Have mercy, Your Majesty—have mercy!
KING.
I'll talk to you later. As for you, Conrad Eckhof, I know that is your name—I will tell you what your punishment shall be. You are discharged from the army that serves under my glorious flag, discharged in disgrace. But you are not to be honored by being sent to a convict company or into the worthy station of a subject. Listen to the fate I have decreed for you. A troop of German comedians has taken quarters in the Warehouse in the Cloister street. These mountebanks—histriones—are in straits because their clown—for whom they sent to Leipzig, has not arrived. You are to take off the honorable Prussian uniform and to join this group of mountebanks, sent there by me, as a warning to every one. You are to become an actor, a clown of clowns-and henceforth amuse the German nation with your foolish and criminal jokes and quips. Shame upon you!
ECKHOF (with a grateful glance to heaven, trying to conceal his joyful excitement).
An actor! Oh, I thank Your Majesty for this most gracious sentence. Conrad Eckhof will endeavor to do honor to himself and his despised new profession.
[Goes out.]
KING.
And as for you, my Lady Sonnsfeld, you may, the sooner the better, pack up your belongings and be off to Dresden where my cousin, the Elector of Saxony, has need of just such nymphs and graces for his court fireworks and his ballets.
SONNSFELD (going out, speaks aside).
In his anger he chooses punishments that can only delight any person of refinement. [She goes out.]