FREDERICK THE GREAT. FROM THE PAINTING BY CARLO VANLOO. THE YOUTH OF FREDERICK THE GREAT BY ERNEST LAVISSE PROFESSOR AT THE SORBONNE, PARIS TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY MARY BUSHNELL COLEMAN CHICAGO S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY 1892 Copyright, 1891 By MARY BUSHNELL COLEMAN 3$733-b R. R. DONNELLEY & SONS CO., CHICAGO THIS TRANSLATION IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF MY FRIEND AND INSPIRER, MRS. CHAPMAN COLEMAN, THE SUCCESSFUL TRANSLATOR OF MUHLBACH'S HISTORICAL NOVELS OF "FREDERICK THE GREAT." awToaa AUTHOR'S PREFACE. Nature, who has prepared certain countries and constructed birthplaces for nations, did not foresee Prussia. In fact, there does not exist a geograph- ical Prussia either as a race or region: Germany is the daughter of nature, but Prussia was made v by men. In 1713, a man began to reign at Berlin, who was born a military monomaniac. It pleased this sov- ereign of eighteen hundred thousand poor subjects to have as strong an army as that of Austria, that is to say, of an empire of more than twenty million people. This passion regulated the thoughts, habits, and life of Frederick AVilliam I. As it was a morbid and restricted mania, it was sufficient unto itself, and required no exterior manifestations. The King- Sergeant loved his army as Harpagon his treasure; his eyes delighted at the sight of his battalions as the miser's hands at the fluent contact of the gold pieces. Harpagon took his gold from the coffer only to contemplate it; when the regiments of Frederick William left their garrisons it was for display at grand reviews; they returned to them immediately. VI PREFACE. T}iis king had, it is true, good reasons for not ven- turing his military capital in enterprises; besides, he had a religion, the fear of God and the fear of the devil. The desire of gaining a few " shovelfuls of sand" caused him to commit sins of cupidity, but his Christian conscience and his scruples as an honest man would have recoiled if an 'occasion for some bold infamy had presented itself. This king died in 1740. Another succeeded him, at the same time alike and yet unlike; 1 alike in methods of governing, in making and saving his gold pieces, in regulating the increase of his army by that of his finances, and by his sedulous attention to details; unlike in ability for decisive action, in power and genius manifested in action; in con- tempt for all human and Divine law, and in the serenity of this contempt. In 1740, a conjunction was formed of a power, the Prussian army, of a resolute man to make use of it, Frederick II. and of an unforeseen event which opened the way for this power and this man: this opening was the Austrian succession. It de- termined the whole destiny of Prussia. In place of Frederick William I., who created the power, put a king like Frederick I., an en j oyer of a royal dignity, that was expended in magnificent fetes and ostentatious ceremonies: you suppress Prussia probably; assuredly you prorogue it. Place, after the King-Sergeant, an honest, mediocre man, PREFACE. VI] or, simply, an honest man: Maria Theresa inherits the paternal succession guaranteed by a number of clear and authentic treaties, and Prussia does not rise from third to first in rank. The whole course of history is changed. Frederick William I. and Frederick II. collabor- ated equally in forming the character and physi- ognomy of Prussia. The f athe r was an a utocr at by Divine right, a priest as well as a soldier and a king, a man of order and of prayer. He bent the bodies and souls of his subjects; he moulded them, body, and soul, into an attitude, into a uniform. The son was one of the most liberal-minded m en 1/ that ever existed, a s oldi er also, but. at the same time a man of letter s ; an autocrat, but a philosopher. Military and intellectual Prussia the Berlin of barracks and schools, where the university neigh- bors the arsenal, where the statue of Humboldt faces that of Blucher emanated from Frederick William, the King-Sergeant, and from Frederick the Great, the King-Philosoph er ; and barracks, univer- sity, arsenal, statues of philosophers and marshals sprang up around and in the shadow of the king's palace. A singular power, made up of liberty in thought and discipline in action, where the boldest concep- tions are given life within line, and remain there. The principal interest of the history of Frederick's youth, is that it points out to us the struggle of Vlll PREFACE. contrary elements, the fusion of which was to con- stitute Prussia. From the time that Frederick reached manhood until the day, when forced into an unwilling marriage, he became master of his own household, "far from Jupiter and his thunder," the father and son were in continual strife. They were conscious only of their dissimilarities. Except in rare moments when they caught a glimpse of the justice they owed each to the other, they hated and despised each other. The son desired the death of his father; the father promised a munificent reward to the messenger who would bring him news of the death of his son. Neither knew the value of the other, nor that they worked, each in his own way, the one as necessary as the other, to " decide," as Frederick would say, the uncertainty of the birth of Prussia. I have related in detail the history of Frederick's youth up to the time of his marriage, which eman- cipated him. 2 I have been induced to do this by reading preceding works upon this subject, 3 but principally through the study of valuable docu- ments, letters and orders of the king, letters of the prince, official or secret correspondence, memoirs, authentic accounts by eye witnesses of the chief events, and official reports of the courts, that were permitted to relate day by day, and, during the most trying moments, hour by hour, the incidents of this strife between father and son. PREFACE. IX I have, also, studied from other documents, the places where the drama was enacted. I imagined I could see it revived in the Palace of Berlin, at the Wusterhausen, and at the foot of the rampart at Custrin. In the great mass of detail, perhaps I may have erred in some few instances; but my conscience tells me that I have searched for the truth, and I hope I have found it in the essential points, that is to say, in the character of the two principal per- sonages, and the motives of their conduct. I have taken great pleasure in my task. At every turn, I met with words, phrases, gestures, actions, that we can hear or see repeated at the present time. I have observed, in passing, that such an order of William II., addressed to the officers of his army, such a speech pronounced by him at Konigsberg, and which excited so much provocation in Russia, were mere reminiscences of Frederick William, but there must be left a part for the reader to do in the work which was written for him. In seeing revealed the minds and morals of the two sovereigns by a hundred anecdotes, sovereigns who have made the little Kingdom of Prussia such a great military State, to-day master of Germany and a prevailing power in Europe, perhaps, reader, you may wonder if these minds and morals, of which the effects have developed in concentric circles, will rule enlarged Prussia, Germany, and X PREFACE. Europe for a long period of time. The first circle formed in the water by a stone that is thrown into it, has the clearness of a relief; the relief dimin- ishes as the circles multiply and enlarge; at a little distance farther on the water retains its natural tranquillity. In history all power has its limits more or less contracted; the strongest is often of the shortest duration, and the most exposed when it passes beyond the bounds of its primitive sphere to the reactions which destroy it. Eenest Lavisse. CONTENTS. Preface, v Bibliography, xiii CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD. Birth. Grandfather. Accession of the Father, - 1 The Governess; the First Masters; the Preceptor and the Sub-preceptor, 7 Instruction to the Preceptors, - - - - 20 The Germs of Conflict Between Father and Son, 33 CHAPTER II. THE FATHER OF FREDERICK THE GREAT. The Ideas and Modes of Government of Frederick William, - - 45 The King's Government, 61 The Creation of Prussian Power, - - - - 67 The Inaction of the King of Prussia, - - 75 The Individuality of Frederick William, - - 95 The Pleasures of Frederick William, - - 101 Acts of Violence, Folly and Despotism, - - 113 Frederick William's Religion, .... 120 CHAPTER III. THE CONFLICT BETWEEN FATHER AND SON. First Symptoms and Causes of the Conflict, - - 128 The Mother of Frederick, 135 The Eldest Sister, ------- 142 Mother, Daughter and Son, - - - - " 1^6 The Projects of Marriage for Frederick and Wil- HELMINA, 151 The~King and the Projects of Marriage, - - 158 xi Xll CONTENTS. The Prince's Party, 162 The Preceptor's Farewell. Forbidden Pleasures, 170 The Autumn of 1728 at Wusterhausen, - - 177 The Resumption of the Marriage Negotiations, - 186 The Mission of Sir Charles Hotham, - - 199 CHAPTER IV. THE ATTEMPT AT ESCAPE AND THE PUNISHMENT. The Flight and the Arrest, 221 The Examination, 236 The Judgment, - - - 260 The Justice of the King, - 272 The Execution of Katte, ------ 277 The Pardon of the Prince, 288 CHAPTER V. THE SECOND EDUCATION OF THE CROWN PRINCE, The First Six Months in the Chamber of Adminis- tration, - 304 The Royal Visit, 314 The New Regime of Life, 318 The Marriage of Wilhelmina, .... 332 The Crown Prince at the Marriage of His Sister, 346 The Last Days at Custrin, 353 CHAPTER VI. THE MARRIAGE OF FREDERICK THE GREAT. The Intentions of Austria, - 369 The Declaration of the King, 375 The Double Play of the Crown Prince, - - 382 From the Betrothal to the Marriage, - - - 388 The Anglo-Austrian Intrigue, .... 400 The Marriage, - 406 CHAPTER VII. Conclusion, 421 Notes, - 427 BIBLIOGRAPHY. DOCUMENTS CONSULTED. Political correspondence in the archives of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of France, documents upon Prussia, years from 1725 to 1733, vols. LXXXIII. to XCVI. Beitrag zur Lebensgeschichte Friedrichs des Grossen, wel- cher einen merkivurdigen Brief wechsel ilber den ehemaligen Aufenthalt des getachten Konigs zu Custrin enthdlt, Berlin, 1788. Brief e Friedrich des Orossen und seiner erlauchter Bruder Prinzen August Wilhelm und Heinrich von Preussen aus der Zeit von 1121 bis 1162 an die Gebruder Friedrieh Wilhelm und Friedrich Ludivig, Felix von Borcke, Potsdam. 1881. 4 JJrkundenbuch zu der Lebensgeschichte Friedrich Wilhelms I., second part of vol. II. of Dr. Friedrich Forster's book, Fried- rich Wilhelms I. Konig v. Preussen, 3 vols., Potsdam, 1734-35. The third volume of this work comprises the Nachtrdge Zum ersten Bande, and the Nachtrdge zum zweiten Bande, in which is found a great number of the documents referred to in this book. Works of Frederick the Great, 30 vols., Berlin, 1846-1857, vols. XVI. to XXVII. JJrkundenbuch zu der Lebensgeschicte Friedrichs des Gros- sen, by J. D. E. Preuss, five parts, Berlin, 1832-4. In the sup- plement to the first part, which is inserted in the second, is found the Briefweschel Friedrichs des Grossen mit seinem Vater (1730-1734). Memoirs of Frederica Sophia Wilhelmina, Margravine of Baireuth, 3d edition, Paris. 5 XIV BIBLIOGRAPHY. Vollstdndige Protocolle des Kopenicker Kreigsgerichts ilber Kronprinz Friedrichs, Lieutenant von Katte, von Kait, u. s. w., Berlin, 1861. AUTHORS CONSULTED. Bratuscheck, Die Erziehung Friedrichs des Grossen, Ber- lin, 1885. Due de Broglie, Frederick IT., and Maria Theresa, 2 vols., Paris, 1883. Carlyle, History of Frederick II. of Prussia, 6 vol, London, 1858-65, German translation of Neuberg and Althaus, 6 vol., Berlin, 1858-69. Cramer, Zur Geschichte Friedrich Wilhehns I. und Fried- richs II., 2d edition, Leipsic, 1833. Droysen (J. G.), Friedrich Wilhelm, Konig von Preussen, 2 vol., Leipsic, 1869; in the Geschichte der preussisschen Politik, by the same author. Fassmann, Leben und Thaten des Allerdurchlauchtigsten und Grossmdchtigsten Konigs von Preussen Friederici-Wil- helmi, Hamburg and Breslau, 1735. Forster (cited above when mentioning the Urkunden- buch zu der Lebensgeschichte Fr. W. I.) Fontane, the second part of the Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (das Oderland Barnim-Lebus) 4th edition, Berlin, 1889 Koser, Friedrich der Grosse als Kronprinz, Stuttgart, 1886. Kramer, Neue Bietrdge zur Geschichte August Herman Francke's, Halle, 1875. Pierson, Konig Friedrich Wilhelm I. in Den Denkwur- digkeiten der Markgrdfin von Baireuth, Halle, 1890. Preuss, Friedrichs des Grossen Jugend und Thronbesteig- ung, Berlin, 1840. and Friedrich der Grosse mit seinen Ver- wantden und Freunden, Berlin, 1836. Ranke, Zwolf Biicher preussischer Geschichte, 5 vols., 2d edition, Leipsic, 1878-79, vols. XXV-XXIX of the Sdmmtliche, Werke. BIBLIOGRAPHY. XV Raumer, Prenssen von Jahre 1730 bis 1740, Friederichs II. Jugendzeit, to the vol. I. of 3d part, Leipsic, 1839, from the Bei- trdge zur neueren Geschichte, ans dem britischen und franzo- sischen Reichsarchive. Waddington (Albert), The Acquisition of the Royal Crown of Prussia by the Hohenzollerns, Paris, 1888. Weber (Von) Von berliner Hofe water Konig Friedrich Wilhelm I. in Aus vier, Jahrhunderten, Mittheilungen aus dem Haupt-Staats Archive zu Dresden, Neue Folge, 2 vol. Leipsic, 1861. THE YOUTH FREDERICK THE GREAT CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD BIRTH THE GRANDFATHER ACCESSION OF THE FATHER. XpREDERICK THE GREAT was born in Berlin, -J- January 24, 1712, to Frederick William, Crown Prince of Prussia, and Sophia Dorothea of Hanover, during the reign of his grandfather, Frederick, the first Hohenzollern who wore the royal crown. * His maternal grandfather, George, Elector of Hanover, was the heir of Queen Anne of England, whom he succeeded in 1714. At the time of Frederick's birth, the Houses of Brandenburg and Hanover were in the enjoyment of great prosperity ; to the one it had come, by the other it was with pleasure anticipated. During the eleven years that he was king, Frederick I. was unwearied in admiring and celebrating his royal dignity. He arose very early in the morning that he might have a longer time to enjoy the pleasure of being king, and officiated P '^lEDEIilCK THE GREAT. until evening. There was majesty at the council, at table, in the smoking-room ; majesty in the presence of the qeeen. His garments were fastened with buttons of gold and diamonds, and his perukes came from Paris. When he traveled from place to place, it was in great pomp. His journeys by land were long, slow, magnificent processions of coaches. A boat from Hol- land or a gondola bore him upon the water. He spoke of himself and of the queen, his wife, with circumlocu- tions of etiquette, enveloping in solemnity his name, as well as his person. He was not a wicked man, on the contrary, he was a good husband, and a good father to his family. 6 He kept a mistress, only to imitate Louis XIV. through a professional point of honor. The birth of Frederick was welcomed by him with more than usual pleasure, as two of his grandsons had already died at an early age. It was rumored in Ber- lin that they had been victims of the contingencies of royalty, neither one being able to bear, on his bap- tismal day, the noise of the cannons and firecrackers, the weight of the silk mantle, the diamond insignia of the Black Eagle, and the golden crown in which he was arrayed. In reality, the poor little things died a very ordinary death from teething. So King Frederick watched with anxiety for the first tooth of little Fritz. This child appeared to him to be born to a glorious destiny, because his birth took place in January, that is to say, in the month of his own coronation, at Konigsburg, eleven years before. He desired that the baptism should be celebrated before CHILDHOOD. 6 the end of the " month of coronation," and that his grandson should be called Frederick, "the name of Frederick having always brought good fortune to his House." January 31st, the child, crown on head, clothed in a robe of silver tissue, studded with diamonds, the train of which was held up by six countesses, was carried to the chapel of the palace, under a canopy supported by a princess and two princes. The king, also, under a canopy which was supported at the corners by four chamberlains, its silk pendants held by four knights of the Order of the Black Eagle, awaited him. The godfathers and godmothers represented were the Em- peror, Czar Peter, the States-General of Holland, the Canton of Berne and the Elector of Hanover, the Em- press Dowager, the Electress and the Electress-mother of Hanover, the Duchess of Brunswick and the Dow- ager Duchess of Mecklenburg. The States-General sent, among other baptismal presents, a gold box, con- taining a deed of annuity of four thousand florins. All the bells of the city, three salvos of cannon, as well as drums and trumpets, announced to the people of Berlin that the world counted one more Christian. The cortege in procession re-entered the apartments between files of Swiss and a body-guard. 7 Fritz showed a desire to live. His grandfather saw with pleasure how bravely he drew the breast. His teeth came very quickly, six at the end of six months, and without causing him the least inconvenience. "One can see in this," wrote Frederick, "a kind of predes- tination. May God preserve him to us a long time yet." 8 4 FREDERICK THE GREAT. It was the grandfather that God did not preserve a long time to the grandson. Frederick I. died Feb- ruary 27, 1713. The child, who had received at birth the titles of Prince of Prussia and of Orange, became the Crown Prince. The new king, Frederick William, had manifested from childhood a violent aversion for ceremonies and luxury. One day, when quite a small child, curled, powdered, clad in a gala costume, he hid himself in a chimney, whence he was pulled out, black as a chimney-sweep. He threw a brocaded night-robe into the fire, soon after it was tried on him. The sight of the big perukes made him furious. Finding some courtiers in his father's antechamber, warming them- selves, with their heads thrown back, so as not to scorch their beautiful periwigs, which had cost them 200 thalers, he forced them to throw their wigs into the fire. Another time, they picked up at the foot of the staircase a maitre cle la cour whom he had kicked to the bottom. He was extremely parsimonious, and kept an exact account of his receipts and expenditures, in a faultless register, on the first page of which he had written: "Redlining iiber meine Ducaten, Account of my Ducats." "Miser," exclaimed his mother, "and at so tender an age ! " But no remonstrance corrected it. Magnificence gave him nausea, and prodigality ) fits of rage. After having received the last sigh of his father, Frederick William left the chamber of death, passed through the crowd of weeping chamberlains, pages and people of the Court, and shut himself up in CHILDHOOD. 5 his own apartments. After deliberating there a short while, he requested the Grand-Marshal, Von Printzen, to bring him the " Court Register." He ran over the list of dignitaries, servitors and pensioners, seized a pen, and made a great mark from top to bottom, saying that he would do away with them all, but wished each one to remain at his post, until after the funeral ceremonies of his father. Printzen came out, saying not a word, but he had so troubled a look upon his face, that one of the courtiers, the best pro- vided with titles and functions, Lieutenant von Tettau, Chamberlain, Chief of the Body-guard, Governor of Spandau, Knight of the Black Eagle, stopped him, and took the paper out of his hands. He saw the big mark. "Gentlemen," said he, "the king our good mas- ter is dead, and the new king sends us all to the devil." All of the long-peruked crowd were present May 2, 1713, at the obsequies of Frederick I. The son wished to have his father interred, as he had lived, with great pomp. The ceremonies lasted more than two months. The body remained eight days in state, upon a bed of red velvet, embroidered in pearls, enriched with crowns and golden eagles ; upon his head was the crown ; upon his shoulders, the mantle of purple and ermine; on his chest, the Grand Cordon and Order of the Black Eagle ; at right and left the scepter and the sword. The chamber, hung with violet Velvet, was illuminated with a profusion of wax candles. On March 4, the body, clothed in cloth of gold, was placed in the coffin, and carried to the palace chapel, which was transformed into a Castmm doloris. On the second of 6 FREDERICK THE GREAT. May, between lines of regiments nearly all the Prus- sian army was there the funeral cortege proceeded to the cathedral. Behind Count Dohna, the gen- eral who held the standard, the new king advanced, enveloped in a long mantle of mourning, the train of which was carried by the grand equerry, the entire Court following. In the church, transformed into a mausoleum, the wiiite marble statues of the Hohen- zollern Electors of Brandenburg were placed around the catafalque, as a guard of honor for the first of their descendants who had attained to the distinction of roy- alty. Pictures and inscriptions recalled the principal virtues of the deceased. The solemn service ended, Frederick William himself ordered the salvos. Then he returned to his own apart- ments. He had given a rare proof of filial piety in prolonging the ceremonies two months. It was a great relief to him when he had interred this ceremonial life with his father, and saw dispersed the grand officials, the chamberlains, the pages, the twenty-six drum- mers and trumpeters, who announced all the move- ments of the king, the musicians of the royal chapel, and the hundred Swiss 'guards clothed in silk, velvet and gold. The useless ones, who did not ex- change the gold key for the pistol, or pumps for the boots of a cuirassier, went " to the devil." The pearls, precious stones and diamonds were sold to pay the debts of the late king, who was always sadly in need. Then Frederick William commenced to live the life of a well- to-do civilian, economical to avarice, ordering his house- hold himself, keeping a strict account with his cook. CHILDHOOD. Thus two months had not elapsed before he had levied two new battalions of grenadiers. 9 jm OVEKXESS THE FIRST MASTERS THE PRECEPTOR AND THE SUB-PRECEPTOR. Frederick William wished his sons and daughters to be educated, not as princes and princesses, but as chil- dren of simple folk. He intended that the inheritors of his crown should be otherwise dealt with, than the young king Louis XV., whose least gesture and act the journals related to the world, and whom the Emperor called "the child of Europe." 10 As unassuming as he was, however, the King of Prussia could not refuse to give his son a governess, and at the proper age a pre- ceptor and a tutor. He had been educated by a French-woman, Madame de Montbail, for whom he always had an affection- ate remembrance, perhaps on account of the many bad tricks he had played her. So he wished that Madame de Montbail (she had become Madame de Rocoulle) should educate his children, and he there- fore appointed her "governess of the royal prince and princesses." The royal princesses were, at that time, in 1714, Sophia Frederica Wilhelmina, two and a half years older than the prince, and Char- lotte Albertina, a year and a half younger. Madame de Rocoulle was to give the children religious instruc- tion, and teach them to read the Bible. The same year, while the King of Prussia was at the siege of Stralsund, he noticed a young cavalier who seemed pleased to place himself where there was the most dan- 8 FREDERICK THE GREAT. ger. The king had this young officer presented, while in a trench, by Count Dohna, who was acquainted with him, for he had confided a part of the education of his own son to him; Frederick William engaged him to be, at the end of two years, the informator of the prince. This young man called himself Jacques Egide Duhan ; like Madame de Rocoulle, he was French. Installed in his functions, in 1716, he had to " explain maps to his pupil, teach him the history of the last hundred years and no more, then the history of the Bible, but, above all, calculation." Finally, when the prince was just attaining his seventh year, the king appointed his old preceptor, General Count Fink von Finkenstein, tutor, and Colonel von Kalkstein sub-tutor. ll Little did the King of Prussia think that he was doing a grave thing in confiding the education of his son to these two groups of persons, whose ideas were so opposite, the French refugees and the Prussian " officers. Said Frederick the Great later, "It is rare that one takes a tutor from a trench." It is rare, in fact, and very Prussian. Frederick William had as professional masters very grave men ; among them, Frederick Kra- mer, a learned philologist and jurisconsult, who, one day, becoming offended at a jesting discourse of Father Bouhours upon this theme: "Is it possible for a German to have wit?" replied by a dissertation en- titled: "Vindication of the Germanic name against certain Gaul detractors of the Germans, Vindicice nominis Germanici contra, quosdam Germanorum obtrec- CHILDHOOD. 9 tatores Gallos." The king, who was not a pedant, and who loved not dissertations, hastened to obtain for the informator of his son, a cavalier. He did not know that this cavalier was a man of more learning than his Kramer. Jacques Egide Duhan de Jandun 12 was born at Jandun, in Champagne, the year of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. His father, former secretary of Turenne and former Counselor of State, left France in 1687, and went to Berlin, where he became secretary of the Great Elector. He undertook the education of his son himself, and did not send him to the "Gymnase Fran- cois," then recently opened. He taught him the lan- guages, classical literature, history and rhetoric. The paternal lessons were supplemented by those of La Croze and De Naude. Naude left Metz in 1685, the same day that they closed the last Protestant church in that city. Arriv- ing in Berlin in 1687, he gained a livelihood by giving lessons in mathematics ; after that he gave instruc- tion in mathematics, first, in the College of Joachims- thal, afterward, in the Academy of Arts. But his favorite study was theology, upon which he brought to bear the strength of his mind as a geometrician. He composed two volumes upon evangelical morals. 13 La Croze had been a monk ill the monastery of St. Germain-des-Pres. In 1693, tormented by conscientious scruples, he fled to Bale and made a profession of Pro- testantism. Berlin attracted French refugees in great numbers : the nobles were assured of finding a place in the army or at the court ; the magistrates, in the 10 FREDERICK THE GREAT. tribunals ; the men of letters, in intellectual offices, where they had but little to fear from native compe- tition. La Croze went then to Berlin, where he was put in charge of the Electoral Library, which became the Royal Library three years afterward. He was himself a library, "a regular storehouse," said Fred- erick later. His memory was prodigious. One day, before Leibnitz, he recited twelve verses in a dozen different languages, after having heard them but once. No question surprised him : he had an answer for everything. Whenever he was asked for information, and referred to a book, he gave the edition and page. In addition to his native language, he spoke fluently, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and German. He understood Latin, ancient and modern Greek and Hebrew. He learned the Slavic, Basque and Oriental languages, and among them, in order to please Leibnitz, Chinese. He was not a profound philologist; he had neither the taste nor the time to penetrate into the genius of the languages that he studied, because he was of an inquisitive mind, and learned, simply because he could not refrain from learning everything he saw. He knew, in the same way, philosophy and history. All his learning manifested itself in his conversation; without cessation, he discoursed, narrated, cited and recited. He told droll stories in the tone of a psalmodi-st, for this ungarbed monk still showed the cut of his frock. 14 Duhan de Jandun, the father, La Croze, and Naude, were indirectly Frederick's masters, since they edu- cated his master. Moreover, the prince knew La Croze and Naude, as he had often seen and heard them CHILDHOOD. 