From "dear Countess and adorable friend," he quickly leaps in his letters to "my dear Wilhelmine." He looks forward with the impatience of a boy to seeing her at "that terrestrial paradise which is called Naples, where we shall enjoy perpetual spring and spend delightful days in listening to the divine Paesiello. Do you know," he adds, "I passed two hours of real delight this morning in simply contemplating your elegant bedroom where only the elegant sleeper was missing."
"It is in Crocelle," he writes a little later, "that you will make people happy by your presence, and where you will recuperate your health, regain your gaiety, and forget an Irishman; and a holy Bishop, more worthy of your affection, on account of the deep attachment he has for you, will take his place."
In June, 1796, this senile lover writes, "In an hour I depart for Germany; and, as the wind is north, with every step I take I shall say: 'This breeze comes perhaps from her; it has touched her rosy lips and mingled its scent with the perfume of her breath which I shall inhale, the perfume of the breath of my dear Wilhelmine.'"
But these days of dallying with her legion of lovers, of regal fêtes and pleasure-chasing, were brought to an abrupt conclusion when news came to her at Venice that her "husband," the King, was dying, with the Royal family by his bedside awaiting the end. Such news, with all its import of sorrow and tragedy, set the Countess racing across the Continent, fast as horses could carry her, to the side of her beloved King, whom she found, if not in extremis, "very dangerously ill and pitifully changed" from the robust man she had left. Her return, however, did more for him than all the skill of his doctors. It gave him a new lease of life, in which her presence brought happiness into days which, none knew better than himself, were numbered.
For more than a year the Countess was his tender nurse and constant companion, ministering to his comfort and arranging plays and tableaux for his entertainment. She watched over him as jealously as any mother over her dying child; but all her devotion could not stay the steps of death, which every day brought nearer. As the inevitable end approached, her friends warned her to leave Charlottenburg while the opportunity was still hers—to escape with her jewels and her money (a fortune of £150,000)—but to all such urging she was deaf. She would stay by her lover's side to the last, though she well knew the danger of delay.
One November day in 1797 Frederick William made his last public appearance at a banquet, with the Countess at his right hand; and seldom has festival had such a setting in tragedy. "None of the guests," we are told, "uttered a word or ate a mouthful of anything; the plates were cleared at the hasty ringing of a bell. A convulsive movement made by the sick man showed that he was suffering agonies. Before half-past nine every guest had left, greatly troubled. The majority of those who had been present never saw the unfortunate monarch again. They all shared the same presentiment of disaster, and wept."
From that night the King was dead, even to his own Court. The gates of his palace were closed against the world, and none were allowed to approach the chamber in which his life was ebbing away, save the Countess, his nurse, and his doctors. Even his children were refused admittance to his presence. As the Marquis de Saint Mexent said, "The King of Prussia ends his days as though he were a rich benefactor. All the relations are excluded by the housekeeper."
A few days before the end came the Countess was seen to leave the palace, carrying a large red portfolio—a suspicious circumstance which the Crown Prince's spies promptly reported to their master. There could be only one inference—she had been caught in the act of stealing State papers, a crime for which she would have to pay a heavy price as soon as her protector was no more! As a matter of fact the portfolio contained nothing more secret or valuable than the letters she had written to the King during the twenty-seven years of their romance, letters which, after reading, she consigned to the flames in her boudoir within an hour of the suspected theft of State documents.
A few days later, on the night of the 16th of November (1797), the King entered on his "death agony," one fit of suffocation succeeding another, until the Countess, unable to bear any longer the sight of such suffering, was carried away in violent convulsions. She saw him no more; for by seven o'clock in the morning Frederick William had found release from his agony in death, and his son had begun to reign in his stead.
At last the long-delayed hour of revenge had come to Frederick William III., who had always regarded his father's favourite as an enemy; and his vengeance was swift to strike. Before the late King's body was cold, his successor's emissaries appeared at the palace door, Unter den Linden, with orders to search her papers and to demand the keys of every desk and cupboard. Even then she scorned to fly before the storm which she knew was breaking. For three days and nights her carriage stood at her gates ready to take her away to safety; but she refused to move a step.