lost in air; or gone wholly to a single point unexpectedly preserved for us. One day, riding through some village, Priort some say his Majesty calls it, some give another name,—advocate Seckendorf, in the fervor of pleading and arguing, said some word, which went like a sudden flash of lightning through the dark places of his Majesty's mind, and never would go out of it again while he lived after. In passionate moments, his Majesty spoke of it sometimes, a clangorous pathos in his tones, as of a thing hideous, horrible, never to be forgotten, which had killed him,—death from a friend's hand. "It was the 17th of April, 1733, [All the Books (Forster, ii. 142, for one) mention this utterance of his Majesty, on what occasion we shall see farther on; and give the date "1732," not 1733: but except as amended above, it refuses to have any sense visible at this distance. The Village of Priort is in the Potsdam region.] riding through Priort, a man said something to me: it was as if you had turned a dagger about in my heart. That man was he that killed me; there and then I got my death!"
A strange passion in that utterance: the deep dumb soul of his Majesty, of dumb-poetic nature, suddenly brought to a fatal clearness about certain things. "O Kaiser, Kaiser of the Holy Roman Empire; and this is your return for my loyal faith in you? I had nearly killed my Fritz, my Wilhelmina, broken my Feekin's heart and my own, and reduced the world to ruins for your sake. And because I was of faith more than human, you took me for a dog? O Kaiser, Kaiser!"—Poor Friedrich Wilhelm, he spoke of this often, in excited moments, in his later years; the tears running down his cheeks, and the whole man melted into tragic emotion: but if Fritz were there, the precious Fritz whom he had almost killed for their sake, he would say, flashing out into proud rage, "There is one that will avenge me, though; that one! DA STEHT EINER, DER MICH RACHEN WIRD!" [Forster, ii. 153.] Yes, your Majesty; perhaps that one. And it will be seen whether YOU were a rotatory Clothes-horse to dry their Pragmatic linen upon, or something different a good deal.
Chapter VI. — KING AUGUST MEDITATING GREAT THINGS FOR POLAND.
In the New-year's days of 1733, the topic among diplomatic gentlemen, which set many big wigs wagging, and even tremulously came out in the gray leaves of gazetteers and garreteers of the period, was a royal drama, dimly supposed to be getting itself up in Poland at this time. Nothing known about it for certain; much guessed. "Something in the rumor!" nods this wig; "Nothing!" wags that, slightly oscillating; and gazetteers, who would earn their wages, and have a peck of coals apiece to glad them in the cold weather, had to watch with all eagerness the movements of King August, our poor old friend, the Dilapidated-Strong, who is in Saxony at present; but bound for Warsaw shortly,—just about lifting the curtain on important events, it is thought and not thought. Here are the certainties of it, now clear enough, so far as they deserve a glance from us.