11 when a child. These three men were antoclidacts, and there is no better culture for minds born thought- ful and capable of study, than that which they give to themselves ; for school, with its precise rules and hieratic customs, does not allow enough play to the intellect. It is true that all times are not propitious for the free exercise of personal education. But the eighteenth century offered such admirable facilities for the expansion of free effort! In our day, only the greatest intellects acquire an entire science, master and classify it in the concourse of knowledge : the others, in the throng, dwell painfully upon the detail, which continually increases and multiplies, hiding the science from them, like the trees that prevent one from see- ing the forest. Toilsome lives serve out their time in little corners of the intellectual domain. In the eight- eenth century this whole domain was exposed to view : it could be surveyed with ease. Inquiry was univer- sal and truly philosophical. The men of that time, to whom an extensive reading gave, together with great literary, historical, and scientific culture, the il- lusion of believing that they knew everything that could be known, lived in a continual intellectual fete that the world will never see again. -r The childhood of Frederick was thus confided to FrencK people. It is true that they were exiles. The opinions that they brought with them were not those of the majority of their nation, which had, alas ! wel- comed with Te Deums the persecution of these her- etics. Calvinism had marked them with its grave impress, which had frightened and rebuffed a people naturally gay. ^vfr 12 FREDERICK THE GREAT. A gentler influence was exercised over the soul of Frederick by his governess. She, too, had sacrificed her country for her religion. Widow of M. de Mont- bail, and still young, she took her family to a foreign country, the day after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, at a time when an exodus was not without peril. This courageous woman had also mind. She spoke her language prettily and knew how to turn a verse well. It seems that she was not afraid of an amusing joke, even if it was a little broad. She knew how to hold a salon, a rare thing in Berlin. 15 It was at the Court itself, that she found a refuge, near Sophia Charlotte, wife of Frederick I., who so little resembled her husband. The gazettes of the time state that nature lavished upon this princess charms of both body and mind. Sophia Charlotte was gay and -artless, and she had a bewitching way of making game of her solemn husband. The day of his coro- nation, in all that pomp of pomps, she drew forth her snuffbox and took a pinch of snuff. And yet she was serious, and religious, with that charming restless- ness of a woman philosopher, abhorring the unknown. Pier religion and her philosophy enlightened each other, but neither the one nor the other, nor the two united, pretended to possess the full light. So her curiosity was never satisfied; unceasingly, she demanded of her friend Leibnitz the why of whys, that he could not answer. She loved the arts, as well as philosophy, and music above all. She had also a taste for poetry. 16 The memory of Sophia Charlotte had that particular charm of a queen who had made herself beloved. CHILDHOOD. 13 Her name recalled the brilliancy of the old court, and its intellectual life. It evoked a past entirely different from that uncouth, strange present, in which they lived under the reign of Frederick William I. Madame de Rocoulle kept fresh in the minds of the children of Prussia the memory and the sayings of the good queen. 17 Frederick's eldest sister would have liked to be called Charlotte, and would have desired nothing so much as to resemble her grandmother. Frederick must have often heard his governess speak of this lettered, philosophical, and musical queen. And, finally, when one seeks to recognize all the vague w T orld of influences which surround and pene- trate the soul of a child, one should not neglect this little fact : during the thirty years that she was in Ger- many, Madame de Rocoulle had never learned a word of the language. She remained purely French. General Fink and Colonel Kalkstein 18 were men of culture, the latter particularly ; he was to have his part in the education of Frederick. But the king chose them both for their virtues as soldiers. Kalkstein was thirty-six years old when he was ap- pointed tutor to the prince. He had made his first venture at arms in the service of Hesse Cassel. Freder- ick William had known him in the Netherlands, when, as Heir-apparent of Prussia, he was serving his military apprenticeship under Prince Eugene. Kalkstein distinguished himself in the battle of Mal- plaquet. He joined the Prussian army as volunteer, during the campaign of Pomerania, in 1714, and the king had taken him into service in the capacity of lieutenant-colonel. 14 FREDERICK THE GREAT. General Fink was sixty years old ; a veteran of the European wars. Born in Prussia, of a very old family, which was established in the time of the Teutonic Order, he was seventeen, when he entered, as volunteer, the army of the Prince of Orange. He served in the campaigns of 1676 and 1677 against France, and was wounded and taken prisoner. In order to regain his liberty, he accepted the offer of passing into the French army, and fought against the Spaniards on the Pyrenees frontier. He then became an officer of some note, and was known to Louvois. Peace concluded, he obtained permission to go into Brandenburg and make recruits. The Great Elector graciously welcomed him: "Your father," said he, "was my chamberlain, and an honest man ; he broke his leg on my account. One day, at Cleves, I desired to enter the castle by passing over a plank ; he wished to see if it was firm, and he broke his leg. . . Conduct yourself well, and, if it pleases you to enter my service, I will take care of you." Fink returned to France, but soon left it, as did most of his compatriots, when the war of the Coalition of Augs- burg broke out. He offered himself to the Great Elector. As he had been captain in the French army, he passed to the rank of major in that of Brandenburg. Until the Peace of Ryswick, he fought in the cam- paigns on the Rhine, always distinguishing himself. During the War of the Spanish Succession, he almost attained renown. At Hochstedt, in August, 1704, it was he, perhaps, who assured victory to the Coali- tionists by the disposition that he made of the right wing of their army. He was then a general, and the *A KX^ CHILDHOOD. 15 Crown Prince Frederick William's preceptor. He took the Crown Prince with him to the Netherlands, and was one of the heroes of Malplaquet. To recompense him for his services, the Emperor, upon the proposition of Prince Eugene, named him Count of the Empire. Frederick William, on his accession, showed him all the favor of which he was capable. Fink accompanied his new master in the Pomeranian campaign. As preceptor of Prince Frederick, he represented to this child war considered as the profession of nobles, war loved for itself, and sought for everywhere, as the chevaliers of old sought it in the crusades and in adventure. This profession of arms was not en- tirely confined to one nation. The royal and imperial armies and those of the United Provinces were filled with foreigners. The common soldier is a kind of workman in military corporations, who makes his tour of the world, and stops where the trade is flourishing, that is to say, where war, swooping down and fastening upon some rich country, is capable of nourishing its artisans. As soon as the country is impoverished, the news is spread abroad, and they say that war is "played out" in Flanders, or on the Rhine, or in Lombardy. It is then necessary to pay the soldier more. In this league the nobleman exercises the right of going from place to place. He has no scruples in changing camp, provided he does not fight face to face with his prince. Taken by the French in Flanders, where he fought against them, he will serve them in the Pyrenees, against the Spaniards. His prince does not become angry with him ; on the contrary, he praises him for his 16 FREDERICK THE GREAT. bravery, and, if the officer takes orders again under him, he retains the rank he acquired in the opposing camp. At that time Europe presented a strange picture of in- ternational advancement for these military noblemen. These officers were true men of war, who had served under all the illustrious chiefs, and had observed the diversity of their temper and genius. Fink had known the Prince of Orange, Luxembourg, Louvois, Prince Eu- gene, Marlborough, to name only the most celebrated, and in the greatest actions of the gigantic struggle where the fortunes of Ancient France were crushed, he could say: "I was there, and such a thing happened to me." Fink of Finkenstein and Kalkstein had been chosen from the Pleiades of Prussian warriors. The Court, if one could so call the persons around Frederick William, was full of officers, so tightly laced in their short coats that they were almost ready to suffocate. The cham- berlains whom the king had retained were four generals. His dining and smoking apartments were open, through preference, to the veterans of the battles of the Rhine and Danube. A very rude, half-barbarous company, to say the least, uncouth ; eating, drinking, smoking and talking with him. The principal personage was Leopold, reigning Prince of Anhalt-Dessau, as noble as the Emperor and^e^- King of Prussia, and even of older nobility, for his ancestor, Albert the Bear, Margrave of Brandenburg, played his role in the great affairs of Christianity, in the time of Frederick Barbarossa, when the Hohenzoll- erns, and Hapsburgs, too, were but mites in the dust of CHILDHOOD. IT small dynasties that overran the Empire. Leopold's family was closely allied to the royal family of Prussia. From his palace to the Palace of Berlin was but a day's journey by post. As he was not a person to fall asleep in his peruke in some little imitative Versailles, he en- tered the service of Prussia. He also had learned war, by war. He had made his first venture at arms with his cousin, William of Orange ; sieges, skirmishes, bat- tles, he loved passionately. During the War of the Spanish Succession he was at Blenheim, in the right wing, under the orders of Prince Eugene. In the midst of the general confusion of the Austrian cavalry he remained firm, attacking, recoiling, maneuvering, send- ing forth volley after volley, until Marlborough, who was victorious on the left wing, came to his aid. He was at the Cassano bridge, " during the heaviest fight- ing I ever saw," said Prince Eugene ; for hours he remained in the river with his infantry, which was partly destroyed. At the attack of the lines of Turin, in 1706, he was the first to leap into the entrenchment. As the French remained steadfast at their post, and the combat was prolonged, Anhalt, dying of hunger and thirst, stepped to one side for a moment ; he caught sight of a cap- tain : "Ami wounded?" "No, Your Highness!" "No? Then have you something to drink?" He swallowed a glass of brandy, then a piece of bread that a grenadier gave him, and returned to his post. He was also at the siege of Stralsund and at Mal- plaquet. The Prince of Anhalt was skilled in the science 18 FREDERICK THE GREAT. of war. It is said that it was he who invented the marching in step, and the iron ramrod. He constantly studied tactics, and he carried to great perfection the drill a la Prussian. He had been the principal collaborator and inspirer of Frederick William ; he proposed reforms and tested them ; the king renewed the experience and decided. When these two men found it impossible to be together, they corresponded in short letters like business men. Leopold was, like the king, an administrator as well as a soldier ; good economist, he knew that it was through " careful man- agement" that the soldiers were paid. He increased more than their gross value the revenues of his little principality. A peculiar persfbn but yet agreeable, when it so pleased him, with princely manners, knowing- how to speak French as well as a native, indeed even how to converse, but ordinarily disdaining to be gracious. His religion resembled that of the Reiters of the fifteenth century. He sung the Psalms to the tune of the " March of Dessau." On the field during action, he said, with head bared, a short prayer. He called Luther's hymn, "A Mighty Fortress is Our God," "The March of the Dragoons of Our Lord." Contemner of forms and established customs, this prince of the Empire married an apothecary's daughter, to the great scandal of the country at large. His fame and ,his victories obtained from the Emperor the recog- nition of Fraulein Fos as a legitimate princess. The whole personality of Anhalt was expressive. He was tall, bony, hairy, and- wore a heavy mustache on his clear strong lip. He had an open eye, and a pene- CHILDHOOD. 19 i trating look like all observing people. His face, discolored by gunpowder, was framed in a solid jaw. His physiognomy was full of determination, of resolu- tion, and seemed to say: "Let come, what will." It was that of a man of strength, a servitor to the wishes of a master who employed himself in forging this strength. 19 / Fink, Kalkstein, Anhalt, on the one side ; on the other, / French refugees : these are Frederick's teachers, these *^the environments and influences at work upon his youthful mind. The former are war veterans, the latter, martyrs to the faith, who sacrificed honors, fortune, country (and such a country!) to the service of God. The lives of all were lessons of heroism, but the officers were, according to the king's idea, his son's only instructors. Compared with them, the inform- ator^ Duhan, was a small personage, hardly visible. The object of the education being to make of him a chief of state, and a chief of war, the true masters should be the king's generals. The principal merit of Duhan was his brave conduct under fire of the Swedes : philosophy, science, letters, these the King of Prussia did not take into account at all. Frederick William did not know that he was going to put Minerva and Bellona into competition in the mind of his son. This Spartan did not burn the smallest grain of incense upon the altar of the goddess of Athens. Had he seen in Duhan all this vast world of thought and learning, he would have turned his head away, instead of having this young man presented to him in the trench at Stralsund. 20 FREDERICK THE GREAT. Without either the knowledge or the wish, he offered to his son the double education which accorded best with his nature and with the genius which slumbered within him. INSTRUCTION TO THE PRECEPTORS. According to custom, Frederick William remitted to the preceptors an Instruction upon the education of his son. He utilized the one that had been given to his own instructor, in 1695, by the king his father; but there were some corrections made, which were certainly from his own hand. Frederick I. used the majestic style of language as was his custom. 20 He began by thanking God for His kindness in giving to him an heir "to so many and such great countries," "to such magnificent coun- tries." He professed to be overpowered with the responsibilities imposed upon him, in the education of a prince, upon whom depended "the salvation and happiness of so many millions of men." He said in speaking of himself: "We"; of his wife and son, "our revered wife the Dilection, our well-beloved son." Frederick William divested the words of their flourishes. As his millions of subjects did not amount to two, he did not enumerate them. As his countries were not so magnificent, he struck out the epithet, and said "the countries," "all the countries." He wrote: "I," "My wife," "My son." The Instruction for 1695 may be divided into five parts : Moral and religious training ; intellectual train- ing ; training in deportment; physical training; pre- CHILDHOOD. 21 scriptions relative to the prerogatives of the preceptor, to the supervision that he must exercise over the prince, to the authority with which the king invested him. Frederick William retained these divisions but, in each one of them, he left out or added something. The chapter on intellectual training was abridged. Frederick I. had desired that his son should learn Latin, history with geography and genealogy, French and mathematics. Upon each subject he deduced his reasons. He feared, it is true, that the "Dilection of his son" would dwell too long upon themes and rules, experience having proved "that the humdrum of gram- matical exercises disgusted young princes with the beautiful Latin language"; but the study of this lan- guage appeared indispensable, because the Golden Bull decreed it, because Latin was employed in diplomacy by several powers, and finally because it was a great aid in an historical or political education. The king then ordered that his son should learn the rules, "as much as possible with pleasure and while playing"; that "the ephor," it is thus he named the preceptor of the Dilection, "should practice an agreeable Latin history" so that the prince would learn the history and the language at the same time. The said ephor must give his lessons in Latin, speak only Latin "in their walks or drives," and make the prince learn by heart aphorisms taken from the best authors, "which could be used on every occasion." Through this beautiful passage, as well as through the fine "State of the Court," Frederick William drew a long mark : " As for the Latin language, my son shall 22 FREDERICK THE GREAT. not learn it." Reasons he did not give, but as he foresaw that he might be questioned, he added : "I for- bid any one whomsoever to make remarks upon this subject." The Instruction for 1695 treated wisely of the stitdium historicum. It recommended giving the most time and attention to the history of modern times, particularly to that of Brandenburg and the Houses allied to the family of Prussia, but to commence also with an exposition of universal history, from the crea- tion of the world. It is very complimentary to history, ''that study preferable to all others, for it is both entertaining and edifying." The Instruction for 1718 cancels these compliments ; it forbids the study of " ancient history" otherwise than a passing glance {fiber hin)\ "but the history of our epoch, that is to say, of the last hundred and fifty years, should be pointed out in the most exact way, aufdas genaueste . . especially that of the reigning House" . . . For this purpose, "the library and archives will be open to the prince." Frederick William greatly desired that history should serve as matter for reflection upon the cause of events, and for discerning "that which had been well and that which had been badly done." But he meant it to be, above all, a preparation for the very affairs in which one day the prince would be occupied. The pupil would find in previous history contained in the archives, exact testimonies of a true history. The king, perhaps, was hoping that his son would show a pref- erence for the parchments wherein were inscribed the rights of the House with the largest inheritance. CHILDHOOD. 23 The article upon mathematics pleased Frederick William ; the point at issue being, principally, military mathematics which treat "of fortifications, the form- ation of a camp and other sciences of war." But on reading the passage again, he noticed this consideration ; that a prince "must be instructed, from childhood, in the calling of a general"; he wrote "in the calling of an officer and general," thinking it was not exactly congruous to make a baby, all at once, a general. However, as the main idea pleased him and it was, according to his notion, the essential one, he insisted: "They must inculcate in my son the veritable love for a soldier's life, impress him with the idea, that noth- ing in the world is more capable of giving a prince more glory than the sword ; that he w T ould be a despicable creature, on this earth, if he did not love this sword, if he did not seek in it and through it the only glory, die einzige Gloire." The Instruction for 1695 prescribed the study of the French language by exercises and by reading good French books. Frederick William added it was necessary "to see that his son should become accus- tomed to an elegant, concise style, in French as well as in German." Frederick I. had forgotten to men- tion German. He had also forgotten political economy and constitutional law, which Frederick William in- troduced in the place left vacant by Latin. The chapter on deportment was shortened, as one might expect. Frederick William consented that his son should be taught to converse well, to turn a gratulatio, or harangue an army, in order to excite it 24 FREDERICK THE GREAT. to vigorous action, to argue in Councils, to make a summary of advices, and pass judgment. But he suppressed here the word "eloquence," for it was sufficient that his son should learn to express himself "clearly and purely." He crossed out a solemn dis- sertation "on the decorum more suitable for a reign- ing prince than for any other human being," upon the proper ways of gaining obedience and love of subjects, and the necessary intermingling "of majesty and humanity." He simply said: "See that my son has good morals and befitting deportment, and agree- able manners, but no pedantry." There is almost complete accord in regard to physi- cal culture, requiring careful gradation, so as never to exceed the child's strength ; the same as regards the "honest recreations" of the pupil; but Frederick William did not wish these precautions to go so far as to enervate the body, for it must be inured to a hard life. As there was nothing he disliked more than laziness, he ordered them to imbue the prince^ "with the greatest possible disgust for this vice, one of the worst of all vices." He prescribed the most rigorous measures in regard to the "frequentations" of his son. The preceptors must never leave him alone ; one of them must always be with him, even at night. They should choose with care the prince's table companions. They must submit to the king the list of persons that they pro- pose admitting to the presence of his son. Concerning the dangers which may arise at the age of puberty, the king said calling things by their names, which CHILDHOOD. 25 will not bear repetition "Have a care! for I make you both responsible with your heads." To him, the religious and moral education was much the most important. Here he added, "Develop and form it at the same time." He did not content himself with a commonplace phrase upon the necessity of instructing his son in the fear of God, that being the only restraint capable of controlling princes, for whom the world has neither punishment nor reward ; but he commanded that his son should be educated with a horror of Atheism, Arianism, Socinianism and Catholicism, these he stur- dily qualified as absurd. He defined the faith to which he wished the prince to belong. The Protest- ant church was troubled with the quarrels of the Lutherans and Calvinists. The ambition of a few princes and thinkers like Leibnitz was to reunite the two sects; Frederick William passionately desired this reconciliation. The chief obstacle was a grave dog- matic dissentation; the Lutherans taught that salvation was accessible to all, that Christ died for all ; the Calvinists, that God predestined, from the beginning, a certain number of men to be saved, and others to be damned. The Lutherans were "Universalists," and the Calvinists, "Particularists." But there were Uni- versalists among the Calvinists ; Frederick William was of the number. He had in this, as in everything else, simple, practical reasons. He did not care about being damned in advance. He understood that the Universal- ist-Calvinists were nearer than the others in consenting to the wished-for union. And to sum up, the doctrine 26 FREDERICK THE GREAT. of predestination appeared to him dangerous for the State, because it suppressed the responsibility of the subjects. He forbade these teachers to preach to the soldiers, for fear they might believe themselves pre- destined to desert the ranks, and desert for that reason. He wished then that the prince should be educated in the true Christian religion, of which "the principal dogma is, that Christ died for all men." "You must not make him a Particularism" said he ; "he must believe in universal salvation." The counsels on morality are also much more prac- tical in the Instruction for 1718. The king intended that his son should be warned against certain extrav- agant vanities, operas, comedies and other worldly amusements : "Give him a distaste for it ! " He forbade flattery, under penalty of incurring " his greatest dis- pleasure." He commanded them to employ "every means imaginable" to combat with pride and arrogance. They must "accustom the prince to right management, economy, modesty, and have a care that he shall become a good economist, and learn by degrees all that is necessary in order to become so." The corrections made by Frederick William in the Instruction for 1695 rank him among the pedagogues who desire to make education a direct preparation for a practical life. The problem was fixed in his mind thus : Being given a child destined to the profession of king, over a certain country, Prussia, and at a given 'time in the history of this country, what must the child be taught? How to be King of Prussia, at this given time. Perhaps in other countries, the sons CHILDHOOD. 27 of kings, the Dauphins, the Princes of Wales, the Infantes, have the time to study discourses upon univer- sal history, to learn Latin, and to seek aphorisms in the editions of classics arranged for their use. It may be the proper thing to have them drilled in fine man- ners ; to behave with dignity at a small or grand levee is not a thing so natural that a training is not neces- sary for it, but, in Prussia, the king rises all alone, to the drum tap, and retires without ceremony, after having smoked his pipe. He is not a potentate like the Kings of England, France, or Spain. Being "a king in trust," as Frederick William said, he did not belong to the great in history, and had nothing in common with the Kings or Emperors of Assyria, Egypt or Rome. Herodotus, Thucydides, Titus, Livy, Tacitus, did not know the names of Pomerania, Silesia, Meck- lenburg, Juliers, Berg, and other countries over which the "House" had rights. They were ignorant even of the House itself. Of what use can they be? And their language ? How employ it in the army or in "economy?" A regiment is a regiment, not a legion ; a gun is a gun, not a pike ; a captain is a captain, not a centurion ; there is no word for colonel, and neither these Greeks nor these Romans knew anything about field-marshals. All this antique form is, then, cumbersome in its use- less ceremony ; it weighs down and burdens the mind, as the big peruke the movements of the head it over- heats and fatigues. A King of Prussia has need of a free mind and head. The late Frederick I. made a mis- take in wishing to have his crown prince educated like 28 FREDERICK THE GREAT. the son of a classic king. He had not meditated upon the fable of the frog who burst himself trying to get bigger. Hardly seated in his royal chair, than he showed in every way that he was entirely satisfied with himself. He did wrong ; he should have descended from his throne, walked, ridden, and worked in real life. The honor of being king creates the duty of pos- sessing a true kingdom, and it is a very weak presump- tion to believe that the name suffices, and that one has the right, because one is titled like Louis XIV., to wear the same peruke as he. Then down with the peruke, majesty, ceremony, universal history and Latin dis- course. The reform of the Instruction for 1695 emanates from the same source as the Court reform, and leads to the same end. All that the king judged useless he sup- ; pressed. He prescribed for his son's mind the simple tenor of work, which should be that of the king, the Court and all that old monarchy born but yesterday, and which has its fortune to make. For these same reasons the king took away all cere- mony from the life of the pupil. He himself had been overwhelmed with pedagogical ceremony. 21 In 1695, the day that his preceptor, Count Dohna, was installed, the Court assembled to listen to a lengthy dis- course by Fuchs, the Minister of State: "The swad- dling clothes of an infant born in the purple," said he, " inspire us always with a secret veneration, but often- times they cover a cruel Busiris instead of a magnani- mous Hercules ; a bloody Domitian instead of a humane and clement Titus." But Fuchs quickly modified this : CHILDHOOD. 29 " There can only come from the glorious blood of Bran- denburg and Brunswick a worthy successor of so many illustrious heroes, whose virtues have dazzled the whole universe." Then, pointing to the young prince: " These sparkling eyes, full of fire, this majestic and graceful bearing, do they not tell us in advance that a body so well formed must be animated by a mind better still ? This union of body and mind will combine in this prince, some day, the valor of a David, the wisdom of a Solomon, the clemency of an Augustus, the complais- ance of a Titus, so that he may be in his turn the de- light of mankind." . . . Frederick William, no doubt, had yawned during this fete of the inauguration of his studies. He hated metaphors. This realist had often spoken of the blue cloth of his soldiers, but never of the purple. He had been constrained to submit, from time to time, when he was a student, to examinations before the assembled Court, with the king sitting upon his throne. We have the ritual of one of these ceremonies, which lasted two days. " The first day," according to the pro- gram arranged by the ephors, "His Royal Highness will read from the printed and written German, write from dictation, solve a few arithmetical problems, read a French book selected by His Majesty, and relate in French the moral and the sense of a few fables. He will translate, from Latin into German, passages from the Orbis pictus, and from German into Latin, verses from the Bible. He will show what he knows of geography, confining himself to the map of Germany. The second day the prince will recite Latin sentences, 30 FREDERICK THE GREAT. until His Majesty bids him cease. He will be ques- tioned upon an abridgment of profane and sacred histo- ry, upon the history of Brandenburg, and the geography of Germany in its minutest details ; area of the country, latitude and longitude, rivers, provinces, principal cities ; the immediate States of the Empire, with the extent of their territories ; division of the Empire into circles, with their governors, etc." The program furthermore added that it was not necessary to mention the prayers, passages of Holy Scripture, Psalms and sacred hymns, as well as much other knowledge that had nourished the soul and formed the heart of His Royal Highness. They likewise made no mention of the military exer- cises, horsemanship, dancing, the harpsichord, the flute, everyone knowing that in these things His Highness was very proficient. These examinations had, doubtless, been insupport- able to the prince. He acquitted himself well enough, it seems, since the king rewarded him several times, count- ing out to him some bright ducats; but it is probable that the ephors added some of their own, and contrived to make His Highness shine. They had an eye to their own fame and interest. At the end of the program, in post-scriptum, they implored the blessing of God and the gracious continuation of the confidence of their Majesties. They give themselves the credit of the sus- cess attained, in saying that "His Royal Highness, fol- lowing the ordinary run of minds which promise much of judgment and solidity, had difficulty in learning." All this savored strong of the Court comedy. Freder- ick William replaced this ceremonial by weekly recapit- CHILDHOOD. 31 ulations. Saturday morning the prince was questioned upon the work of the week. If he had "profited," he was at liberty for the afternoon. If not, he had to go over again, during a study of four hours, that which he did not know. The King of Prussia was accustomed to leave nothing to chance, and had the gift of seeing in everything the detail in its exact order ; his greatest pleasure was to draw up regulations. Thus he methodized, minute by minute, the occupation of his son's days. 22 Sundays the prince must rise at 7 a. m. As soon as he puts his slippers on he must kneel by his bed and recite this prayer aloud: "Lord God, Holy Father, I heartily thank Thee for having mercifully preserved me through this niglit. In the name of Jesus, my Savior, make me obedient to Thy Holy Will, and keep me from committing, either to-day or ever, an action that will separate me from Thee. Amen." The prayer said, the prince, quickly, hurriedly (geschwind, hurtig) must bathe, powder and dress himself. For the prayer and toilet he must employ an exact quarter of an hour. He must breakfast in seven minutes. Then the preceptor and all the domestics shall enter. All must kneel and recite the Lord's Prayer ; they must listen to a reading from the Bible and sing a hymn. For this, twenty- three minutes. The preceptor must read, immediately after, the Gospel for Sunday, discourse upon it, and make the prince recite the Catechism. The prince must then be conducted to the king, with whom he will at- tend church and dine. The rest of the day is at his own disposal. At 9:30 p. m. he must bid his father 32 FREDERICK THE GREAT. good-night, enter his own apartments, undress hastily (geschioind), and wash his hands. The preceptor shall read a prayer and sing a hymn ; the prince must be in bed by 10:30 p. m. During the week, rise at 6 o'clock. The prince must not turn over in bed. He shall rise immediately (sof/leich), kneel and say the little prayer ; then quickly (geschwind) put on his shoes, and bathe his face and hands, but without using soap ; he shall dress in his jacket and have his hair combed, but not powdered. While they comb his hair, he must drink his tea or coffee. At 6:30 o'clock the preceptor and domestics shall enter; reading of the Lord's Prayer and a chapter in the Bible ; then the singing of a hymn. After- ward shall follow the lessons, to be continued from seven until a quarter to eleven. Then the prince must hurriedly (c/eschwind) bathe his face and hands, using soap for the hands only. He must be powdered and put on his coat, then enter the king's presence, there to remain from eleven until two o'clock. After this, the lessons must be resumed to be continued until 5 o'clock. The prince may then dispose of his time as he pleases until the hour for retiring, "provided he does nothing contrary to the will of God." The program ends with a last injunction to dress quickly, and always keep himself clean, "dass er propre und reinlich werde." Thus, the king had foreseen everything, ordered everything, from the manner of washing his hands, to the form of his belief, disregarding entirely the method of cultivating the mind. He desired that his son CHILDHOOD. 33 should be like him in everything, exact, diligent, prompt, practical, devout, and soldierly. He loved his boy. He used familiar expressions in speaking of him: "The rest of the day shall be for Fritz, vor Fritzen." He wished his son to love him. He, him- self, as a child, unquestionably had suffered much from the ceremonious reserve by which he was sepa- rated from his father, whom he greatly feared. He forbade them to inspire Fritz with any feeling of fear in regard to him. Of course, his son must be sub- missive, but not servile (sklavisch). The most impor- tant thing was, that the child should have confidence in his father, and look upon him as his best friend. In a first correction of the Instruction for 1718, the king had written, in order to define the kind of affec- tion he desired, the words "Fraternal love." 23 He con- sented to have his son stand in awe of his mother, but not of him : "Make him fear his mother but not me." And he was convinced that all was for the best, in the best of possible educations. In all good faith, he believed that a mind could be maneuvered like a regiment, and that a soul would yield itself to cultiva- tion at will, just as an estate is worked for its products. THE GERMS OF CONFLICT BETWEEN FATHER AND SON. Those who had known Frederick William as a child, Mme. de Rocoulle, for instance, must have been sur- prised to find how slight was the resemblance between Fritz and his father. When Frederick William came into the world he was very robust. His grandmother, the Electress of Hanover, who was in Berlin at the 34 FREDERICK THE GREAT. time of his birth, admired the strong structure of his limbs. From the age of four, he was a formidable youngster. One day, while they were dressing him, he tore a buckle from his shoe, and put it into his mouth. When they wished to take it away from him, he swal- lowed it. His mother uttered cries that would have "melted rocks"; his father, majestic as he was, came near losing his senses. The physicians, however, pre- scribed a purgative and the buckle is on exhibition in a glass case, at the Hohenzollern Museum, in Berlin. In growing up, he acquired a taste for malicious pranks, some of which I have already related. He was ex- tremely brutal. They had to bring him back from his grandparents of Hanover, where he had been visiting, for while there he had unmercifully beaten his cousin, the future George II. of England. He detested this cousin all his life. One day, they had to tear him away by force from the Prince of Courlande, whom he held by the hair. He did not have one good quality, nor the least coquetry of a child who desired to please. He fled from ladies, blushed, when out of respect they kissed his hands, and, when he had to speak to them, he never said anything agreeable, to the great despair of Sophia Charlotte, who had found that "affection refines the mind and polishes the manners." He was a coarse little savage. 2i "Little Fritz," said his sister Wilhelmina, "had a very weak constitution. His taciturn humor and lack of animation gave just cause of fear for his life." He had several diseases during his infancy ; he became stronger as he grew up, but always looked very delicate, CHILDHOOD. 35 with an air of sadness about him, thinking a long while before answering. He was moreover, an amiable child, earnestly beloved by the household, and, with the exception of some little temper, had an " angelic disposition." Wilhelmina tells us that he learned slowly, but that signified unquestionably that certain things were distasteful to him, or that he had the dis- tractions of a youthful mind that regarded other things through natural preference. Other witnesses eulogized his good qualities, and the incredible facility he had of learning everything he wished to learn. He adored his sister Wilhelmina, his elder by nearly three years, whose precocity everybody praised, for she had all the manners of a full-grown young lady ; she was lively and sensible, and loved her brother. "My only diversion was to see my brother. No attachment ever equaled ours." 25 They were both pretty; Pesne has painted them together : Fritz (who was about five years old) is in a low-necked velvet dress, with the Grand Cordon and Star of the Black Eagle ; he wears a hat with a long plume. His right hand holds a drum- stick, and is raised with a gesture which signifies : Forward ! He looks at his sister as though to urge her to advance. Wilhelmina wears over her dress of a Marchioness a la Watteau, a velvet mantle with a long train. She looks you in the face ; one hand gathers up a loose bunch of flowers in the fold of her mantle ; the other, resting upon the drum, stays the hand of Fritz from beating it. She is truly the big sister who guides the little brother. From both heads fall blonde curls. Fritz has a firmer chin, but if their clothes were 36 FREDERICK THE GREAT. exchanged, it would be difficult to tell the boy from the girl. There was then in Fritz a delicacy, a fine distinction of nature, which his father did not foresee, and which he never saw, perhaps. However, the Crown Prince only gave at first, cause for contentment to the king. He played soldier very well. He was barely six years old when his father organized for him a "company of Crown Prince Cadets," composed of one hundred and thirty-one children, selected from several cadet schools. The effective force was increased little by little ; the company became the "Crown-Prince-Royal-Battalion of Cadets." This was a nursery of future heroes for the wars of the great reign ; they had sowed in it nothing but the best grain ; squires, sons of squires ; soldiers, sons of soldiers. These pigmies composed, in minia- ture, a model troop. They learned the art of renounc- ing all personal movement, to assimilate themselves into this toy machine accurately and neatly, and to make their little maneuvers in perfect unison. Fritz first drilled in the ranks, commanded by Instructor Rentzell, a big boy of seventeen. Afterward he himself commanded. He had the honor of being reviewed by Czar Peter and by his grandfather, the King of England, who admired him very much. In 1721 the king gave him for his birthday present a little arsenal, installed in one of the rooms of the palace at Berlin. " Dites que mon berceau f ut environne d' armes " (Say that my cradle was surrounded by arms), wrote Frederick later. The father, in fact, had placed them everywhere. CHILDHOOD. 37 It seemed that Fritz had made an effort to be agree- able in everything to his father. We have the letters that he wrote then: For the first, which was in 1717, his hand was guided ; he wrote the second all alone, for which reason he begs the king to keep it as a souvenir. It is a pretty communication of a little officer. The prince submits "the list" of his company of cadets. He returns thanks for a new cadet who has been sent to him ; he hopes that this recruit will soon grow up and take a place one day in the famous battalion, in which Frederick William admitted none but giants. He gives a report of his company, which had executed the ma- neuvers so well and "made such good shots that it was impossible to do better" ; for this success he gave them a tun of beer. That must have gone straight to the king's heart. 26 The "dear papa," who was a great hunter, was to learn also with joy that his son had killed a hare and shot his first partridge. But the fol- lowing must have given him more pleasure than all. In 1720 Fritz composed in French a little piece entitled: "The Way the Prince of a Great House Should Live." 27 "He must be noble-hearted, belong to the Reformed religion, fear God in a certain way, not like people who do it for money, or for the world. He must love his father and mother ; he must be grateful. 1 ' He must love God with all his heart, for, when one loves Him, one does everything to please Him. He must not make long prayers, like the Pharisees, but (un petit) a little one. He must thank Jesus Christ for His kindness in crucifying Himself for us, poor sinners. He must never renounce the Reformed religion, and in his 38 FREDERICK THE GREAT. illnesses consider that God has sent them to us, to re- mind us that we are sinners; and we must not think, I am not sick, I can vanquish God, for it is necessary always to think, I am a sinner. He must not love a thing too much, he must be obliging, civil, speak with all men. When one knows how to do well and does not do so, this is a sin. He must act as it is in the Ten Commandments, not to steal, to keep one's self pure, and to think always, all that I do well comes from God. He must never think evil ; all evil that comes into the mind comes from the devil. He must think of the passage of Scripture that says : ' Be sober, be vigilant ; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour ; whom resist steadfast in the faith.' " Oct. 4, 1720. Friedrich." " Note well," said Kalkstein, concerning this compo- sition, of which he had made a copy from the original, "that H. R. H. the Crown Prince of Prussia, wrote this on the morning of the 4th of October, according to his own impulse and without having communicated this design to anyone whomsoever, at the age of eight years, eight months and eleven days." 28 He assures us that he had "neither added to nor taken out a single letter." However, he must have at least corrected the orthogra- phy, for the prince, a long time after this date, spelled in such a way that it was difficult, at first reading, to comprehend his meaning. It is evident, besides, that the child only repeated his lessons of religious in- struction, and probably word for word. It is a curious thing, however, that the first writing of Frederick the Great should have been this : " The Way the Prince of CHILDHOOD. 39 a Great House Should Live." "May God," said Kalk- stein, "confirm him in these pious sentiments, that are truly beyond his age." This also was the cherished wish of King Frederick William. Meanwhile, during the daily lessons, in the tete-a-tetes with Duhan, little by little, without anyone perceiving it, a work was going on, entirely different from these exercises of the little soldier and young Christian. The education of the prince overstepped the limits the king prescribed. Duhan did not deliberately disobey the in- structions that he received ; but, in spite of himself, he amended, retrenched, and added. He corrected the let- ter by the spirit. The king, as soon as he perceived this, tried to bring Duhan back to the letter. He had ordered that Fritz should learn history from the Theatrum JEuropceiim, a collection of volumes in folio, with maps, plans, illustrations, where the facts were enumerated year by year, from 1617. This was a repertory enor- mous and indigestible. Duhan arranged it so that the. prince should not lose himself in it. "I purpose," said he in a note to the king, "to spare His Royal Highness the trouble of reading this long work, by gathering up for him the most remarkable events, according to the exact order of the book." The king wrote on the margin, "All the events" Duhan added that he would put the prince " in a way to reason upon the events every time the king would notify him to do so. However, His Highness had no need of learning anything by heart, unless it was the names of the most celebrated persons, the principal battles, sieges and summaries of the treaties of peace." In a marginal note the king re- 40 FREDERICK THE GREAT. plied: " He must learn by heart, for that will form his memory." 29 Propositions and responses show the conflict of the two minds ; the king did not care about general consid- erations ; the philosophy of history was not to his taste. He desired facts, facts, and facts only. But, if the preceptor had obeyed the king, the prince would have had to learn two or three volumes in folio each year. Duhan certainly did not put him to this torture. The preceptor ended his note by saying that it would be well to repeat from time to time an outline of the history of Brandenburg. "Good," wrote the king; "but the history of the Greeks and Romans must be abolished ; they serve no purpose. " Here it was in vain for the master to desire not to disobey the king ; the sacrifice of antiquity was beyond his strength. To-day, we who have lived a century longer, a century sur- charged with events, ideas and sentiments, more potent than all, a century which has regenerated the opinions of man upon himself and upon all matter ; we who feel clearly that one destiny ends and another begins, that the present gives birth to the future, have no longer the leisure to look into the past. Antiquity will keep the graces of its arts and the charm of its eternal and simple wisdom some time yet for the initiated, then it will vanish into oblivion. A hundred years ago it was the light of the world. All cultivated men fed their intellect upon it. It was there they found the perfection of form and thought, the types of virtue and vice, the expressions of joy and sorrow ; the morale of the " honest man," as they said, was a reminiscence ; a maxim, a citation. CHILDHOOD. 41 The envious was called Zoilus ; the ugly, Thersites ; the triumphant hero, Achilles ; the unsuccessful hero, Hec- tor. Marathon and Zama were the combats of yesterday; Pythagoras, Solon, Numa, inimitable models of law- makers. Classical Mythology was reduced to one of a thousand human ways of expressing the thoughts and dreams of men ; not the best, nor yet the most pro- found. Scholars as well as poets reveled in it, familiar with all its ideality and its pretty detours. Not to make his prince acquainted with the Greeks and Romans was, of course, impossible to Duhan, utterly impossible. The classics, consequently, often became the topic of conversation between tutor and pupil. Du- han's most plausible pretext was, perhaps, the reading of Telemachus. 30 Frederick William had no objection to this. When a child, he had read this book with his mother, who explained it to him. Sophia Charlotte thought to find in the study of this calm work, so deeply imprinted with Hellenic serenity, a means of polish- ing her savage boy. She would walk with her son, in the park at Charlottenburg, Telemachus in hand ; read, explain, and question. She even wrote out her questions and Frederick William's answers. He spoke like a sage of Sesostris, of Pygmalion, the good Min- ister Narbas, the bad Minister Metophis, and expressed his admiration for Telemachus' strength in fleeing from the beautiful Eucharis. This edifying dialogue between mother and son prefaced the edition of Fenelon that Duhan and Frederick read together. Now Telemachus is a hero, exalted to virtue and glory, according to the maxims of ancient wisdom. This reading must 42 FREDERICK THE GREAT. have transported the imagination of Fritz far from the Spree and Havel, his company of cadets, giant recruits, and the history of Brandenburg, Brunswick and Hesse. It is very difficult to study antiquity without know- ing the ancient languages. Duhan tried, they say, to scheme. A royal prince, heir to an electorate, must read the Golden Bull, which was one of the consti- tutions of the Holy Roman Empire of the Germanic nation. It showed the privileges of the Seignior Elec- tors ; the places assigned to them in the imperial cortege ; in the imperial sittings ; in the festive hall, where the Emperor dined, crown on head; and, upon this basis of ceremonies, was painted in relief the anarchy of old Germany. Duhan contrived to have this venerable document explained to the prince. He imposed this duty upon an assistant teacher, but as ill luck would have it, the king entered his son's apart- ments, during the course of one of the lessons : < ' What are you doing, there, you rascal ? " he demanded of the teacher. "Your Majesty," responded the poor man, "I am explaining to his Highness the Golden Bull." "Just wait," replied Frederick William, "I will Golden Bull you," and he raised his cane. Thus ended the instruction in Latin. Fritz however secretly learned a few of the elementary principles, which enabled him later to make some very queer citations, it is true; for, by the side of: O temporal O mores! and Dominus vobiscum, which are correct, we find, in his collection of aphorisms, a Meatus pauperes spiritus, a Compille intrare, a De gustibus non est disputandus. CHILDHOOD. 43 which proves, according to Frederick William, that in order to learn how to reign and conquer, Latin is not necessary. Frederick read in translations the masterpieces of classic antiquity, for he was a great reader. He said later that, his sister Wilhelmina having made him i ' ashamed to neglect his talents, he set himself to reading." He commenced with romances : " I obtained Pierre de Province (this was a Provencal romance trans- lated into French). They would not have consented for me to read it ; I hid the book, and, when my pre- ceptor, General Fink, and my valet slept, I went into another room, where I found a lamp in the chimney. I crouched down, and read." 31 Behold a pretty scene of a child reader, wherein is revealed one of Frederick's ruling passions which gave him so much pleasure, and even whiled away his greatest hours of tribulation. But in this way the child learned to taste forbidden fruit. At the hour when he was reading, the order was to sleep. The king would not have permitted this infraction of discipline, no matter if the secret read- ing had been that of the Theatrum PJuropceum. He w T ould have forbidden many other things besides, if he had known of them. He did not see expanding in his son's mind an ideal totally different from the "practical" that he intended to impose, neither the growing pleasure of secret disobedience, contradiction and opposition. One fine day however, all kinds of vague indications of a manner of living, displeasing to him, will open up before his eyes. He will ask himself, "What is going on in this little brain?" 44 FREDERICK THE GREAT. Accordingly as he divines what is "going on," he will become disturbed, enraged; in the end, he will rejoice. Before relating the quarrel between father and son, we must become well acquainted with the personality of Frederick William, of which we have just caught a glimpse. Let us see him in the State, in his family, and in the familiarity of daily intercourse. In this wise, we shall begin to discover the cause and character of a conflict, where the Crown Prince, vanquished by his father, learned that he was born, not for letters, but for action and command. CHAPTER II. THE FATHER OF FREDERICK THE GREAT THE IDEAS AND MODES OF GOVERNMENT OF FREDERICK WILLIAM. XpREDERICK WILLIAM had but few ideas, and -*- so simple were they that nothing more could be added; to wit : "A king needs to be strong; in order to be strong, he must have a good army ; in order to maintain a good army, he must pay it ; in order to pay it, he must raise the money." Outside of this he had a unique and original conception of his functions ; he considered the King of Prussia an ideal and perpetual being, of whom he, Frederick William, was but the servant: "I am," said he, "the General-in-Chief and the Minister of Finance of the King of Prussia." This mystic conception of his office had this very practical result ; viz. : he did not believe himself authorized to enjoy royalty ; he administered it in his master's behalf. All his life he worked under the eye of this master, whom he knew to be redoubtable. Prussia was not a nation. It was a union of territo- ries, separated from one another, spreading from the Rhine to the Vistula, from the Baltic toward the mountains of Bohemia, having neither the same memo- rials nor the same customs, united by the result of a few marriages and the fortuity of a few deaths. It is true that this union had been in existence and these countries 45 46 FREDERICK THE GREAT. under a common ruler for a century. The predecessors of Frederick William had destroyed provincial liberties in the Rhine countries, as well as in Brandenburg and Prussia. There remained very little for him to do in order to establish his sovereignty (the word is his) "like a rock of bronze, wie einen Hocher von Bronce" But he ruled over a species of inert matter. His subjects had no zeal for any public undertaking, of which they had not even a conception ; that rested in the king aloner** The future of Prussia was in the mind and will of the m Sovereign. ^ Frederick William made this mind and this will felt everywhere. It is always in action, on the scene, to the front. It is not an institution that operates ; it is a person in flesh and blood, fashioned in a certain mold, whose voice we hear and whose hand we feel, a hand armed with the sword of justice on great occasions, and a stick on minor ones. This character, so "personnel," lives not in the abstract. For him, the ministry, the administration, the army, are definite individuals, minis- ters, counselors, officers, that go by such and such names, and must do such and such things. The royal domain is composed of estates of such a quality or of such a defect, situated in such a place, for which the farmer, Jack or Peter, pays or does not pay his rent. Without interposition of general ideas, of acquired cus- toms, of wheel-work that turns for the pleasure of turn- ing, of means to produce ends ; without restraint of decorum, of majesty, of velvet, of silk gloves that pre- vent the hand from touching the pie, Frederick William attacks the practical and manipulates the concrete. THE FATHER. 47 His father left him an army of some thirty odd thousand men. It was a suitable number, rather large even, for a kingdom that had only two million subjects. He wished to have at least eighty thousand soldiers. His father, his grandfather, all his predecessors had received foreign subsidies ; they had taken money of all effigies, louis, sterlings, and florins : he, however, made it a point of honor to pay his expenses, only n money duly and rightfully gained by him. So it ecame necessary to improve the kingdom in such that it would bring forth more each year. To e "a surplus," as he said again and again, ein ^ machen, everything depends upon that: "Whoever \y$) disposal of ready cash commands both the civil and military service, and by augmentation gains the respect and the admiration of the world." His whole principle of government, 32 his whole manner of living is shown in a decree, which should be placed among the great documents of history, for it has produced results, or rather, a single result the power of Prussia. He composed this decree about the last of December, 1722, after a retreat to a hunt- ing lodge. For a long time the king was discontented with the general system of administration. The State had, at that time, her chief revenues from two different sources: First, revenues domanial, which comprised tillable lands belonging to the crown, products of the forests, mines, salt-works, posts, customs, rights of transit and stamp-duty ; second, war revenues, of which the principal ones were the contribution, direct impost levied upon the low countries, and the excise, indirect 48 FREDERICK THE GREAT; impost, collected in the cities. The war revenues were controlled in the provinces by assemblies called War Commissariats, which reported to the General Com- missariat of War ; and it reported to the Chamber of Administration which was controlled by the General Directory of Finances. These two Administrations had a hundred occasions of contradicting each other, and they never allowed a single one to pass. They were constantly at law ; a press of affairs was sus- pended, and the king, in the confusion of these chican- eries, could not find out the exact state of his finances, by which he wished to regulate the expense of his army. He resolved to unite these opposing bodies, and to teach them, in clear terms, their duty. For several days, he reflected, in his retreat at Schonebeck : then, taking up a pen, he wrote a first plan of instruction. He applied himself vigorously, taking a pride in doing it so well, that no one could counsel him to add the least thing. He then set out for Potsdam, where he had one of his secretaries, Thulemeier, called, and ordered him to make a copy of his manuscript: " Come to-morrow," said he, "with some strong paper, and some black cord mixed with silver. We will have two days work on it." But the two days did not suffice ; the king dictated, then had that read to him, corrected it, then had it read again and corrected. At last the 19th of January, 1723, the members of the General Commissariat of War and those of the General Directory of Finance were called to the palace. Not one of them knew for what purpose. Ilgen, a (& V^V^-^M THE FATHER. 49 minister, began by reading a royal mandate, in which they were rebuked for their follies and errors: "The two assemblies know how to do nothing but oppose each other, as if the Commissariat General and Chamber of Administration do not likewise belong to the King of Prussia. The Commissariat has lawyers paid from my purse, to plead against the Finance, consequently against me. The Finance, to defend itself, has lawyers also paid from my purse. It is time to put an end to this work of confusion." Consequently, the members of the two bodies were informed that they were united into a single body, "the General Superior Directory of Fi- nance, War and Administration, General-ober-Finanz- Kriegs-und- Domdnen- Directorium." They were then led into a hall prepared for them ; Ilgen indicated to each one his place, and, standing before the portrait of His Majesty, read the Instruction. After that he conducted them to the king, who received their oath " to work, as much as it was humanly possible, in the service and for the welfare of His Royal Majesty, particularly in the augmentation and improvement of all kinds of revenues, and at the same time for the preservation of the subjects, in the low countries as well as in the cities, and, per contra, to avoid and foresee all that might be injurious to his said Majesty and to the Royal House, to the country and the faithful subjects." 33 Here are the two principles : Increase of revenue, and preservation of subjects. The king insists upon this in the Instruction. "Every one knows the formidable con- sequences of badly taken measures and too heavy taxes, which enervate the people and render them incapable of 50 FREDERICK THE GREAT. furnishing integrally to the sovereign the customary prestations." It is necessary, then, to watch over the preservation and prosperity of the cities, villages, and the low countries, and to impose no tax too heavy for the people to bear. Third principle : The public taxa- tion shall be equally distributed among all ; the contri- bution shall be taxed " after the cadastre of which they shall always keep themselves thoroughly informed." From the excise no one shall be exempt: "We will pay it, we and our Royal House. All conveyances from ours to the lowliest peasant shall be taxed ; " for the burdens of State "must fall equally upon all shoulders." These are about the only general ideas to be found in this document. They are worth the trouble of repeti- tion, for they express a whole philosophy of State. It was not a fiscal ordinance that Frederick William wrote in his hunting lodge ; it was a chart, a great chart of a monarchy, of a particular kind in which the monarch is coalescent with State, like the God of Spinoza with na- ture. Understand well that these are not empty formu- las that Frederick William has written ; they are truths. He had a horror of vain declarations and principles "that are lost in wind and blue vapor." With great conciseness he described the new organi- zation. The Directory was divided into Departments, each one of which was presided over by a minister. The Departments had no special function to perform ; the monarchical territories were distributed among them ; the affairs of these territories, of whatever nature they might be, were referred to them. The king wished that the counselors should understand all about these affairs. THE FATHER. 51 " Some will say : ' We are only competent for affairs of commerce and manufacture, and know nothing of agri- cultural economy. ' Others will say : ' We comprehend agricultural economy, and know nothing about the rest.' . . . To these we respond: 'We have chosen men intelligent enough to speedily inform themselves upon all these subjects. They have but to work zealously to direct their attention to all the affairs, to gain informa- tion and enlightenment; one will be a school for the other. A clever, zealous man, who, after God, esteems nothing more than the favor of his king, whom he serves through love and honor, not for recompense, and who has a horror of all intrigue, will soon render himself skillful enough to serve us in all things. Nevertheless, we are going to put you to the test. We will take ad- vantage of this opportunity to send a counselor, compe- tent in agricultural matters, to establish manufactures and control the excise ; if he does not administer these affairs with address it will fare badly with him.' "... The work of the Directory, the apportionment of the duties, the methods of decision were regulated with the greatest care ; the responsibilities were pointed out in strong terms. The king stated who should be responsible, according to the case in question, and, as he called the ministers and counselors by name, these Instructions had the character of a very curt menace: "For example, if there is any negligence in the first Department, Von Herold, Manitius and Yon Thiele will be held responsible. As 'a word to the wise is sufficient' there is no reason to believe that they will act differently." 52 FREDERICK THE GREAT. The first duty was promptness. All ministers and counselors, without a written permission from the king, who arrived an hour late, should forfeit a hundred ducats ; if they missed an entire sitting they forfeited six months' salary ; in case of a second offense, they were to be dis- missed cum infamia, for, "if we pay our counselors, they must work." The sittings were to convene at 8 o'clock in winter, at 7 in summer, and continue until the order for the day was exhausted. If the business was not finished by 2 o'clock, half of the members should dine, while the other half continued to work ; those who had dined should return to their places immediately and the others should replace them at table ; < 'for it is necessary that our service shall be done with zeal and fidelity." Every day at 11 o'clock, the steward must ask the usher of the Directory if the members were going to dine. "At 2 o'clock, lie shall serve a good soup, a good dish of fish, a good roast of beef, mutton or veal, and a quart bottle of good Rhine wine, to each person. The bill of fare shall not always be the same. It must be varied, having a care, that each time there shall be four good dishes as well prepared as those of His Majesty. For serving this, there shall be but one lackey, for it is not neces- sary to have the room filled with lackeys. Each guest shall immediately receive four plates and a glass ; he must put the soiled plates in a basket placed near him." 34 Behold these practical sentiments ! These are real people in flesh and blood, like the king, who are there under his surveillance, and who are going to work at once without any preamble or ceremony. THE FATHER. 53 Nothing simpler, moreover, than the work prescribed for them to do : increase the power of the production of the kingdom, so as to increase the revenues of the king. The country does not yield all that it can. All the losses incurred during the Thirty Years' War have not yet been repaired. The king found, in the old registers which he consulted, the names of villages that had entirely disappeared. Since then, war again, and other scourges had made other depredations. During the last years of the preceding reign a pestilence had car- ried off a third of the inhabitants of Prussia, and three- fourths of the population of Lithuania. These vacan- cies these Wiiste Stellen, the sight of which made Fred- erick William ill must be filled. They must build up the villages of the 17th century and repeople the de- serted cantons. The peace that the kingdom was then enjoying insured a superaddition of births ; but this natural repeopling was slow, and Frederick William was very impatient. They must, then, make subjects of foreigners ; his Prussia was the asylum for all who fled from religious persecution, or who came to seek their fortunes through labor. He did not content himself with merely receiving them ; he summoned, cared for and humored them. To put some one where there never had been any one before, was to create ; the king thus applied himself to ameliorate. He did not refuse his farmers any " repairs" ; if it was necessary to build, he built ; to make a clearing, he made a clearing ; to drain a marsh, he did that. This work of increasing the value of his kingdom, upon which he expended an incredible amount of energy, he recommended to the Directory, but 54 FREDERICK THE GREAT. he took the precaution not to be deceived. He could not bear the idea that a thaler, a pfennig even, should be stolen from him or misused. He exacted absolute regularity in the accounts, for money escaped through the slightest disorder. Neither did he wish that the farmers to whom a new building was granted should build it themselves, then retain out of the rent of the lands the sum expended. "For in- stance," said he he loved to exemplify and give pre- cision to his thought by examples "Farmer Lursten, of Kopenick, owes a rent of 500 thalers. They ask him why he does not pay it. He answers that his ex- pense for building counterbalances it, and that the Chamber of Administration is indebted to him. An- swers like this arrive from all the countries. This must be changed ; the farmers must not be occupied in any- thing but cultivating the soil. They will pay their quarter's rent without deducting a farthing, for we will not receive accounts and paper for money. Each Chamber of Administration shall have a master architect, who shall have charge of constructions, and a superin- tendent of the building, who shall pay the workmen. The master shall watch over the superintendent ; one of the counselors of the Chamber will keep an eye on both of these ; the whole Chamber shall look after all three. If, notwithstanding these precautions, they secretly blow in the same horn, then they are a lot of rascals." The founding of the colonies cost very dear ; the king who "swallowed" this expense, as he said, " spoon- ful by spoonful," felt the bitterness of it, but he realized its necessity. So he resolved to continue THE FATHER. 55 this colonization, but he varied it from year to year. There was in the arrangement of it something unique and extraordinary. The king did not like these * < Flic Flac expenses." He wished to regulate them even to the minutest detail. He set aside a certain sum, that must not be exceeded by a farthing, Besides, he did not approve of making any but good invest- ments ; the propositions for opening of credits should be very cautiously dealt with: "Not to build farms or villages, unless 10 per cent, on the capital employed, could be realized." Frederick William put his old and new subjects in a condition to work : this was his duty. Make the present subjects do theirs, by working well, that is to say, in obtaining from the ground all that it can produce by proper cultivation, without uselessly spend- ing a farthing. "They have but to take example from the king" said he: "Upon our little estate of Schenken, which we cultivate ourselves, and where we have learned things by experience, not from books." Thus the population of the kingdom will increase from day to day ; agricultural implements will be improved ; new territories will be brought under culti- vation; the peasant subjects of the King of Prussia will produce more each year. Then, they will pay the farm rents and the contributions. The citizens, as well, must pay their excise, and, in order to do that, industry must be promoted in the cities, like agricul- ture in the country. Here again, fill up the Wiiste Stellen, which are numerous, make and remake, con- struct and reconstruct. "My cities of Prussia are 56 FREDERICK THE GREAT. in a bad state": the General Directory must neglect nothing to remedy this evil. There are not enough cities in Lithuania : the General Directory must build some. This must be taken hold of " earnestly and vigorously, mit Ernst und Vigueur, in such a way that our desire may be gratified as soon as possi- ble. They know of what great importance the establishment of manufactures is to us and to our country. They must apply themselves with ex- treme zeal in promoting all kinds of industries, wool, leather, iron, wood, that do not exist in our country, and establish as many of them as possible." Foreign workmen must be imported. - The king indicates to them where will be found woolen drapers and stock- ing manufacturers. If they have need of a master- draper, let them seek one at Gorlitz, at Lissa or in Holland. They must promise and give him a situation ; they must marry him to "a girl of our country"; they must advance the wool to him: "And this is the way the master-draper will earn his bread, found a family, and become independent." Nothing easier: "You can- not make me believe that it will be much trouble to engage such people and attract them to our country." The industrial production would then increase like the agricultural ; but the sale and consumption of the products should be assured. Here, the rule was very simple: "Not to buy of foreign countries, or buy as little as possible ; to sell them as much as possible. As to the imports of the kingdom, absolute prohibition or diminution by heavy duties ; as to the exports a slight tax, which will not prevent exportation. Only THE FATHER. 57 there are exceptions to this rule. The ideal of the King of Prussia was that Prussia should be self-sup- porting, as if she were alone in the world. He estab- lished between his cities and countries an exchange of relations and services. He bound together agricul- ture and commerce, so that they complimented each other. For example, one of the great agricultural pro- ducts was wool. The peasants wished to export it ; but then, it would be necessary for the drapers, who would not be able to find enough wool in the country, to buy it outside, and behold the Prussian money going out of the country. The king then forbade the ex- portation of wool. The consequence was that all the wool had to be consumed in the country ; otherwise, " our provincial Chambers will not fail to say that our farmers will not be able to dispose of their wool, that it will no longer be worth anything, and so forth . . " The king also prescribed to the Cham- bers of Administration and the Commissariats of War an exact estimate, on the one hand, of the quantity and quality of the wool produced in each province ; on the other, of the manufactories that worked the wool. "The General Directory," said he, "shall compare the total of the wool manufactured with the total of the wool produced. Let us suppose the first total to be inferior to the second, and that 2,000 pounds of the wool of first quality and 1,000 of medium quality will not find buyers. The General Directory shall establish in a city nine drapers, each of which will use 300 pounds of good wool, and employ one hundred operatives in the stocking manufactories, each of which 58 FREDERICK THE GREAT. will work up at least 10 pounds of medium wool. The evil is remedied. All this will be profit to the king- dom, for the Prussian peasant will sell his wool ; Prus- sia will manufacture cloth and stockings in sufficient quantities for the consumption of the country and for exportation." The king was so sure of being in the right, that to prohibit the exportation of wool, he ordered as the penalty " strangulation." Since every one else was attending to his own business, the king would attend to his also. He admitted no tardi- ness in the payment of his revenues. For the excise, which was an indirect impost, there was no difficulty, but the rural affairs had to await the contributions and the farm rents. The king spoke clearly on this subject: "The payment must be made punctually at a fixed time, without even the smallest deduction, and we admit of no excuse, from any one whomsoever." He knew all the tricks of the peasants. They would not fail to say that the commodities were sold too low. "Reply to them, that they cannot have only dear commodities. If it were thus, we would have the rentals too low. The lease has been calculated on a mean average, so that a good year will cover the losses of a bad year. We have not promised our farmers that they would have none but profitable years. They have signed the lease without condition, ohne zu conditionniren. The farm rents have been justly im- posed so that the proprietor may draw profit from his lands, and receive the rental, the ready money, without entering into complicated accounts. Then, away with all weakness, no ' humanitarianism.' If THE FATHER. 59 the money is delayed, if it is < tied up' somewhere, employ means of untying it. If these methods do not appear as clear as the sun in the sky, send with- out losing a moment's time to the place where this default and confusion is rife, and there apply the remedy." The General Directory shall exercise its authority over all the Administration of the monarchy. The Commis- sariats of War and the Chamber of Administration of the provinces emanate from it. When there are vacan- cies the Directory shall fill them again. It shall place in the Commissariats worthy, diligent men, provided with a healthy, natural understanding, versed in manu- facture, excise and all affairs pertaining to the Commis- sariats ; and in the Chamber of Administration strong, healthy, vigilant men, who are experienced in farming, whether as overseers of estates or as practical farmers, and proficient in bookkeeping. The king desires the members of the Directory to have the highest attri- butes. The ministers, after making diligent search, shall propose the most competent persons, faithful and honest, whether Lutherans or Calvinists, such as com- prehend practical economy and are acquainted with com- merce and manufacture, capable of writing well, that is to say, of stating a subject properly, having " clear heads." Frederick William made of this a kind of portrait of the Prussian bureaucracy which he created a kind of noblesse civile, drilled to service, vigorously disciplined, exact, hardworking, the mainspring of a State where the subjects who had lost the last vestiges of feudal 60 FREDERICK THE GREAT. liberty,* obeyed the royal order : Nicht raisonniren, here, no reasoning. The time will come when this body will take the form of a caste ; the "clear heads" will be heard no more ; exactitude will become a mania ; zeal, pedantry, and all that fine organization will be nothing but a machine. Then it will be seen that a nation cannot live in the air of a bureau, that it is dead, in fact, and the machine turns in a vacuum. But the danger of the morrow was, the day before, a necessary state of existence. The Prussian bureaucracy was the first organ of the nation of Prussia. The king, after having enumerated the virtues that he exacted from his functionaries, adds : " And, above all, they must be our born subjects." He reserves to himself the right of calling one or two for- eigners into the Chambers and Commissariats, but they must be very proficient in order to counteract the defect of not being born subjects of the king ; for he wishes to create the idea that a chance visitor is not able to com- prehend the sentiment of a country. This country will be no longer a Brandenburg for the Brandenburgers, a Pomerania for the Pomeranians, or a Prussia for the Prussians ; it will be, without distinction of territories, the whole extent of his domination. He orders recruit- ing the Chambers and Commissariats of one province with men born in another. For example, if there are vacancies in Prussia, men must be called from Cleves, Brandenburg or Pomerania, not from Prussia. And the same with the other countries ; the king will send the people of his provinces away from their homes ; he will remove the barriers of these small countries, so as THE FATHER. 61 to blend them into the one great country. A peculiar country, which is neither the product of nature nor of history, the true definition of it being : The Prussian country; that is, the service of the King of Prussia. Between the Directory and the Chambers and Com- missariats the intercourse shall be regular and frequent. A report from the provinces will arrive each week. In order that these reports may be exact and circumstan- tial, the Presidents of the Chambers must inspect the estates, villages and farms with the greatest care ; the Presidents of the Commissariats must visit the cities under their jurisdiction, and keep themselves informed of the commerce and the manufactures, the citizens and the residents, that they may know the cities of their de- partment "as well as a captain of our army knows his company, when he understands all of the innate qualities as well as exterior characteristics of his soldiers." An abridgement of these reports was transmitted to the king, who, in this way, knew regularly all that trans- pired in his kingdom, and whether or not each one was doing " his duty.' THE GOVERNMENT OF THE KING. The king, in order to give the Directory "more lus- tre and authority, in order to show the particular atten- tion that he proposes to pay constantly and indefatigably to the affairs appealable to the Directory, and as its ex- treme importance demands," reserved for himself the presidency. He was not a man to give an order once, so as to remain ever after inactive. Every evening the Di- rectory sent him a proces verbal of the sitting for the 62 FREDERICK THE GREAT. day, which he read the following morning. He did not admit of any decision to be taken, involving some inno- vation, without his approval. This great council had but little consultative voice. Not one expense for im- provement was authorized except by the king himself ; no lease was confirmed until after it had received his signature. The plan was presented to him with a brief but clear note, which permitted him "to see the nature of the thing immediately." The authority that he gave to the Directory to address questions to him "every time they may deem it necessary, notably, in all extraordinary cases," comprised an order to refer every- thing to him, of whatever import. This is certainly the way that he wished it to be understood. "The questions," said he, "must be brief and forcible (in we?iig JVbrteti and nerveus). . . ." To each one should be appended the advice of the General Directory. For example : There is a horse to be sold for a hundred thalers. "We think that Y. M. will do well to buy it, but only for eighty thalers ; otherwise Y. M. would lose for such a reason." The example proves that the king wished to be in- structed in the minutest detail. He received questions by the thousands and thousands, to which he responded in short marginal notes. We can scarcely understand why he was not drowned in this inundation of diverse minatice for the most part unimportant, and how he was able to give so concisely and very often with spirit a like number of instructions. It was because he loved to command. Frederick, his father, delighted at all times and in all places to display the majesty THE FATHER. 63 of the King of Prussia ; Frederick William, to make this majesty felt. "You must each time," said he to the Directory, "and for each affair, add your ad- vice with the reasons upon which you establish it, but we will remain the Seignior and King and will do as we will. Wir bleiben dock der Ilerr und Konig und thun teas wir loollen" A few lines farther on, after having declared that he intended always to know the truth, that he wished no flattery of any kind, he repeats the same words, "We are the Seignior and King, and do as we will." The mind of a king who thus comprehends and prac- tices his duties has not a moment of repose. There was in Frederick William's dominions, as in all the States of Europe, administrative machinery of different dates, mixed together, which disappeared after the reorgan- ization of the Chambers and Commissariats. The con- flict of privileges that the king suppressed in finance, continued between the administrative and judicial authorities. There were also habits formed, resistance of routine ; no rebellion, but inertia, unwillingness, and, in all grades of society, from the noble to the peas- ant, the murmur of a people from whom an effort was demanded. Frederick William knew well that he was not fully obeyed except when he was there in propria persona. He could not be, and was truly, never at rest. He would have liked to see all the world at work : farm- ers on their farms, workmen at their trade, counselors in council. He recommended to the Directory to watch over the Chambers and Commissariats, to inspect them and not to rely on their word. He enjoined it to em- 64 FREDERICK THE GREAT. ploy spies. Each of the counselors must have one, which he must choose from among all kinds of people : farmers, tradesmen, and peasants. He will obtain, in this way, false as well as true information ; with good judgment, he will discern the true from the false. This espionage will enlighten the Directory, even upon the minutissima. The king took the trouble to give a model of these secret reports : "For example, in Prussia, there have been good winters and hard winters. The com- modities arrive in the cities. The wood for building is carted. The building goes on. There are indications of a good, crop. Commerce, navigation and manufact- ures begin to prosper. . . . Such or such a village is burned. The nobility conspire secretly against a certain impost. A certain regiment buys its provisions from a foreign country. The Chamber of Administra- tions will turn over its exact amount of rentals or not. There may be good reasons or not for the delay. This must be corrected. There have been twenty houses built in the city " Frederick William would never have finished if he had enumerated all the objects of his curiosity and anxiety : he shows in the ordinance that he had his head full of doubt at all times upon the most diverse matters. The Directory proposes to him an augmenta- tion of such and such a revenue. But would there not be an equal or greater loss in such and such another revenue? Then what they propose to him is not an amelioration, it is wind : Keine Besserimg, ergo, Wind. Do not the Chambers of Administration and the Commissariats of War continue to quarrel among THE FATHER. 65 themselves on the subject of the distribution of such and such funds or imposts? "They must find another way to amuse themselves ; then the poor devils of lawyers and jurists will become as useless as a fifth wheel to a coach." Do the farmers fertilize well their lands? They are capable of impoverishing them. They must be prevented from selling their straw. Certain officers, for example, of the hunt are thieves, but still they do not take advantage of everything that their right of office permits. The whole thing must be changed. Are there not too many officers? Could not several duties be included in one? Let us see then if a certain number of officials cannot be cut off (retrcmgirt). Why is beer not as good elsewhere as - at Potsdam? To have wool, we must have sheep ; now, in Prussia, there are nearly as many wolves as sheep. Quick, an order for hunting wolves. How is it that the impost on salt is less this year than the preceding in the Hal- berstadt? The number of inhabitants has not dimin- ished. They have eaten as much salt as last year. There is some fraud, some leakage. You must then give warning to the principal manufacturer of salt to manage otherwise than the way he has been doing up to this time. Perhaps also the subjects buy their salt in Hanover or Poland. All of these importers of salt must be hung, etc., etc. Let us admit an impossible thing, that all the world, without exception, does its duty. Country and town are well populated ; the former furnishing food and ma- terial for industry, the latter working up this material in such a manner that not a particle of it is lost. Prus- 66 FREDERICK THE GREAT. sia is fed, clothed, supplied with implements, armed. Not only is she sufficient unto herself, but "she pro- duces a surplus ein Plus" which is sold to foreign countries. Will the king remain inactive ? He cannot, for the least accident will put this machine out of order, every movement of which is calculated with mathemat- ical accuracy. For example, the budget of receipts and expenses is made out for each provincial fund. One foresees that such a regiment will consume, per head, so much, including man and beast, and that the excise will deduct beforehand such a sum for this consumption ; but war breaks out, or perhaps the regiment is called to Potsdam or elsewhere to maneuver or to go into camp. The receipt of the excise becomes less ; the peasant no longer sells his provisions : "When my army leaves the country, the excise does not bring in more than a third ; the pretium rerun diminishes ; the domains no longer pay the rent charge." It is very difficult to avoid a fire taking place somewhere. Each year houses, villages, and even towns, are burned. This makes new "empty places." Nothing more deplorable. Again, can one not remedy these various evils ? Move the regiments as little as possible, order every village to have its engine and firemen, and have the thatched roofs replaced everywhere "inside of five years" by tiled roofs. But what is to be done to prevent bad crops, and pestilence of man and beast ? Frederick William prayed God "in His mercy " to spare him these scourges, but God's mercy is uncertain. It required all the King of Prussia's religion to admit without blasphemy, the possibility that God might take THE FATHER. 67 away from him a man or a beast, each one of which was so precious, and counted for such and such a sum in the exactitude of his calculations. Submitting himself 'to the Divine Will, the king at least meant to have all his subjects obey him. u We will extend our favor and our protection to all those who will observe all the points of this order, and use all our power against those who will not. As for the others, who insist on returning to the old routine, we will chas- tise them exemplarily, Russian fashion, exemplarisch und auf gut jRussisch." 35 THE CREATION OF PRUSSIAN POWER. The remarkable result of this order, made, as the king said, "for the strengthening of our crown and army," was the advancement of the Prussian army. This is the wonder of this reign, and one of the great events of history. If Frederick William had required military service from all the population of his kingdom he would not have been able to form out of it that powerful army that he wished to give to his little Prussia ; but he was careful not to exhaust the productive forces of his terri- tories. In the very simple system that he had conceived, he must, first of all, make money, and afterward increase his troops in proportion to his new resources, from which he deducted a portion to constitute a reserve fund of the monarchy. There must be a helping-hand extended to industry and agriculture. However, there was in the reasoning of all his work the creation of a national army. This difficult problem was made 68 FREDERICK THE GREAT. still more complex by the incoherence of the military institutions, where modern customs were grafted upon the remains of feudalism. In seeking the solution, Frederick William ended by arriving, after many at- tempts and much groping about, at a mixed regime, of which certain parts had an entirely modern spirit. 36 From the Middle Ages proceeded the militia, that is to say, the troops of occasion, so that military service was an exceptionally easy occupation. The king, good trooper that he was, had such a horror of this na- tional guard that he desired to abolish even its name. The principal mode of recruiting was through volun- tary enlistment obtained by crimping. Frederick William was one of the most extraordinary enlisters of soldiers ever known in military history. His mania for tall men is famous. He attempted to propagate them in his own country ; he commanded giants to marry giantesses. When he learned that from one of these unions there was born a child with large hands and feet, he rejoiced and ordered mother and child to be sent for immediately ; even in the cold of midwinter, and when necessary for the mother to make the trip from Cleves to Berlin. 37 This giant-rearing pro- ducing but slight results, he sought for them in countries where they naturally thrived, Sweden, the Ukraine, Ire land, Lower Hungary, and wherever they could be found. And this king, so economical otherwise, dis- pensed his thalers by the millions to satisfy this caprice. His recruiters respected no laws of peoples, and he had to undergo more than one diplomatic scene in regard to their acts of brigandage. He was extremely sensitive to THE FATHER. 69 incidents of this kind, would fly into a passion and .be much troubled over it: "They will dishonor me," said he, for he believed it was to his honor to have only giants, at least in his first regiment of Potsdam Grena- diers. Once he came near having a war with Hanover, who had maltreated his recruiters. The best way of paying court to him was to furnish him with giants ; his ministers and his son Frederick went so far as to say that his fidelity to Austria was explained by the care the Emperor took to flatter this passion. He, himself said : "To win the most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a matter of indifference to me ; but I have one weak point, a mania for soldiers, and in gratifying it, one can lead me wherever one wills. f 38 This "weak [ / point" cost him so much money, fatigue, and danger, that this giant mania of the King of Prussia was re- garded as a maniacal freak in the full sense of the word, "and one which cannot be solved," said a foreign Min- ister, "unless by some future anatomy." This idiosyncrasy ought not to obscure the rest of the work. Frederick William recruited and enrolled, out- side of his States, more than forty thousand men, and from his own people an equal number. It is here that he hit upon a future idea. For a long time, each regi- ment had an assigned district for recruiting, where the crimps of the colonel and captains had alone the right to exercise their trade, but the regiments encroached upon each other, and the institution, badly regulated, produced conflicts and disorder. Frederick William sketched out through the whole extent of his territory these military boundaries, which were determined by 70 FREDERICK THE GREAT. the number of arms ; five thousand arms for a reg- iment of infantry, fifteen hundred for cavalry : the district was subdivided into cantons, one for each company. Voluntary enlisting was abolished. Some classes of persons were exempt from military service and reserved for trades and husbandry, which were also, according to Frederick William, public service ; these exemptions, however, did not interfere with the principle thus expressed: "All subjects are born to carry arms, fur die Waff en geboren, and bound to serve in the regiment, dem Regiment obligat, in the district where they are born." 39 It made no difference to Frederick William about arriving little by little and by indirect ways to the ex- pression of this idea of military duty. Ideas follow their course, through many obstacles. Besides, they never spring frpm nullity. There was in Frederick William, who was a zealous servant of the State, and prided himself upon being, in his way, a true republican, ein wahrer JRepublikaner, a predisposition to establish the idea of the obligation of military service toward the Civitas. The effects of such a declaration of prin- ciple must have been considerable. . . . Behold a people who are given notice that they are born to carry arms ; every child at the same time that he learns the name of his village learns that of the regiment "to which he is bound." This obligation raises up and ennobles the most humble subjects. The peasant, whose condition was, in Frederick William's country, that of a beast of burden, becomes a member of the State, and of a State where the soldier.'s coat was held in high THE FATHER. 71 esteem: the king's son, when the paternal displeasure fell upon him, asked as a favor from "the majesty of his father," to reinstate him by giving him back his uniform of the Grenadiers. Frederick William desired to make the framework of the Prussian army out of the nobility of Prussia. Up to his time, numerous foreigners had attained the highest ranks in Prussia, and Prussian nobles went else- where to seek their fortunes: he resolved to reserve his nobles for his service, and his service for his nobles. . . He not only commenced this great reform, but he recom- mended it to his successors : "My successor must have all the nobles of all the provinces employed in the army and placed among the cadets. This will render him formidable. ... If you have officers taken from among the children of your country, you have a true, permanent army, a body of permanent officers, and this no other potentate possesses, und Kein Potentat hatdas." 40 The man who wrote these lines saw the future of the Prussian army, and ended by establishing the char- acter of the Prussian State. All commonalty subjects born to serve, all noble subjects born to command under the orders of the king ; the social hierarchy transferred to the State; the nobility utilized and disciplined ; the vanity of the country squire transformed into the pride of an officer, all this, which is so much to be commended and not to be found "in the realms of any potentate," proceeded in great part from Frederick William. The cohesion of the army, enclosed in this royal frame, was assured, through discipline and careful atten- tion, of all in the service. For the King of Prussia 72 FREDERICK THE GREAT. there were no minutice in soldiery. When he sent his son, in 1734, to the Army of the Rhine, he prescribed that he should be instructed "fully and carefully in de- tail, not only of the regular service, but in all detail ; he shall learn how the soldiers' shoes are made, and how long a time they can be worn. . . . The prince shall go thus from the smallest detail concerning the soldier to the greatest, from the shoe to the can- non of the heavy artillery. He shall pass immediately into the regular service, in order to train himself up to the dispositio?ies generalissimini." 4,1 All the detail to use an expression that he repeated so many times, Frederick William regulated, from the length of the sleeve, and the width of the collar, to the number of buttons on the boot. He really created the Prussian uniform, stiff, clean, shining, which once provoked a smile, but which is now one of the many expressions of the obedience of thousands of men to a single will, which foresaw everything. Frederick William was not contented to command and watch over his army from a high elevation ; he as- signed himself a place there, and daily duties. He, himself, was a colonel to the King of Prussia, the one who had the honor to command the tall Grenadiers of Potsdam. Every day he attended the parade and drills. He submitted to all the regulations. Once, in the spring, he ordered all the regiments, company by com- pany, to be bled ; he was bled first, in the open air, and in weather cold enough to snow. Another time, he was at Berlin, very ill ; a colonel said by chance before him, "that to-morrow is the day that all the colonels THE FATHER. 73 on leave of absence must rejoin their regiments." The following day, notwithstanding the entreaties of the physicians, he would set out. He was seen to pass through the city, his body wrapped up, and his head covered with a nightcap, over which he had placed a fur cap. Arriving at the gates, he was lifted into a chaise, in which they had spread out a mattress. 42 It is at Potsdam that the Prussian drill is carried to perfection. The new movements, the reforms in the maneuvers, are tested there before being adopted. From the whole army delegations of officers are sent to be instructed, as the Crown Prince said later, at "The University of Potsdam." It is there that they see how the infantry, through extreme care given to every de- tail and untiring patience, is so well-trained "that it charges with the greatest rapidity, advances in serried ranks, presents arms well, sees everything as well under fire as in the most profound silence." To bring the army to this perfection the king employed grand re- views and inspections. He was the Inspector General of the Prussian army. Every year, in the month of May, he reviewed the garrison of Berlin, that is to say, six regiments of infantry, a regiment of dragoons and six squadrons of hussars. Each regiment or each squad- ron had its day. Each one of the companies was ranged in four files, between which the king passed. He examined the men, one by one, addressing a few words to most of them: "My son, dost thou receive exactly what is due thee?" Or perhaps: "How dost thou like our service ? " And he listened courteously to complaints, particularly when he found things in 74 FREDERICK THE GREAT. order, and that no one had made a mistake in the fifty- four movements that comprised the drill. The last day, after all these special reviews, came the general review. The king mounted his horse at 2 o'clock in the morn- ing, and, except for a few moments of repose at the breakfast hour, he remained in the saddle until evening. The inspections were repeated in the provinces and thus ended these great military examinations. The reviews were frequent and unexpected. By them the king ascertained what was passing everywhere, "as if I were present," said he, "als Ich bestandig ware," and the garrisons were always in the condition of a troop that had an enemy at hand or were expecting one. He watched assiduously his corps of officers. In the reviews and inspections, wherever he met them, they had to be presented, or he accosted them ; he talked with them, requiring that they should look at him as he looked at them, straight in the eyes. He consulted their conduct list, the Conduiten Z/iste, which kept an exact account of their virtues and vices, of their good and bad qualities. He was the censor of their morals and habits ; he forbade them < to bedeck the livery of their domestics with gold and silver," and ordered them always to wear their uniform. He was very severe upon those who "kept no account of their purse " and ran into debt. He prohibited the luxuries of the table: "Of what use is so much ceremony? . . . A glass of beer ought to be just as acceptable as a glass of wine." He inquired into their religious sentiments, for he wished his officers to be just as good Christians as good soldiers. 43 In a word, he recommended as a model THE FATHER. 75 the Colonel of the 1st Regiment of the Potsdam Grena- diers. He centered upon himself all their attention. He gave such a good tone to this corps of officers and to all the army, that his successors, even to-day, repeat his commands word for word. Let us now consider that the army of the King of Prussia was augmented from 38,459 men to 44,792 dur- ing the year of the accession, in 1713 ; to 53,999 in 1719; to 69,892 in 1729; to 83,486 in 1739. Now, France had 160,000 soldiers, Austria hardly 100,000; the French army was divided into numerous garrisons ; the Austrian army scattered over its vast provinces. Neither the Austrian nor even the French army was so well organized, armed, equipped as that of the King of Prussia ; finally, in Prussia, the service of the few for- tresses required not more than 10,000 men. Thus 70,- 000 men, at a low estimate, were always ready for the march, marschbereit, ready for battle, schlagfertig. THE INACTION OF THE KING OF PRUSSIA. Here lies the explanation of the future, for Frederick William did not make use of this power, and that is one of the incomprehensible things of his history. Twice he took up arms ; at the beginning of his reign, against Sweden ; near the end, against France, in the contro- versy about the Polish Succession. Still, he did not enter into any engagement without anguish of heart. It is true that he reigned in a period of peace, and that the great occasion for testing the metal of his army did not arise; but all Europe, at that time, was thought to be every day on the eve of war. They fought in nego- 76 FREDERICK THE GREAT. tiations, they grouped themselves in leagues and coun- ter-leagues. Scarcely had the great question of the Span- ish Succession been settled by the Treaties of Utrecht, Rastadt and Baden, when Spain, in order to regain her lost territories, attacked Austria: France, England, Hol- land and Austria coalesced against the aggressor. While Europe sought to reconcile Spain and Austria, in the interest of the latter, Austria, violating her alle- giance, came to a direct understanding with Spain against her mediators. Then France and England, up to that time allied to Austria against Spain, entered into a league against Spain and Austria. After some hostili- ties, Europe began to negotiate. This time Spain aban- doned her ally, Austria, who was obliged to yield to the will of Europe. At last, when Stanislas Lecszinski had been driven from Poland by the Russians, France declared war against Austria, who was the accomplice of Russia: this Polish affair was terminated by a treaty which gave to the King of Poland a duchy in France, to the Duke of Lorraine a duchy in Italy, and to the In- fante of Spain the Kingdom of Naples. There was then such a strange chasse-croise of negotiations and in- trigues that one would think, as Lord Chesterfield said, "that all Europe was going crazy." Frederick William, who was often solicited by these makers of leagues aud counter-leagues, did not know how to figure gracefully in their quadrilles. To take into consideration only his great political intrigues, one sees him, in 1725, adhering to the union concluded at Hanover, of France and England against Austria; then hardly a year elapses before he is united with Austria; THE FATHER. 77 he persists long enough in this alliance; but finally he treats with France, and always wishes to undo what he has done, after he has given his word. Then followed the uprising of Europe. Epigrams from all sides rained down upon him. "The King of Prussia," said the English, "is only a wolf in his own sheepfold;" one after the other, the French ambassadors residing at his Court "affirmed that he would not make war." They wrote: "The insatiable desire that he has for soldiery will make him always keep up a large army; but his timidity will constantly oppose the execution of all engagements that he could undertake to put this army into action. These are two principles upon which one can rely." "He will be brave enough up to hold- ing the sword," but will be always restrained from go- ing farther by "the love which he has for his big men, that are only for parades, and whom he will never ex- pose to danger." Then follow reproaches of inconstancy and changeableness. "He is" (according to his own servitors), "a prince without plan, without system, who goes by fits and starts, passing from one extreme to another." A French Minister, obliged to transmit to his government these contradictory statements week after week, wondered "how any faith could be placed in these dispatches." "The variable moods of the King of Prussia and his profound dissimulation," wrote the ambassador to Louis XV., "are infinitely above all that Your Majesty can imagine." This same official, who at that time was the most favored by the king, and charged by him to express the most affectionate senti- ments toward his country, added: "The faith that I 78 FREDERICK THE GREAT. owe to my country and king obliges me to repeat that one can never count upon the King of Prussia in any im- portant matter." After which he quoted the words of Peter the Great in regard to Frederick William: "He likes to fish well enough, but without w T etting his feet." 44 Facts seem to justify these accusations. Scarcely does Frederick William put his foot in camp before he be comes restless, and evinces a strong desire to retire. He hardly enters the league of Hanover with France and England before he becomes * ' worn out with these en- gagements." He goes over to the Emperor's side; he re- grets it, wavers, favors the Minister of France, tries to extenuate himself in the eyes of his former allies for the gravity of the new treaty, and cavils with the Emperor in every way: "My God ! " he cried, " I will not go so far, Mein Gott ! So weit will ich nicht gehen." He liked to see all Europe on fire; to have it break out some place, and spread over the whole continent. In 1727 Spain, allied to Austria, attacks Gibraltar: this is the beginning of a conflagration. The king exults, but diplomacy deluges with water the brazier: he be- comes very much distressed "at the appearances of a set- tlement," which will prevent him from "fishing in the troubled waters." When he learns of the signing of the preliminaries at Paris he humiliates and mortifies the imperial ambassador, saying that his master "should have kept him from bragging in that way, and should have consented to everything, and that he would always be Charles the Stammerer." He has ever the ap- pearance of being ready to set out on a war expedition: 'Let us grease our boots," he writes in 1729. "I am THE FATHER. 79 persuaded that there is no other means to end all this but to give them a good whipping." However, if he saw war approaching him, he would be in mortal terror. At the time that he was allied to France and England he feared that these two powers would abandon him, "so that upon my head alone would fall the wrath of the Emperor and Empire, and destroy me and my family." Allied to Austria against France, he feared being burned and pillaged by the French and Swedes. One moment, to settle divers quar- rels, he seemed ready to throw himself like mad upon Hanover, but he learned this country was in a good state of defense. Then he became uneasy, hesitated, finally had a fit of anger, and, to calm himself, got on a "spree" of several days' duration, with the " officers who participated in his debaucheries." 45 Why would not Europe at last believe that he loved his soldiers only for parade? At last, in 1734, when he sent his troops to join the imperial army on the Rhine, he prescribed that they were to make but two miles per day, three at the most ; that they were to rest the fourth day ; never to break up, never to be inclosed in fortresses, and that after each campaign they were to go into winter quar- ters, good winter quarters, of six months' duration. However, it would be absurd to accuse Frederick Will- iam of cowardice, for they certainly meant to say cow- ardice when they wrote timidity. He liked to recall that he had tested his bravery, under the eye of God, at Malplaquet, "where he had seen hundreds fall at right and left." He expressed his true thought when he added that he "]oved nothing: in the world better than 80 FREDERICK THE GREAT. war," and that "his feet burned when doing nothing." 46 As to his dissimulation and duplicity, they were infant- ile in comparison with that of the other Courts of Europe, particularly Austria. The explanation of his conduct is a curious chapter of political psychology. Frederick William is both Elector in the Empire and King of Prussia, which is not a country of the Empire. He belongs to Germany, where he has duties, and he is a sovereign of Europe, like the King of France and the King of England. He finds within himself two person- ages, who will necessarily conflict with each other. One of his refrains was, that an Emperor was neces- sary to Germany : ein deutscher Kaiser solle unci milsse bleiben, and that he himself was a good imperialist, gut Kaiserlich gesinnt. "All of my blue coats are at the service of the Emperor," said he. . . . "All of the German princes must be of the canaille if they do not profess good sentiments toward the Emperor and Em- pire ; I would be of the canaille myself if I did not. We must have an Emperor ; let us then be faithful to the House of Austria, it is the duty of every honest Ger- man. . . ." He expressed his fidelity in the strongest terms: "For his Imperial Majesty, for his House, and for his interest, I would sacrifice with pleasure, my blood, my possessions, my country. Before I sever my connection with the Emperor, he must repulse me with his foot." 47 But, let us listen to the other side of the story. If he wished to sustain a German Emperor, it was on condition that his sovereignty to such an Emperor should remain intact. He was the onlv one who could THE FATHER. 81 maintain power and he did not permit the Emperor to exercise over him the authority of a supreme judge. The appeals of his subjects carried before His Imperial Majesty, although they may have been perfectly consti- tutional and legal, put him beside himself. He wished to break this latter tie that connected him with the Em- pire: "Our interest, as well as that of France," said his ministers, "is that there may not be any Emperor after this one ; but, if it is necessary to have one, let him be a weak prince, incapable of having his commands exe- cuted, and one with no more authority than the Doge of Venice." 48 These two personages, the German Prince and the King of Prussia, agreed then to the contract that the first should never thwart the second, who was a very sensible man. There was the same play in foreign policy, but still more complicated, for Frederick William recognized in the Emperor Charles VI., as in himself, two person- ages : the Chief of the Holy Empire, and the Head of the House of Hapsburg, to whom European treaties gave possessions outside of Germany, in the Netherlands and in Italy. If the Chief of the Empire were attacked within the Empire, Frederick William owed him aid and rescue, and he would fulfill that duty. He did not wish foreigners to mix in German affairs, nor to touch German soil. "No Frenchman or Englishman must command us Germans. I will place pistols and swords in the cra- dle of my children to aid them in ridding Germany of foreign nations." Or, again: "If the French attack a German village, the German prince who would not pour out his blood to the last drop in defending it, would be a 82 FREDERICK THE GREAT. Kujon" In milder but very firm tones he called to mind his patriotism on all occasions before the Ministers of France: "I cannot suffer them to carry the torch into my Empire. I must, and my conscience obliges me to do so, employ all my strength to defend the country. . . As Prince of the Empire, and good patriot, I could not prevent you Frenchmen from trying, if you wished, to overthrow Germany. . . . Leave our Holy Empire in peace, I pray you." "Frenchman," (it was to La Chetardie he spoke), "do not be astonished to see the king fall again into the Germanism from which he can never be withdrawn." One of Frederick William's min- isters, Grumbkow, then about to allow himself to be bought over by France, deplored this mania of his master: "We have to do with a prince who, with much mind and ability in certain directions, in others, absorbs himself in ideas of Germanism, whence the devil cannot withdraw him." This was, in fact, one of this prince's traits of character : he was a German, a good German, and it was with all his heart that he cried out at table : < < Long live the Germany of the German Nation, Vivat Germania dentscher Nation /" But this German saw nothing in the affairs of the Emperor out- side of Germany ; that was why, at the* same time that he prayed the Frenchman to leave his Holy Empire in peace, he added : "Run down the Emperor and Imperial- ists of Italy, if you will ; the devil take me, if I send a man there." He even advised the conquest of the Netherlands and Italy: "You will render a service to His Imperial Majesty, to whom these countries are a heavy burden." 49 THE FATHER. 83 In virtue of these distinguo^ which were things that appertained to the Qermany of former times, it hap- pened that Frederick William could be at one and the same time, for and against the Emperor. When he be- came allied to France and England, in 1725, he reserved to himself the right to furnish to the Emperor the con- tingent that he owed, in his quality of Elector, at the same time that he assisted the King of France with the number of troops fixed by the treaty. It certainly is to be regretted that this clause had not been put into action, and that Europe had not witnessed this spectacle of the King of Prussia fighting the Elector of Bran- denburg. Let us suppose the engagement of this combat. To which one will Frederick William keep his vows ? Ev- idently to the King of Prussia. If the issue depends upon him, the Elector of Brandenburg will be beaten in company with the Emperor, while the King of Prussia and his allies will come off victorious. Here is shown the contradiction in which Frederick William was embroiled all his life. It was not so easy to distinguish the Emperor from the Empire. To say nothing of Frederick William waiting, hoping, as every- body did, for the death of his "very dear friend," the Emperor Charles VI., and that he was amused and laughed beforehand at the embarrassment that would befall the illustrious Archducal House. Charles VI. dead, Germany would elect the Emperor that she wished, and the House of Hapsburg would cease to be more sa- cred than any other in the eyes of the King of Prussia ! But when the latter said to the Minister of France : 84 FREDERICK THE GREAT. u We will inter the Emperor in great pomp, in pontifi- calibus. . . We will see a fine charivari ; the mate- rial will be ample, and there will be enough for each one to cut himself out a jacket." 50 He ought to have known that the foreign powers would try to cut into the mate- rial, and that there would be a great probability of their attacking at least " a village of Germany." Frederick William thus forgot more than once his Germanism. One day, while at parade, as the French Minister, on horseback near him, congratulated him upon the fine con- dition of his troops, and upon the "skillful, warlike air that they had," he replied: "I am charmed that you find them so good, since they are absolutely at the service of the King of France. Be so kind as to inform him of it. . . . When it so pleases France I am ready to beat the drum." 51 Twice he repeated this expression. Finally he allowed himself to recall, in the treaty of 1725, "that France is guarantee for the treaty of Westphalia," and that "she interests herself particularly in the Ger- manic liberty," and it was as a guarantee for this peace, as protectress of this liberty, that France had maintained anarchy in Germany in order to assure herself tranquil- lity, and hold her pre-eminence in Europe. However, would Frederick William have imitated the German princes of former times, who were the slaves of French policy, and the enemies of their own country ? Not at all. One can affirm that, if the Coalitionists of Hanover had made war on the Emperor, he would have left the alliance at the first German village burned. He treated with the Emperor's enemies; but said : "It was only to annoy and force him to make propositions to THE FATHER. 85 me." If the House of Austria had had the wisdom of paying his blue coats by giving him some of the satis- faction he desired, Frederick William would have still remained the faithful ally of Charles VI. The King of Prussia being contented, the Elector of Brandenburg would have done his duty. But Austria had no more regard for him than if he had been "a prince of Zipfel Zerbst." The King of Prussia being discontented, how- ever, the Elector of Brandenburg 52 would have been com- pelled to keep quiet, and Frederick would have sacrificed everything in order to bring down upon the Emperor a terrible vengeance. He surely must have been faithless, since he makes engagements with the intention of never keeping them. He prides himself upon having put in his treaty with the Emperor "more than sixty restrictions and equivoca- tions to get out of it ; " but it must not be forgotten, if one wishes to be just toward him, that his duplicity came, in part, from his being double. 53 As King of Prussia, his policy was entirely simple and connected: he wished to enlarge Prussia. He had, or believed he had, rights over the Duchies of Berg and Ju- liers: he demanded these rights to be recognized. With- out shame, he sold himself to the highest bidder: "I will not give myself for pears and apples." He had a charming way of accepting offers. When France pro- posed Elbing to him, on condition that he recognized Stanislas Lecszinski as King of Poland, he wrote on the margin of the French dispatch: "Finally, I will say, like the late Queen Anne of Austria : * Cardinal, you are so persuasive that I am obliged to succumb to your 86 FREDERICK THE GREAT. wishes.'" If he regretted engagements as soon as he made them, it was because he believed that, being free, he would find the occasion for a better scheme. At the time of the commencement of the War of the Polish Succession, he confessed his chagrin at being united to the Emperor: " My position should be to-day, such as would give me the most realistic advantages." This was not duplicity ; there was nothing simpler in the world. Frederick William had such a guileless heart that he understood nothing of the affairs of diplomacy. In it, he brought to play passion and childish caprice. He had the good fortune to be Elector and King at the same time : he did not like others to have the same priv- ileges. It displeased him that the Elector of Saxony was scheming to be King of Poland, and the Elector of Hanover King of England. Literally, it made him jealous to see the Hanoverians " cut such a fine fig- ure in the world," and he was grieved at their prosper- ous condition. 5i He knew George II. at the time when he was but the grandson of an Elector of Hanover ; he played with him, he even beat him: he could not bear that this gamin should become so great a prince, and lord it over him. He called him "my dear brother, the come- dian," or "my dear brother, the red-cabbage." He used such abusive language toward him that it will not bear repetition. As to Augustus of Poland, he never called him anything but "the clothes-peg." His manner of venting his ill humor on these princes was strictly in- fantile. He broke up a service of china with a cane, because it was Saxony-ware, and came from the King of THE FATHER. 87 Poland. Sick, and angrily rehearsing again and again his trials with England, he remembered that he had in his stable a horse that had been given him by the King of England ; he ordered this animal to be turned out. He was advised to give it, instead, to Prince Anhalt, "the enemy of everything English." He consented, and thought that he would in this way be well revenged. At another time, he refused passports for wood destined for England. 55 One cannot, without placing in it some restrictions, call a man treacherous who so freely published his senti- ments. Europe knew what he thought; he cried it out. Upon each and every thing, he expressed himself with absolute freedom. At his Imperial Majesty he laughed "immoderately," and said: "He has not a sou, he is poor as a painter. This is the .... economy of the Court of Vienna." In the smoking-room, at table, he was never without pipe or glass. If he was content with the Emperor, he drank three consecutive times to His Majesty, draining it to the last drop. And he tired the Imperial Minister with these healths, and this before the French Minister, although he did not drink to the King of France for an hour and a half, nor honor poor La Chetardie with the shortest toast. Another day, he would drink to the King of France, and omit the health of the Emperor. He gave France more than one caress, and always took care to treat her circumspectly, but he hated her, and could not hide it. The first time he received La Chetardie, as was his custom, he intei- viewed him upon everything, the French troops, French game, the wine of Champagne, the marshals, the 88 FREDERICK THE GREAT. weak points of Magdeburg, Molinism, Jansenism, Parliament, and then, suddenly beginning to talk through his nose, "Why," asked he of La Chetardie, "were the Frenchmen of the olden times so grave and stately, and to-day, they are nearly all comedians ? " 56 In foreign politics, as in government, the King of Prussia acted with the easy-going fashion of a free indi- vidual. He was not a Chief of State who had inter- course with other States; he was a disagreeable, foul- mouthed person, who carried on his business with other persons. One of his ministers has well defined his man- ner: "To have a correct idea of # his sentiments in re- gard to England, consider him as an individual who takes his revenge at the risk of being hung." Frederick William knew well his own infirmity. One day he acknowledged it to his son: "Follow the example of thy father," said he to the Crown Prince, "in finance and in military affairs ; do better still when thou shalt be master . . .;" then, giving him a little friendly slap: "Take care not to imitate him in what is called ministerial affairs, for he understands nothing about that." 57 For this reason he did not like to negotiate him- self. He could not help saying what he thought: "It is stronger than I," said he. He was so incapable of diplomatic politeness that he reproached the Ministers of France and Austria at his Court for not disputing like "street arabs." One day, in an audience given to an Envoy Extraordinary from England, he threw upon the ground a paper that this personage presented to him, and turned his back. Another day he received the Min- ister of Holland, whose propositions displeased him ; he THE FATHER. 89 left the room as if in sudden haste for something. The Holland Minister waited respectfully, but at the end of half an hour he descended into the court-yard, where he learned His Majesty had gone off on horseback. His conversation disconcerted the diplomats. He led his interlocutor from Muscovia to Gibraltar, "from Gib- raltar to the Netherlands, then back finally to Port-Ma- li on, so as to pass suddenly to Constantinople, and return to Vienna." He had no fixed ideas except in the care of his own interests. He interrupted dissertations by one of his refrains : "Good for a few shovelfuls of sand," meaning to say that he "loved to acquire new territories for the ag- grandizement of his estates." To attain them, he would never do anything that was necessary ; but, to gratify him in this respect, the others had to run all the risks, he alone drawing out the profit. It was thus that his accredited Ministers, when near him, were the most un- happy diplomats. Berlin was their purgatory, their hell. Rottenburg would rather have become a "Carthu- sian" than remain longer at this Court. The Austrian Seckendorff, himself, the favorite, the indispensable companion at table and in the smoking-room, did not relish it either. Someone met him on the street in Ber- lin, and, surprised to see him there while the King was at Potsdam, asked him what he was doing: "Alas!" said he, "I am like the servants in the Gospel. I remain when they tell me to remain ; I depart when they tell me to depart. . . If the Emperor would give me a province for another year's service, the devil take me if I would accept." 58 90 FREDERICK THE GREAT. The king returned the sentiments that the diplomats expressed toward him. He did not like to see them, and would oftener send them to his ministers, who would receive them in conference, four around a table, and one of them holding a pen. You would think it was "a tribunal of the Inquisition, where a secretary reduced ad protocolum, on the instant, the most insignificant speech." The report was forwarded to the king, with the counsel, which he accepted or not, as it pleased him. He distrusted his ministers, and he had reason; nearly every one of them betrayed him; some sold themselves to France, and others to Austria. He did not know just how far they betrayed him ; but, of their treachery, which exceeded almost the improba- ble, he did not doubt. One of the most extraordinary traits of this prince was his absolute indifference to the infidelity of his agents, in foreign political matters. He wrote upon the report of one minister: "You are too fond of guineas;" on the report of another: "You are too fond of louis'," but he dismissed neither the one nor the other. It even pleased him that these "Mazarins," as he said, received from foreign sov- ereigns, what La Chetardie called "tokens of sentiment and essential proofs of gratitude." "I am aware," said he, "that many of my people are bribed by France, and I know them all. Well and good ! If France wishes to be so foolish as to give them pensions, they have but to accept. The money will remain in the country, and they and their children will spend it. . . . but they deceive themselves if they think they can lead me by the nose." One would suppose that he saw in these treach- THE FATHER. 91 eries but a means of importing hard cash. Besides, he arranged to have always two parties in his Ministry. One day he received, very gruffly, the Imperialists, who asked to have an Anglo-French colleague dismissed. He would listen to first one party and then the other, and reserve to himself the decision, which was, in sub- stance, always this: not to risk anything, nor to act. 59 What were the true reasons for this ? There seem to have been several. It certainly must have cost the King of Prussia very much to expose to peril such fine sol- diers, so well clothed and well equipped, and so perfect in the drill a la Prussian. We also know that the least displacing of troops interfered with the compu- tations of his receivers and the exact proportion of re- ceipts and expenses ; the surplus that he had to make each year was endangered, lost perhaps, replaced really by a deficit. But, on the same conditions that he would have risked a capital, when he had the hope of drawing from it a fine interest, Frederick William would have risked his soldiers, if he had seen a way of gaining a province. Now, he knew that no one was sincerely dis- posed to come to his aid, and he would, at the decisive hour, find himself alone against all. The inheritance of Juliers and Berg was the principal object of his am- bition; but France did not care about seeing Prussia at Dusseldorf; Holland dreaded still more this neighbor, so powerfully armed ; neither did the King of England, Elector of Hanover, one who laid claim to grand roles in Germany, wish the growth of the power of Prussia. The Emperor had been watching for a long time, with uneasiness, the progress of the Hohenzollern, and he had 92 FREDERICK THE GREAT. personal motives for not displeasing the competitors of the king to the succession to the duchies. Frederick William had then to do with a very strong opposing party. When he thought of the dangers he might have to encounter, he was as if taken with vertigo. Prussia was not yet solid ; he knew it well. He felt that she lived and moved in him; he nourished her; he fortified and animated her with his mind ; his prodigious activ- ity started the inertia of his incongruous subjects; his bureaux and his army organized a State and made a country, but the work was not yet finished. This Fred- erick William was the first true Prussian of Prussia, there are millions, to-day, of these Prussians: but he was the only one of his time, and if, a century after his epoch, it appeared possible, as Heinrich Heine said, " that Napoleon could whistle and Prussia would exist no longer," it would have been sufficient for Frederick William to take a false step, and Prussia would never have been born. Thus he did not dare to act alone, and, at the same time, he had too much pride to figure as a nonentity, in a combination. The ways of the great powers irritated him. France, England, Austria, Hol- land, held a high head with him, accustomed as they were to rule the world. He called them the ''quad- rille dancers," and yet he feared them while he mocked them. If he entered into treaties it was to be as equal with equal. He explained himself very frankly, at the time of the negotiations of the Hano- verian League. "I will not enter into war," said he, "for the benefit of the Hollanders, so that they may THE FATHER. 93 be able to sell at a higher price tea, coffee, cheese and china ! I wish to know about the pot aux roses (the secret). ..." This pot aux roses was that they were going to make war on the Emperor, and take some provinces away from him; "but to whom will fall, in the division, the provinces taken from the Emperor? ... If I make conquests will I retain them or will it be necessary to give them all up ? And if I give them up who will pay my war expenses ? I mean to know all the secrets, as well as the Very Christian King and the King of Great Brit- ain, and to regulate with all of them whatever comes up, as an equal party, not as a subaltern and an in- ferior. ... If I am going to accede to this Hanover alliance, I will not enter into it as an errand- boy." 60 He had very explicit reasons for speaking in this way ; he remembered the affronts received by his grandfather, the Great Elector, and his father, Fred- erick I.; the conquests that they had to surrender, treaties signed, after they fought in the wars, with- out even allowing them to consult their own in- terests. He did not wish to act alone, and yet was discon- tented with all other company: what then remained for him to do ? First to storm against all the other powers ; and he lent himself . to it with a right good will. One day, during a dinner, he was speaking, in a desultory way, of the affairs of the continent, "and ended the repast by making everybody drink a bum- per to the approaching confusion of all Europe." 61 This confusion he expected, hoped and prepared for, 94 FREDERICK THE GREAT. in husbanding all his strength. Already he was " re- spectable," and saw very well that they held him to be of some account, and he was proud of it. ''All the most imposing powers seek me, and emulate each other in fondling me, as they would a bride. They will always be obliged to seek a prince who has a hundred thousand men ready for action and twenty -five million crowns to sustain them." He had now gained that point where he had no need of anyone. Like his father and grandfather, he could have found subsidy in foreign countries if he had wished, but it was "a thing he had never done and would never do." He intended to remain his own master, and gloried "in following his own impulse," that is to say, "his momentary caprice." The repre- sentatives of the older powers had to take the greatest precautions with him: "I would rather eat bread and cheese all my life," said he, "than to suffer them to impose upon me the law of talking, when I do not wish to do so." 62 From time to time, he liked to make himself believe that he would act some day. He spoke of possible "revolutions" at the death of the Czarina, or of the King and Queen of Sweden, the King of Poland or of the Emperor: "All these successions are disputed," said he, "and even if the King of England should be missing, the Pretender would find followers enough to support him, to give perhaps occasion for some trouble." He survived the most of these events, which did not turn out as he expected, or he did not know how to profit by them ; he re- THE FATHER. 95 served himself perhaps for the "trouble" that would follow the death of the Emperor. He preferred however to leave to his son, with an account of the wrongs done him, the care of action and revenge. He pronounced more than one prophetic word, among others this one, as he pointed to the Crown Prince: "Here is one who will avenge me some day Da steht einer der mich rachen wird." It seems that he accepted philosophically the role that would be assigned to him in Prussian history. He wrote as early as 1722, in an Instruction for his successor, these remarkable words: "The Elector Frederick William has given to our House develop- ment and prosperity ; my father has acquired royal dignity ; I have made a State of the army and coun- try. Upon you, my dear successor, is devolved the maintenance of what there is and the gaining of those countries which belong to us through God and our right." THE INDIVIDUALITY OF FREDERICK WILLIAM. Frederick William was constantly occupied with his affairs. As they were never completed, and never went together, his mind knew no repose. He was born restless and turbulent, predisposed to misuse life and the practicality of life, forcing and aggravating it out of the natural, making of himself one of the most tortured beings ever known to history. He suffered in body as well as mind. His frame showed strength during the first years of his reign. His limbs were strong and well proportioned. From 96 . FREDERICK THE GREAT. out his serious, cold, oval face with its high fore- head, sparkled a mobile eye that saw everything. It could become, at will, intensely set on an object that it wished to scrutinize or on a soul that it wished to read. The lips seemed always ready to speak, not to say amiable things, but to interrogate, with an ex- pression of disdain, as if they were sure that the speaker was a liar or a knave. Frederick William 63 was a blonde in spite of himself : as a child, he ex- posed himself to the sun so as to brown his girl skin. As soon as he commenced to wear the short perruque a queue, he chose a brown one. He feared no fatigue, and exhausted himself and those around him. The horse, the carriage, the cart, the hunt, the table, the wine, the tobacco, were all too strong for him. Early in life, he was seized with the gout, then shaken by apoplexy, and swollen by dropsy. He grew so large that his waist measured four ells. The attacks of these maladies became more and more frequent; he became deaf from the effects "of an in- flammation of the ears ; " he would suddenly become drowsy, or again, he would swoon away ; and his face would be streaked blue and red. It is said that, at times, the skin under his thighs would become de- tached and look like a bladder of fresh pork. 64 We have the detail of one of his maladies: the sufferings he endured were horrible. He said that a king should know how to suffer better than any other mortal, but his stoicism was interrupted by fits of anger, and his natural endurance gave way to fury. It must never be forgotten, in judging Frederick William, that he lived in constant torture. THE FATHER. 97 It is not true that he was naturally wicked, and that he did not love even his own family. He assuredly loved his wife. He was but eighteen years old when he married, and had, up to the time of his marriage, so much modesty that he would blush when a lady would kiss his hand through respect. His disposition showed itself in his conjugal love. At twenty-five, when he became king, he already had five children; the queen bore him nine more. He was to the last a faithful hus- band. He came forth conqueror from the strong tempta- tions put upon his virtue, while on a trip to the Court of Dresden. He wrote : " I have returned, after this trial, as I departed," One day, while traveling, he took pleasure in talking to a pretty woman ; General Grumbkow offered himself as negotiator; the king re- pulsed him sharply. He did not intend to be untrue to his Fiekchen, or Fiji, as he called Sophia Dorothea. An- other time, he met one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, on a stairway, caught her by the waist and began cajol- ing her. He received a slap. "Oh! the wicked little devil!" he cried. This was all his complaint. These two anecdotes, which are perhaps not authen- tic, compose his history as a gallant, and in what a century! He esteemed his wife, and gave her a proof of it when he set out on his campaign for Pomerania. "If anything of importance happens," writes he to his secret counsel, "tell my wife and take her advice, Soil an meine Fran gesagt werden . . ." Frederick William was, per- haps, the only Hohenzollern that ever gave an order of this kind, for the principal function of queens in Prus- 98 FREDERICK THE GREAT. sia is maternity. He asked nothing more than to love his children. His first Instruction for the education of the Crown Prince was of a father who wished to be cher- ished by his son. It would seem that he had the qualities of a good husband and father. But he meant to rule in household as well as in state, without ar- guments, and he intended that his wife and chil- dren should have no other tastes than his, that they should bear with his ill-humor, even when it was exe- crable, and whenever it pleased him to bring it down upon those around him. The slightest resistance, the least hesitation irritated him. It was not necessary for the queen to oppose him long, before he would hurl at her words like these: "The loss of a woman is not more than the loss of a hollow tooth, which pains one while it is being pulled, but which one is delighted to be rid of the moment after." 65 If the opposition became worse, if it took the character of a rebellion, the good husband, the good father, gave himself up to extreme anger. Then, too, he lived very little with his family; the drill at Potsdam, the hunt, the trips of inspection, his solitary rides, separated him from them. He saw them around him at table, in the general confusion of a large company, and in the perpetual tumult of his thoughts. To live a sedative life, and, above all, to hold a court he had neither the taste nor the time. He passed four or five hours each day 66 in his cabinet, listening to re- ports, having the ministers' questions read, writing his answers, or designing them, for he responded as well by a rebus, and often in a very clear way; all comprehended what was meant by a gibbet on the margin of a question. THE FATHER. 99 He passed, on an average, two hours at his principal re- ports and all evening in drinking and smoking. Be- fore dinner, he would go to the parade; afterward take a walk, or ride in a carriage or on horseback; but upon the road or in the street, he worked. He talked of his affairs with those who accompanied him. He had oftener some object in these promenades; to surprise a sentinel, to watch over the work of the peasants and workmen, the buildings particularly, for he had the ambition to enlarge and embellish Berlin. It was one of his great pleasures to watch a house going up, and to enter into a conversation with the architects and builders. On his way he would stop to receive petitions, to ask people their names, or question the couriers as to where they were going ; he would give information to those seeking a street or a house. Once he entered a lodging where he heard a great uproar, and forced a couple who were quarreling to embrace. He was the terror of loungers, and dispersed with blows of his cane tfiose that lingered to play at bowls. His subjects dreaded to meet him, and evaded the meeting at need by flight. It is said that one day he carried on the following dialogue with one of these runaways: "Why are you running?" "Because I am afraid." "You must not be afraid, you must love me." And, to make the poor devil more sensible of his duty of loving, he gave him a good flogging. Very laborious were his inspections in the provinces. For these journeys no gilded carriages, nor outriders, nor lackeys, as in the time of his father, who seemed to be always posing before some Van der Meulen ; no 100 FREDERICK THE GREAT. ladies, whose gowns feared the dust, who retarded the departure in the morning, and had to be entertained all along the route with frivolities. Not even an escort, except along the frontier of the "anarchy" of Poland. Four or five post carriages, well equipped, the relay awaiting them at the hour appointed, were sufficient to transport the king, generals and counselors that had to travel with him. They worked while on the journey. It took two weeks for Frederick I. to go from Berlin to Konigsburg ; four days was enough for his son ; in three days Frederick William went from Berlin to Cleves. His visit was not expected : everywhere he desired to surprise the colonels, the Chambers of Administra- tion, the farmers, judges, foresters. All appearance of a reception was forbidden ; the king dined at an inn, as well at one as at another, and contented him* self with a chicken and soup, cabbage with salt meat, a roast of veal with butter, and cheese for a finish. He had not a minute to lose; he examined the regiments, the funds, the accounts, he counted the vacant places in the fields and in the cities. Between times he exercised his justice. He discovered the proof of malpractice in the accounts of the Domain of Lithuania, and ordered an inquest: the Counselor of the Domains, Von Schla- buth, found guilty of embezzlement of a sum destined for the establishment of colonies, was condemned to sev- eral years' imprisonment. The king did not confirm the judgment. He reserved his supreme decision for his next journey through Prussia. On arriving at Konigs- burg he summoned Schlabuth, reproached him for his crime, and declared he deserved to be hung. Schlabuth THE FATHER. 101 exclaimed: "It is not customary to hang noblemen;" furthermore, he had returned the embezzled funds. "I do not want your dirty money," cried the king, who gave the order to take him away. He had a gallows erected in the night, under the windows of the Chamber of Administration. There was great excitement in the city. An unprecedented action this, a condemnation, without trial, contrary to a judgment ! The family did everything to save the unfortunate man. The next day being Sunday, they had twenty-four hours to attempt to bend the judge. At divine service the preacher took for the text of his sermon the words: "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." The king wept, but the day following he convoked a meeting of the Chamber of Administration, and, under the eyes of the counselors, had their colleague hung. THE PLEASURES OF FREDERICK WILLIAM. Frederick William had also his hours of relaxation and pleasure, and some enjoyment of life. It was not at the door of philosophy he knocked, nor of science. He had a horror of all speculation that did not produce immediate practical application. When a child he had too often heard, at the court of his mother, who was the great friend of Leibnitz, about monads, infinitely great and infinitely small, and pre-established harmony. He understood nothing of these profound doctrines, and called bluntly all philosophy a Windmacherei, wind-making. As the wind did not pay the excises, the king was ready to prohibit the manufacture of it as use- less. He readily believed the counselors who repre- l6& FRftJD>ftRiCK THE GREAT. sented it to be dangerous. One day he committed a barbarous act against the most celebrated philosopher of his day. Wolf, a disciple of Leibnitz, taught the doctrines of his master at Halle. His rivals of the University and his adversaries, the bigots, organized a cabal against him. It is said they represented to the king that, according to the theories of Wolf, a Potsdam Grenadier could desert unscrupulously, alleging that he was, from creation, predisposed to the desertion in virtue of pre-established harmony. The king considering "that the letters and lessons of Professor Wolf were contrary to the religion revealed by the word of God," ordered the said professor to leave the city and king- dom in forty-eight hours, "under penalty of strangu- lation." Four years after, he interdicted the reading of Wolf's writings, filled with "atheistical principles," under penalty of hard labor for life. It is true that toward the latter part of his reign he saw his error. To make reparation, he did all that could be expected of him ; he wrote to Wolf, offered his excuses, made brill- iant overtures to him, and, in the most persuasive way, 67 urged him to return, but Wolf was not to be won ; he put off his entrance into Prussia until the accession of Frederick II., the King-Philosopher. Through the advice of Leibnitz, Frederick I. had founded a "society of scientists." He had given them a magnificent role: to glorify German Science, to purify the German Language, to study the History of Germany and the Church, Physics, Mathematics, Astronomy, Me- chanics, ways of propagating the faith and preserving the Kingdom of Prussia from inundations and fire. THE FATHER. 103 From this repertory several articles must have pleased Frederick William, notably the last. He did not with- draw the royal donation from the society. He even showed them marks of favor when they asked permis- sion to open an anatomical lecture hall, but, as they were thanking him, he said: "Work with more zeal than you have done heretofore. . . Your society must apply itself to inventions capable of advancing arts and sciences, but in a way that they may be generally useful; no wind-manufacturing; none of those lying dreams in which so many worthy men lose them- selves." He expressed his contempt for science in a most pecul- iar manner. He had in his own service a man by the name of Gundling, a great savant, a polygraph, whose very extended knowledge he used in matters of law and politics. He made him his commensal and the indis- pensable habitue of his "tabagie." Among other favors he gave him the entire use of his wine-cellar, knowing well that the doctor would abuse this privilege. He made him drunk every day; he enjoyed it, and desired others to be amused at the poor man's expense, by dirty, dishonoring jokes. He called him the "Court Jester," so as to heap upon him all the dignities he could think of that were ridiculous. He made him Grand Master of Ceremonies, Grand Chamberlain, a baron with grotesque armorial bearings, and President of the Society of Sciences, President after Leibnitz ! In the same man- ner he treated Dr. Fassmann and Dr. Bartholdi, Pro- fessor of Law in the University of Frankf ort-on-the-Oder, whom he called "Mr. Pandects," and the astronomer 104 FREDERICK THE GREAT. Graben zum Stein, whom he surnamed " Mr. Astralicus." Graben was also nominated President of the Academy of Sciences. The king took the trouble to reject the nomination. He boasted of Graben's knowledge of antiquities, new and old coins, physics, mechanics, botany, hydraulics, pneumatics, statics, and cabal, of his art of knowing how to examine evil spirits, with the use and abuse that could be made of it, of the wonderful preadamite doctrine, history, physics, logic, the combinatory art of algebra, etc., etc. Graben had, among other duties, the arrangement of the calendar. He had to be circumspect in his predictions, to announce the fewest possible bad days, and the greatest number of good days. He had the charge of watching over spirits. The incredulity of men had, of course, passed the bounds of hobgoblins, ghosts, etc., but there were still dwarfs, wehr-wolves; they could be found in the lakes, marshes, caverns, and hollows of old trees: Graben had to work out their destruction. For each one of these wicked spirits that he captured, dead or alive, he was to receive a prize of six thalers. And, lastly, according to an ancient tradi- tion, the soil of Brandenburg, principally around the old monasteries, was sown with treasures. Every ten years, to assure herself that these treasures were undisturbed, Rome sent Jesuits and other vermin there. Graben must try to catch these rascals, but the most important of all was to find the treasures, by the means that were used then ; the king put at his disposition the books on magic that he found in the archives, with the speculum Salomonis. . . "In witness of which we have signed THE FATHER. 105 this ordinance with our own hand, and appended thereto our royal seal. . ." 68 Frederick William was not insensible to the charm of the arts. He was a natural musician, and loved music. From the "Chapelle" of his father he had kept an artist whom he had made Master of the "Chapelle des Haut-bois " of his Grenadier Guard. From time to time, in the evening, he had them play the choruses and airs of two of Handel's operas that were his favorites. Sometimes he would drop off to sleep, or seem to do so, and the leader would skip a few measures. The king would always notice it: " You have not played such an air," he would say, and then sing the first notes; they had to recommence. He thus heard, hundreds and hun- dreds of times, the same arias. He did not wish to be disturbed by an audience : in the long hall where the musicians were stationed at one end with their music- stands and candles, he would place himself at the other, all alone, in the dark. It was evident, then, that he had a taste for this fine heroic music, but, as he could not keep from mixing irony with the serious things of life, and turning everything to coarse comicality, he .was delighted the day that the Master surprised him with a pig sextet that he had composed from a story told in the smoking-room. The king had him repeat the piece twenty times, while he held his sides and laughed until the tears streamed down his face. He was a painter, as well as a musician, during his leisure moments. When the bad weather or gout con- fined him to his apartments, as he could not " remain doing nothing," he painted. Pictures by him, exe- 106 FREDERICK THE GREAT. cuted during these fits of the gout, bore the signature: In tormentis pinxit. F. W. He preferred caricature sketching. He liked droll beasts, bears and monkeys. It is told that at the principal post of Potsdam was an old bear who understood the military commands. At the cry: Heraus! he would go out, raise himself up on his hind legs, and fall in line with the company; he recognized, it appears, the voice of the king, who was very proud of it. The king had at the palace, among other animals, cubs and monkeys, that he used for low farces at the " Tobacco Club." These animals were the principal inspirers of his pencil. He would dress them up as men, and make them play the human comedy, like the artists and writers of the Middle Ages. Through conscientious scruples he mistrusted come- dies; so he did not have, like his father, a French Com- edy, nor an Italian Opera; but, one day at Charlotten- burg, he admired extravagantly a certain Eckenberg, who held on his extended arm a drummer seated on a cannon. He immediately accorded him a privilege. "Whereas, Mr. Eckenberg, celebrated for his extraor- dinary strength, has given at the Palace of Charlotten- burg many remarkable proofs of the power with which God has endowed him, in presence of and for the great pleasure of His Majesty; seeing that the said party has requested His Majesty, in all humility, not only to give him a letter of recommendation, but also permission to visit his kingdom, provinces and countries, and give an exhibition of this said strength in all the cities and towns that he pleased," order was given to the civil and military authorities to take care of and give him aid. THE FATHER. 107 Eckenberg, that they commonly called the " Strong Man," was promoted to the dignity of " Master of the Pleasures of the King," and " Royal Prussian Court Comedian." The privilege was conferred to give, "be- sides these exhibitions of strength and rope-dancing, theatrical representations with the assistance of his troop, for the recreation of those who did not have too much to do. . . , under the condition that he would represent and play things that were not impious, sinful, scandalous, dishonest or injurious to Christianity, but, on the contrary, innocent things which would procure people honest amusement, honestes Amusement. . ." Major-General Count Alexander Yon DOnhoff was given the charge of these comedians, and we have from this celebrated military man such report, where he lays before His Majesty: 1st, That, conformably to the gra- cious decision of His Majesty, stating that the deserter, John Baptist Mumieux, must be hung, he has "notified him of the death-sentence;" 2d, that the "Strong Man," Eckenberg, dismissed Harlequin and the Dentist, but that, after the affair had been explained to him, this sending off of two of his best actors, without the permis- sion of His Majesty, he had taken them back again, and had counted out to them their weekly wages. Another day the king learned that the "Strong Man" and his wife, while they were both drunk, threw themselves upon the comedian Walldorf, and without cause, heaped him with insults, blows and kicks. The General had to tear him away from the hands of Eckenberg, or he would have been strangled to death. But the two drunkards ran upon the stage, insulting and maltreating 108 FREDERICK THE GREAT. the actors. The play had been interrupted ; the people fled. The General had to conduct the " Strong Man" and his wife to the post-house, while "they honored him with curses." Thus the Court Theater was not particularly condu- cive to the improvement of morals. 69 Their favorite plays were Italian farces, ' < full of agreeable intrigues, and highly burlesque," as the playbills stated. They employed both men and dummies; the king preferred the dummies; in reality, he liked only the marionettes; sometimes he would distrust them. Once he was pres- ent at a play, and noticed some shocking words that were uttered by one of these puppets. He gave an or- der to Roloff, Counselor of the Consistory, to go to the theater and tell them what he thought of this play. The minister of the gospel recoiled from this office, in- voking to his aid the duties and dignity of his calling. The king admitted these reasons, but he related his em- barrassment to one of his confidential men, Eversmann, Chamberlain-janitor of the palace, and he was acquainted with a deacon who would undertake the function of censor. The deacon received orders to go to the play that evening, and place himself in view of the king. He was to listen attentively, and as soon as a passage offended him he was to draw out his tablet and make a note of it. The king, who was looking at him, noticed the impropriety of the speech, arose abruptly, and left the playhouse. That very evening he ordered the come- dians to leave the city in twenty-four hours, forbidding them to ever return. So it was, even the marionettes had their faults, and THE FATHER. 109 the pleasures of the theater their disappointments. They tried to make the king believe that the hunt itself was not innocent, and that the soul of a Christian was in peril there; but here their trouble was lost; he always con- tinued to be a passionate hunter. In Prussia, he made raids on the bear and wild ox. In Brandenburg and Pomerania, he hunted the deer, wild boar, pheasant, heron, hare and quail. He threw into this diversion wild enthusiasm; firing in one day six hundred shots to bring down a hundred quail. The wild-boar chase was a great massacre. But his real pleasure was to force the deer. Parks of several thousand square miles were kept for this "hunt at force." The king would follow at a trot or gallop, for four, five or six hours, the dogs that tormented these animals. In the chase alone, he loved luxury. The keeping up of these parks cost him a considerable sum. His pack was chosen with great care, and better lodged than many of his subjects. The huntsmen had a well-fed look in their livery. He despised court ceremony, but it was strictly observed in the forest. When the deer was brought to cover, the Grand Master "gave him the death blow," detached the antlers and presented them to the king on a silver plat- ter. The view-halloo was sounded. As a sign of victory, the king and all his suite put a twig in their hats. Upon a car covered with branches the animal was taken in procession to the castle. According to the ancient cus- toms, the dogs then received their booty, "their right of the hunt," that is to say, the quarry. Things did not pass more solemnly before the Em- peror, when he deigned to come in at the death, but I 110 FREDERICK THE GREAT. think that his Imperial Majesty did not give himself so much trouble for the hunt, nor did he so sharply taste of its pleasures. On winter days Frederick William rose at five o'clock, rode two or three leagues in an open carriage, and commenced the hunt at break of day. In the most disagreeable weather he would take a cold breakfast in the open air. His companions thought to warm themselves by drink. The king, rough and crusty as he was, enjoyed this play of primitive life. He was a great hunter and a great gourmand. Fred- erick William ate enormously. At table, as everywhere else, he wished the substantial and the solid. No puffed-up things where there was "wind." Even in the soup he must have a good piece of veal, or a chicken, or a fish, to sharpen the appetite. As a good German, he was fond of liver and pork in all its forms. He often went to the kitchen to watch the head cook and teach him economy, to beat him if he wasted the but- ter, or if he stole in his accounts, but also to give him a few instructions. He put the finishing touches to his education when he dined out, or rather, at an inn, " The King of Portugal." One day, when he had eaten some good mutton tripe with cabbage, he returned with the recipe. He had a grateful stomach. He enjoyed a good soup at the house of Ilgen, one of his minis- ters: he wrote a note of thanks, and sent one of his cooks to learn from one of Ilgen's how to make a good bouillon, and to instruct his cook in return how to pre- pare fish. He assured this minister of his particular favor. " You can," said he, "make use of me when- ever you please." As just at that time there was a THE FATHER. Ill quarrel in the royal household, and Ilgen was on the queen's side, this dinner had the effect of reconciling, for awhile, the king and his wife. Again Frederick Will- iam was very kind and genial. A good dinner gave him nearly as much pleasure as a grand recruit. The Foreign Ministers knew this, and entertained him as well as they possibly could. Among other arguments against his colleague and Austrian rival, La Chetardie employed truffles with oil ; for the king did not disdain, after the heavier dishes, to indulge in certain delicacies such as truffles and oysters, provided there was a boun- tiful supply of them. He ate his hundred oysters. Only these good things were costly; they did not appear on the royal table except on grand occasions. The king, to reconcile his ideas of economy with his petty weaknesses, loved to make a good meal at the expense of others. He drank as he ate, without restraint, and paid even more attention to his cellar than to his cuisine. He did not like champagne, where there was "wind" and foam, but delighted in the strong wines of the Rhine and Hungary, that he ordered himself, with a thorough knowledge of the good vineyards and their good years. The dining never ended without some of the party being warmed up considerably. The king obliged his guests to drink excessively; it was one of the ways of making love to him, that of taking a little too much wine. 70 At nightfall the king would hold one of his "evening revels." In a bare hall, around a long, wooden table, were ranged seats of wood. He took his place at the upper end. The habitues and invited guests had their 112 FREDERICK THE GREAT. places marked : before them were a pitcher of beer, a glass, and a clay pipe in a wooden case. Upon the table were baskets filled with coarse tobacco, and some peat which burned in glass receptacles. Everybody had to drink and smoke, or appear to do so. Those to whom the tobacco was sickening had to hold in their hand an empty pipe, and puff at it now and then. After an hour or two they placed on the table bread, butter and cheese; upon the side-tables there was ham and cold veal. When the king had a distinguished visitor he would regale the company with a salad and fish; he would serve the fish and make the salad. On these evenings they drank Hungarian wine, and the conversation was prolonged far into the night. The king smoked incessantly. During one sitting of the " Tobacco Club," when the king was entertaining His Majesty, King Stanislas Lecszinski, the two royal majesties smoked more than thirty pipes. At table, as well as in his smoking apartments, the company was a strange one: generals, ministers, officers, foreign envoys, found themselves with buffoons and court- jesters. When they were at Wusterhausen, the schoolmaster would often come and smoke his pipe there in the evening ; the king held him in great esteem, be- cause he had never been able to persuade the children of the village to cry with him: "Our master is an ass!" The conversation would overstep all bounds. Even when they would have a "discourse," or a report, or perhaps a reading from the journals, the king, a man who made constant use of the interrogation point, would interrupt by questions, and the discussion would THE FATHER. 113 begin. In the autumn of 1727 he had at his court a young Pietist pastor by the name of Francke. While at table, the points at issue were none but the most edi- fying, salvation, sin, hell, purgatory, apparitions. The minister of the gospel had no time to eat, so harassed was he by the king's questions. He expressed himself with unction, for he had " breathed to God" a prayer, begging Him to guide his tongue; but Gundling was among the guests, and he arrived drunk. He made "astonishing gestures, arose from table and went fall- ing among the pages, returned, howled, and then went off again." The pastor prayed the Lord to be merciful, and prevent such like scandals ! 71 However, the presence of the queen and princesses imposed a certain restric- tion. At the " tabagie" they were men among men. The vulgar farces and brutality had their full sway, with a mixture of scriptural sayings and guardroom curses. The king gave free scope to his humor, sus- taining his rights upon the duchies, telling of his mor- tifications and his hopes, storming against the " qua- drille dancers," or perhaps talking of maneuvers or tac- tics, then returning to stories of the hunt or war, recol- lections of campaigns in the Netherlands and Pomerania. These subjects came up again and again, for Frederick William pertinaciously repeated. ACTS OF VIOLENCE, FOLLY AND DESPOTISM. At the hunt, at table, in his smoking apartments, and with the queen during their days of harmony or recon- ciliation, Frederick William passed the happiest hours of his life. These hours by no means formed the 114 FREDERICK THE GREAT. greater part of his passionate existence. The violent rages to which he would give vent showed only an abnormal state of his rude, coarse nature. No slave- trader, I imagine, distributed more blows with the stick than did this king. Not to mention his family trage- dies, there was not a class of his subjects, the officers , excepted, that did not feel the touch of the royal cane. He beat his domestics right and left. They relate the story at Berlin " that he had cabinets furnished with large sticks, placed at certain distances one from the other, to be more convenient, according to where he happened to be, so as to apply blows to those who ap- proached him and did not gratify his fancy." He gave a blow for an answer that did n?ot content him, whether it was really bad, or so good that he could not reply to it. He met the brewer of Potsdam in the street: "Why do you sell your beer so dear?" said the king. "Because I am governed by the price of barley. If your Majesty will give me the permission to procure it at Stralsund, where it is cheaper, I will be able to lower my prices." Nothing more just; so the king, after having come to terms with the "Swede" brewer, gave him twenty blows with his cane. He struck him, by way of justice, to ex- ecute the sentence that he had pronounced himself in petto. A Jesuit, saying that he was converted to Protest- antism, but who nevertheless remained a Jesuit, being suspected of political intrigue, was arrested ; his papers were burned, however, and no proof could be found on him : the king had an interview with this man in the wood, "and took the trouble to give him a volley of blows with his stick." One day a THE FATHER. 115 sentence being rendered by a jury, was interrupted by his blows given on the shoulders and in the faces of the magistrates, who fled, gnashing their teeth, and he followed them even to the stairway. It is true, he did not beat his ministers, but many a time he had the desire to do it. Once, while dining, before twenty-five guests, among whom there were some of his ministers, he asked the Envoy of France: "If I beat one of my ministers will you send the information to France?" "I hope," answered Rottenberg, "that your Majesty will not put my discretion to such a test." 72 All the foreign residents, Frederick William's own ministers and the queen attributed these proceedings to a mental derangement, and expected any moment "to see the poor prince's head turned." In truth, traces of mania were not lacking in the series of anecdotes of this reign. To have a live fish scaled and oblige his guests to eat it in that condition ; to threaten his physi- cians "with imprisonment of the faculty" if they did not relieve him within a given time of some pimples on his tongue; to beat a doctor because he did not cure one of his little girls quick enough of smallpox; to take a walk through the city with his suite at ten o'clock at night, by the light of torches, crying and making them cry with the rest of the canaille so vociferously that Sauveterre, "if he had not seen them with his own eyes, would have thought that they were animals being driven to market;" to ride out alone continually, and to fire at a miller who passed by him, these are truly fits of mania. The king, too, had the^o.-fits periodically. "Spring is a 116 FREDERICK THE GREAT. bad season for him," wrote Rottenburg. " He rides out alone, as usual, when divine inspiration or rest- lessness for a change of place torments him. He fell, Thile going at a gallop. His horse gave him a kick in the head. He was saved by a forester." He often had moods of melancholy; for hours he would remain mute, "with great tears falling from his eyes." He had nocturnal terrors, and would leap suddenly from his bed, and go to awaken the queen, telling her "that he had thoughts and dreams so frightful that he could not sleep ; that he did not know where to go; that it seemed that they followed him everywhere, and that they would kill him, accompany- ing these words with gestures and cries that showed plainly he was not himself." His spells of rage, when he would foam at the mouth, ended in fits of stupidity. He heard a preacher, in regard to a fire which had destroyed a portion of Berlin, hold forth upon the destruction of Jerusalem; he asked himself: "Is not the conflagration that has taken place in my capital a sign of the destruction of my people." Upon leaving church he fell into a revery, then came the "black melancholy." In these moments he would maltreat pitilessly those who ap- proached him. After this, from lassitude, he would fall back in his arm-chair, where he remained seated, with his elbows on the table, for two hours at a time, his eyes set, staring at each one who entered or left the room, without saying a word. 73 For his wickedness and suffering Frederick William was, in part, responsible. He w 5^the headsman of his THE FATHER. 117 body; in his furious spells were recognized the effects of alcohol, but, as I have said, he was of a restless na- ture. He had in him, at birth, the disposition to tor- ment and render himself unhappy. The care of his affairs, the passion to do his work to the best of his ability, the sentiment of responsibilitv>toward God and "the King of Prussia" troubled him, and partially ex- plains his excesses. Everybody noticed that, when affairs of state were going along smoothly, the king would also be better, and his temper would quiet down. He had his rages, from indigestion caused by oysters and cabbage. He had them on account of a certain regiment badly maneuvered, or because such a receiver had stolen, or that the "quadrille-dancers" had treated him like an errand-boy. Such a man could not be loved. The only sentiments that he inspired were dread and horror, mixed with some pity. The days that his subjects lived, in his reign, were dark. He was, in the full sense of the word, a despot. "I will chastise you exemplarily, Russian fashion," said he. Russian fashion! In fact, he did resemble, in more than one trait, with less gen- ius, be it understood, his neighbor, Czar Peter, whom he strongly admired. Between these two men the prin- cipal difference was marked by longitude. Frederick William reigned at the extremity of the old, historic European region; but he was included within this reign, while th> country of Peter, according to the ge- ography and politics of the time, was Asia. The King of Prussia was*a part of Europe and the Holy Empire : his subjects had the right of men; he was more civilized, 118 FREDERICK THE GREAT. more of a Christian, than the great barbarian; a Czar Peter, attenuated by race and surroundings. His orgies never reached indecency. The queen had a hard life with him, but he never raised his hand to her. It was not the ax the royal hand wielded, but the stick; if, however, he submitted this Empire to a better and higher civilization, it was not without rebellion. In reality, he admitted no law that interfered with his supreme right : he was an autocrat. He had a horror of lawyers, " poor devils of jurists," and he held magistrates in contempt. One day he was requested to give employment to a young man. He wrote: "If he has intelligence and a good head, put him in the Chamber of Administration. If he is an imbecile, make a magistrate of him." There is in this sentiment, strange for a king to have, the rancor of a contestor who has lost many suits, for the judges often put the wrong on the agents of his domains. There is also in it a disdain for an obscure science, and old, un- decipherable parchments. But it seems to me well that Frederick William did not admit the interposition be- tween himself and subjects of a body of judges, nor the ways of justice. His incapability of disentangling an abstraction made him incarnate himself as justice. He was the judge in flesh and bones; he distributed justice personally, like the kings of primitive mon- archies, like St. Louis on the steps of the Sainte Cha- pelle, or at the foot of the oak at Vincennes, but not with a spirit of mercy or charity. If he corrected the judgments, it was to increase the punishment. He THE FATHER. 119 pronounced motu proprio imprisonment at Spandau and the penalty of death. Thus, no one felt safe from his will, his caprices, his fits of rage. In these crises, when "out of respect to his crown, they could not compare him to a maniac with a razor in his hand," everybody trembled, and committed their souls to God. Even the Foreign Min- isters were afraid. Once, during, it is true, one of the greatest storms of passion that the king ever had, the French Minister begged his government to make provision for his safety: "without which I will have a sorry time of it." 74 Did not the king take it into his head at one time, upon hearing the news that some of his recruiters were arrested in Saxony and condemned to death, to send word to his minister resident there, that if one of these men were touched he would be hung ? Judge by this the terror of his subjects. And so they longed for the moment when they should be rid of him. Even his officers, whom he held under such terrible discipline, and whom he ruined by oblig- ing them to make recruits throughout Europe, detested him heartily. Forty of his big Grenadiers, exasperated by hard drills and bad treatment, laid a plot to set fire to the four corners of Potsdam, to roast him there and bury him in the ruins. The civil population were sub- jected to the sight of the corporals executing their order to recruit immediately forty supernumeraries for each company, "by arresting by main force in the streets and houses, wherever they could be found, even children of six years, whom the officers forced the fam- ilies to ransom. " 120 FREDERICK THE GREAT. Thus there is no house where there are no murmurs. "The people are greatly discontented. They hope and believe that this distress cannot endure always. There are all the appearances," wrote Rottenburg, "of a revolution. Everything is preparing for it." The king bitterly felt his unpopularity; he knew his death was desired, even near him, in his family, a thing which fairly enraged him. In one of his attacks a doc- tor made the remark "that it was not necessary for him to go every day to the parade." He answered "that they would believe him dead if he did not go." He would have preferred really to be sick, provided that they believed him well, rather than be cured by giving the public the pleasure that he supposed his illness would give them. 75 FREDERICK WILLIAM'S RELIGION. From the public hatred, from his pain, sorrow and passion, Frederick William sought refuge in God. His faith was sincere, warm, expressive; it had great bursts of enthusiasm, but it was simple as well as practical. He wished no erudition, and became irritated with the dis- putes of the theologians. He mistreated the professors and preachers who resisted his desire to reconcile the Lutherans and Calvinists. "The difference between our two evangelical religions is but a quarrel between priests," he said. "From the outside the difference is great, but when one looks into it well, one can see that the faith is the same upon all points, upon salvation, and upon communion. Only, among the preachers, some make the sauce more bitter than others. May THE FATHER. 121 God pardon all priests ! For they, who stir up < school- rats' * to put at variance the true word of God, will have to render an account before His tribunal. The true pastors, those that say they must be toler- ant toward one another and apply themselves only to augmenting the glory of Christ, w T ill be saved. For it will not be said (on judgment day): Art thou a Lu- theran or art thou a Reformer (Calvinist)? It will be said : Hast thou observed my commandments, or hast thou been a good Dlsputator f It will be said : To the fire or to the devil with the contentious ones; but, to those who have observed my commandments, come with me into my kingdom. May God be merciful to all ! May all his evangelical children observe his command- ments. As to those who cause disunion, may God send them to the devil." As much as the theological disputes, he hated vain eloquence, " oratorical expressions, artistic, allegorical, and flowery words . . . useless repetitions, diffuse explications of texts. . . ." Through an official order he forbade the use of rhetoric " by all preachers under the age of forty," those who were older than that being incapable of changing their habits. He prohib- ited their preaching more than an hour, under penalty of a fine of two thalers. An hour was enough "for a short and edifying explanation of the text, to find conclusions, and conclusions, too, that would touch the hearts of the congregation and convince them." The duty of the pastor was, "to awaken clear ideas in the understanding, and to incline the will to do right, 122 FREDERICK THE GREAT. not to show his art and erudition." It was to teach "active Christianity, thatiges Christenthum" Frederick William meant by active Christianity, that which would be of service in practical life, such as he understood it. That which he called drawing conclu- sions from a text was, for example, to excite his Grenadiers to heroism, after their having heard the story of David killing Goliath, or of Benjamin, who, with a stick, felled an Egyptian armed cap-d-pie. Of the two Testaments, the old most properly applied to the king's service. Thus, his God was the God of Israel, the God of armies, who, in his anger, pun- ished for revenge. Frederick William must have been as sensible to the poetry of the Bible as he was to the music of Handel, and was moved by the singing of certain psalms; but his ear was deaf to the words of the gospel and to the mystic parables. If he had ever meditated upon the evangelical invitation to pious in- ertia and to the holy repose upon the bosom of the Sav- iour, he could not have repressed an interior protestation. The texts which speak of the birds of the air, nour- ished by the divine hand, and of the lilies clothed in splendor, though they spin not, appeared to him to have a dangerous application. If his eyes happened to fall upon the verses telling of Jesus' visit to Lazarus, he quickly turned the page, but not so quickly as not to give the right to Martha instead of Mary, for, had he been in the Saviour's place, he would have beaten Mary. And then, besides, he confessed he was powerless to compre- hend the charity of Christ. "You need not teach me," said he to Pastor Francke, THE FATHER. 123 "that if one gives me a blow on one cheek I must pre- sent the other, too." "The words of Christ are there," answered the pastor, "and cannot be changed." Francke explained, then, that the Saviour did not absolutely command you to turn the other cheek, and that He desired only to prevent individual vindica- tion. "Yes," replied the king, "we are in a ter- rible position; if we wish to let everything pass, we are taken for idlers and cowards; if we wish to avenge ourselves we run the risk of losing our souls or the souls of others. The question is, what to do?" " I know well what I would do," said Francke. And the king added: "So do I. Thou wouldst say to one who attacked thee: My dear friend, I am pained to see you sin in this way. May God pardon you!". "Ex- actly," said Francke, "and what I could do, others could do." "Not I," retorted the king, "that does not apply to me ! " 77 It was not, then, the merciful God that Frederick William invoked in his short prayers or consulted in the long close intercourse. One day he reproached Ilgen in such a violent manner, accusing him of partiality in regard to England, that the unhappy man began to cry, and finally fainted, which termi- nated the controversy. The king declared "that he was going to take a horseback ride, so that he could pray to God." He wandered about the fields alone for over four hours. " On his return he poured forth all the horrible invectives imaginable against England, saying that he would have full revenge." Rotten- burg, who recited the scene to Ilgen, ended with these 124 FREDERICK THE GREAT. words: "Time and modesty prevent me from repeat- ing the infamous and obscene language used in this discourse." The Christian whom God inspired with such anger could not find much comfort in his faith. So it was, even in his religion, Frederick William was restless, unsteady. He knew well that his duty was "to spread abroad the honor of God and the royalty of Jesus Christ." He wished his subjects to feel the word of God in their hearts as he did in his heart. But he was not contented with himself. "I am a wicked man," said he to Fran eke. " If I am good one day, I return to my wickedness the next." He feared for the salva- tion of his soul, and he was afraid of hell, afraid of the devil. "Ah! yes, the way to heaven is very hard, Ja, es ist schwer in Himmel zu kommen/" Difficult above all for a king, who was responsible not only for his own sins, but for those he allowed to be omitted or committed by others. This was the reason that, during his hours of melancholia, he spoke of abdicating: "I do not see any other way for my salvation, and I should like so much to be saved !" 78 He saw himself, then, re- tired to his palace at Wusterhausen, with ten thousand crowns a year. He shared with his wife and daughters the care of the housekeeping: "I will pray to God, and will have a care to the economy of the country." He seemed born, in fact, for this life of a country gentleman. He would have cultivated his ground mar- velously well ; he would have improved it each year, cleared the woods, drained the marshes, established a brewery or distillery, constructed new buildings, and THE FATHER. 125 made sure of the sale of his products. He would have kept all hands under strict discipline, meddling with ev- erything, even to the laundry, kitchen and pantry. He would have been upon all backs at the same time, crying out, scolding, and giving blows. He would have been the most ardent hunter among the Junker of Branden- burg. He would have been at the head of the largest eaters and strongest drinkers, at a carousal or intem- perate repast, a la Pantagruel. In the evening he would have smoked his pipe with his people and neighbors, discussed at length upon the subjects of sowing grain, fertilizing the ground, upon the hunt, comparing the merits of wine and beer, and arguing upon grace and original sin. He would have prayed to God with his family and domestics, and then alone, asking him in all simplicity to spare his harvests from hail, and reserve it for the fields of others. He would have sung the psalms in church and at home, and found in the Bible applications of active Christianity for his intendants and domestics. He would have economized with his ten thousand crowns, and added to this economy the annual surplus of his farm, for each year he would have pro- duced ein plus. He would have at last slept in the arms of the Saviour, leaving to his heir the finest estate in the country, and a nice pile of gold in order to make it still more valuable, to buy such and such a domain that he desired, or to gain a lawsuit that he had always wished to engage in against such and such a one, with- out daring to do so, because he invariably mistrusted judges and justice, and the fear of losing it had calmed his passion for gain. 126 FREDERICK THE GREAT. Upon the throne, Frederick William was this gentleman farmer. He governed his kingdom like a proprietor his estate. Instead of acres, there were thousands and thousands of squares that he cleared or drained. Instead of barns and stables, he built cities. King, instead of an ordinary individual, the ob- jects of his activity were on a larger scale, as well as his good qualities and his defects, his good and bad passions, his joys and sorrows. But he it is who was always on the scene of action, and with all his indi- viduality, his strange personality. His strong, clear intellect, whenever it was applied to things that he knew, and over which he had direct authority, was capable of seeing all the details, each one separately, but also in its place in the whole. He was fond of the real, the visible, the tangible; a contemner of everything luxurious and ideal. Always occupied in regulations, he was fully satisfied in the contemplation of a model regiment, where everything was in its place, battalions, companies, sections, men, and upon each man each piece of uniform and arms; where the motion of the individ- ual was but a portion of the whole movement; where all the attention was fixed on the number of steps desired. Like a regiment, the king maneuvered agriculture, industry, and religion ; but he was troubled by the slightest resistance to classification and placing in the ranks. He did not know how to find the true mode of relationship to exterior powers. At the least hitch he would lose patience, mourn over it, and suffer. Then he would divert himself by the grotesque, by carica- ture, and by a certain taste for drollery which reached THE FATHER. 127 the fantastic, or he would solace himself through anger, or by orgies, or perhaps, at last, make his prayers to God, lay his griefs before his Maker. In these few moments he was sincere, honest and frank, having neither the power over himself to dissimulate, nor the time to arrange his lies. His cj)irtempt Jx>r jjeremony, his distaste for vain ..show, --were, his princely virtues; he went straight to the fact, the real. His application and activity were of such intensity that they penetrated the men and the countries over which they were exercised, and created a force that was marked with his impress. The Prussia of bureaus and barracks, devoted to the God of armies, stubbornly at work, proud of herself even to boastfulness, disciplined even to servitude, is truly the one that Frederick William reared in sorrow and affliction. CHAPTER III. THE CONFLICT BETWEEN FATHER AND SON FIRST SYMP- TOMS AND CAUSES OF CONFLICT. In the month of March, 1724, Frederick William and his son honored with their presence a fete given by General von Grumbkow, one of the principal minis- ters of the Court of Prussia. The king suddenly said, pointing to the Crown Prince: "I should like to know what is passing in this little head. I know his ideas are not the same as my own, class er nicht so denkt wie ich ; there are people who give him other sentiments than mine, and excite him to blame everything ; they are rascals." He repeated the word, and, addressing his son, said: "Fritz, listen to what I am going to say to thee. Keep always a good, large army; thou canst not have a better friend, and, without this friend, thou wilt not be able to sustain thyself. Our neigh- bors desire nothing better than to make us turn a somersault. I know # their intentrions; thou wilt learn to know them. Believe me, do not trust in vanity; attach thyself to the real, halte dich an das Reelle. Have thou a good army and money. In these consist the glory and the security of a prince." Saying this, he gave Fritz some little taps on the cheek, which became harder and harder, and finally resembled blows. 79 At the time of this first open disagreement between FATHER AND SON. 129 _j[athex-an d aon, tho Cr owir Prinre~ivas-4w-elTe years~o-Ldr The misunderstanding was already complete and well known. The foreign ministers informed their courts, and in their dispatches commented upon the king's words. The prince's nature could not support the tax upon his strength that his father imposed. Frederick William tired and harassed him so much that the child had an old lo ok, as though he had been through many campaigns ^ and walked with his back cur ved. The king wished to_accustom_him to _hard ships: every mark of weakness orjigli eaten e ss enraged j iim. He had a ter- rible scene with his son for wearing gloves at the hunt on a bitter cold day. Another time he designated a horse that Fritz should ride; the equerry ventured to remark that the animal was hard-mouthed ; the king pushed him off and ordered him to keep quiet; but, on leaving Potsdam, a gust of wind blew His Majesty's hat off, which made the prince's horse run away; he had the presence of mind to take his feet from the stirrups and throw himself to the ground. He injured his knees, hip and neck. The guard of his sword so hurt his side that he spat blood. On their return the queen became excited ; she groaned and cried. The king was exasperated about it; he ordered "his son to appear the* next day at mount of guard. The wounded prince was actually there, unable to have his arm in the sleeve of his jacket. The prince had a decided taste for elegance and mag- nificence, and all the luxuries of life. He had but few means of gratifying this propensity, but he did what he could. He did not like to eat with a two-pronged 130 FREDERICK THE GREAT. steel fork, which was in use in the inns throughout Germany, and resembled a defensive weapon. The king surprised him one day, eating with a three-pronged silver fork He beat him. 80 If some fairy had permitted Frederick William to make three wishes at the birth of his son, he would have expressed them without a moment's hesitation : ' ' May my son b e a good _e canomist, soldier and-Chris- tian." But Fritz was not given to economy. The king wished that the prince should keep an "account of his ducats," as he formerly did, with an exactitude that made his mother despair and become alarmed to see him a "miser at so tender an age," but Fritz left this commission to others. He did not wish to learn how "to manage his money." 81 MoreovBi^J be was unse lfish, liberal an d cha ritable. In a journey that he made while stopping at MagcTeburg for the first time, he was offered the customary present that the city owed to the heir-ap- parent, he refused it. Forced by his father to accept the gift, he declared he would keep it until his acces- sion, and then distribute it among the poor inhabitants oppressed with heavy taxes. In passing through the city of Stassfurt, they wished to "honor him with two hundred ducats:" he ordered it to be given to the poor, and forbade his tutors to breathe a word of this generosity to the king. 82 F rjtz^jl i d not_JH^ e_ mill tary men. He found them coarse and ridiculous, and preferred to their company "men who knew something." He played tricks on the generals. He dined one day in Westphalia, with the king, at the Castle of Rosendaal, the estate of Gen- FATHER AND SON. 131 eral von der Mosel. After dinner they were going on a hunt. The old general, who drank a little more than was reasonable in order to honor his guests, tried to mount the saddle, but the prince had made his stir- rups too short, and looked on at the scene very much amused. 83 Now, the king was exceedingly fond of jokes, but they were only to be played on scholars and professors. Would Fritz continue to be a good Christian ? At the end of his visit to Wusterhausen Professor Francke was very uneasy on this subject. It was to him alone, in the midst of the general attention, that Frederick did not address a word. "One would think," wrote the poor man in his journal, "that he was angry about something." At last, Frederick called him on the fifth day ; but he received his compliments with a bad grace, and only said a few words to him. Francke awaited an expression of thanks for the highly edify- ing tracts that he had sent to the prince: it was the tutor who thanked him, and with that Frederick left the room. The next day, at table, the king not being there, the pastor perceived that the prince, during a conversation upon apparitions, looked at him with a mocking air. As he was rising from the table, he heard him say quite loud: "There goes one who believes in ghosts." He learned that the evening be- fore, the Castellan of Wusterhausen, a remarkably devout man, met the prince, who asked him where he was taking the light he held in his hand: "Your Highness, to Professor Francke," he responded. "Then," said the prince, "it is a pharisee going to 132 FREDERICK THE GREAT. a pharisee, for he is one as well as you." The troubled pastor made a resolve to pray to God for the heir-apparent. And truly, Fritz had certainly great need to be prayed for. 84 H e ha d "a natural tenden cy toward all sciences ," but h ene glected sa cred science. He was to receive confirmation in April, 1727 ; he was confirmed then, but to be prepared for this cere- mony the pastor had to give him double the amount of lessons. His tutors had to acknowledge to the king that he had neglected religious instruction for six months. 85 Neither economist, soldier, nor devotee, th is son must have troubled the very inmost depths of the soul of the father whom we know. It would have been a miracle, if Frederick William had not allowed himself to give vent to his terrible temper against him. He commenced by little taps which soon resembled blows ; then the real blows followed. He struck Fritz be- cause of the gloves he wore at the hunt ; he struck him for the three-pronged fork. As he was very prompt to act, and carried everything to extremes, he immediately gave up all hope in regard to his son. The child to whom he tendered a kind of fraternal affection, true respect, and absolute confidence, the little Frederick, Fritzen, appeared to him to be a rebel, and a very dangerous one. The French Minis- ter, giving notice of "the alienation of the king and prince," feared "that it might go far." 86 Already, the king was comparing the elder revolting son to the younger one, William. He showed toward him all the tenderness of which he was capable. At table, he FATHER AND SON. * . X# made him say grace, and stood with his head bowed and hands joined, behind the chair of the little fellow. If he was suffering, he would go to see him and cover him with kisses ; he would stop when he met the child, raise him in his arms and kiss him for some minutes at a time. He would say: "I will not wager much on such and such of my children, but (pointing to little William) I have confidence in this one ; he has a good character ; I will guarantee that he will be an honest man." 87 It is permissible to be- lieve that even at that date, three years before the tragic crisis, Frederick William could not keep from thinking that the Kingd oj%u~of Pr ussia wou44-4ae_ well placeclin ^the hands of thi s_vjmngerson, who promised to b e an honest man. As to the eldest, he could no longer bear the sight of him. Then the family life became intolerable : a kind of terror hung over the royal house ; the queen cried every day. The prince's face was painful to see; everybody noticed the " black melancholy " in his great eyes. He confessed it to his friends, and letters from him express distaste of life. He made excuses to a sick friend, Lieutenant von Borcke, for not trying to divert him: "I have rather need of some diversion myself to rid me of this melancholia " ; he begged him not to die, saying : ' 'Death is a thing I fear the most for my friends, but the least for myself." 88 At the C ourt and throughout t he kingdom, public opinion pvprpsspd itsjRJf__g, gainst t hftTcrng., jFor the in- terestmg_jdctim. It truly seemed that the prince had committed no other crime than that of failing to re- ^ FREDERICK THE GREAT. semble his father. We cannot blame him for pre- ferring a silver fork to one of steel ; for wearing gloves when it was freezing cold ; for being liberal ; or even for mocking an old drunken general and a pastor who believed in ghosts ; nor for the excellent taste he evinced, "of being interested in the sciences and liking to talk with those who knew something." This prosaic father who wished to Imry a child of twelve years in practicalities, to whom he denied the right of admiring or loving anything outside of mili- tary life and economy, this brutal man who railed and struck about him with little or no reason for it, had the appearance of being a cruel maniac, an abom- inable tyrant. But, to be just, and to give to each the exact responsibility due him in the approaching denouement, conclusions must not be so quickly drawn. First of all, look around the father and son, study Frederick's surroundings as he grew to manhood, the influences at work, then scrutinize his actions, ques- tion his intentions, discover, as soon as it presents itself, his youthful individuality, which is not so simple as that of his father. "There are some," said the king, "who give him other sentiments besides my own." Who are these people ? We already know that, without meaning to do so, ^rederick ^s_ masters inspired him wit h ideas and mod es of t hought entirel y cont rary _to those of the kin g. The nature of the child lent itself freely to their in- fluence ; and in receiving it, he followed an instinct. Of his own will, he added to *the permitted reading, FATHER AND SON. 137 the forbidden reading. His mind thus accustomed itself to living in a different world from that he saw around him. There was no personage in Telemachus to whom Frederick William could be compared, neither was there any one in the romances of chivalry. All the drinkers, smokers, and sword-dragging men of Berlin and Potsdam were particularly coarse after the ancient sages, and adventurous, gallant, chevaliers. But Frederick had not received his education from tutors only; it now remains to place near the masters, in their quality of educators and inspirers of the Crown Prince, two persons whom he lo ved and wh o_ were tenderly devoted to him, the queen and the oldest prince^s^J^iJiielmina^ THE MOTHER OF FREDERICK. Queen Sophia Dorothea was an imposing person. She was large and strong ; her form which had been * 'one of the handsomest in the world" had rapidly grown stout, and the arm-chairs^ had to be enlarged for her. She had a noble and majestic carriage. Her face was not beautiful. Her features were strongly marked, and not one of them was perfect. She knew how to be affable, agreeable, unaffected, but her whole physiognomy showed her pride in being queen and born of the TTnnag nf TTflpnyaj- She had the germs of intellectual qualities: "a brilliant mind, which seemed however to possess more solidity than it did in reality," a taste for the arts and sciences to which her attention was not "too assiduously given." Her ruling passion was ambition. 89 ~>* FREDERICK THE GREAT. She would have liked to figure in every way as a great queen, first of all, to be well dressed, as at the time, when a young girl, she shone in the luxurious and elegant Court of Hanover, that prided itself upon being extremely polished. Her trous- seau had been ordered from the best establish- ment in Paris. The Duchess of Orleans had superintended the making, and Louis XIV., who condescended to look at these pretty things, ex- pressed the hope that there would be many princes in Germany able to enrich in this way the merchants of his capital. No doubt, the queen would have been greatly pleased to order her gowns from Paris. It would have pleased her still more to be royally lodged, with graceful bibelots around her, like those the elegant world of the eighteenth century loved. She had such a pretty house built in the suburbs of Berlin, on the Spree, with a gallery filled with exquisite porcelains and rooms decorated with mirrors, that it was called Monbijou; but this place was contracted, and the queen passed but a small part of her life in this Trianon. As she was "accustomed to the world," she would have wished to preside at a court, where ceremonials would have marked her royal dignity, at balls where hundreds of couples would have inclined before her; at the card-table, where she would have played, with much gold, the queen's game. She would have given concerts of fine music, and held a circle of literati, with whom she would have conversed in French, the only lan- guage suitable for such a company. 90 Unhappily, what the queen loved, the king detested, FATHER AND SON. 137 and Sophia Dorothea had, as they said, a very sad lot. Her husband had a horror of the French fashions, and went so far as to make the condemned, "those that were the greatest criminals," wear the gallooned hats and the bags for the hair, so that he might give Ber- lin people a distaste for imitating the French Minister, who decked himself out in all this beautiful finery. He himself set the example of simplicity. After hav- ing first assumed the costume of a good citizen, he afterward wore that of a colonel, and never changed it. He took the greatest care of his clothes ; as soon as he returned to his cabinet he would put on sleeves and an apron. He made the queen many a rich present, but he wished that his wife should be simply dressed, as be- came a German woman. He knew very well that he could not live as a private individual, and that he must do honor to the King of Prussia; so he bought vessels of gold and silver, candlesticks of silver and crystal, silver tables and arm-chairs. He was very proud of this furniture, that he ordered himself, and which cost him a good, round sum, thinking besides, no doubt, that it was not all lost, the metal was there, in case of need. But these beautiful things were only for state occasions; he liked neither palaces nor luxu- rious furniture. Of all his residences, those he pre- ferred the most were his hunting lodges. For his own personal use he had chairs and arm-chairs of wood. He was not a giver of feasts; the ball that he liked the best was, I think, that of the fete of the Anniversary of Malplaquet. After the dinner, during which the hunt- ing horns and hautbois were heard, and the healths 138 FREDERICK THE GREAT. were accompanied with salvos of cannon, the queen and princesses would retire. Then the men would dance among themselves. The king would take by the hand an officer, making his choice from one of the survivors of Malplaquet, Pannewitz, for instance, who had re- ceived a fine gash on the head that warm day; 91 but the cold, ceremonious court ball he could not endure. He did not like the queen to hold a court every evening, and Sophia Dorothea was never at ease except during his absences, which were, fortunately, frequent enough. Yet, with this terrible man, she was always dreading a surprise. One evening the king arrived from a jour- ney through Prussia, as usual, without being expected. There was a ball at Monbijou : in a rage, he left for Potsdam, without seeing his wife or children. The visits of princes provided that Czar Peter was not the guest, for he stayed at Monbijou, and made it "the desolation of Jerusalem" gave Sophia Dorothea a few happy days. The latter part of May, 1728, she passed a very pleasant week, during the visit of the King of Poland to Berlin. When Augus- tus II. paid his respects to her, she received him at the door of her third ante-chamber. He extended his hand and together they went into her audience cham- ber, where the princesses were presented. "An affable, polished air, accompanied these ceremonies." As he could not remain standing, for he was worn out with his debaucheries, "the queen offered immediately to seat him, a thing to which he would not consent at first, but finally he placed himself on a stool, the queen taking another opposite him." As the princesses FATHER AND SON. 139 remained standing, the king made " many excuses to them for his impoliteness." He said "something agree- able to each one," and when he arose, he would not suffer the queen to reconduct him. The next Sunday, there was a solemn presentation in the grand apart- ments of the castle. The queen advanced from one side of the gallery, with her daughters, the princesses of the blood, and her Court, while the two kings came from the other. All the ladies of the city splendidly apparelled were standing in file. By the side of the king and the three hundred persons of his suite, the nobles of Poland and Saxony clothed lav- ishly, magnificently, Frederick William and the Prus- sians made a poor show, "with their coats so short they could not even have served as a fig leaf for our first parents, and so tight that they could not move. Their hair was powdered but not cuiled, and twisted in the back with a ribbon." Notwithstanding all this, the ceremony of presentation was brilliant. Since the late king, there never had been "such an array at the castle." For several days the fetes con- tinued : there were not only innumerable parades, and reviews, but also dinners " at a round table," or at a table of an odd shape, arranged in such a manner that the guests represented letters or objects. Every evening the queen held court and they danced. Dur- ing these days of pleasure the Queen of Prussia felt that she really reigned. 92 These were times of rare good fortune; to entertain a guest who knew how to give his hand to a lady, to make excuses for being seated in her presence, and to 140 FREDERICK THE GREAT. find something agreeable to say without any trouble. After the departure of the visitor and his suite they returned to their life of mere existence, and even had to pay for the expense of the visit. Four days before the King of Poland took leave the King of Prussia had given the order "to economize as much as possible;" he reduced the daily expenses from ninety-three thalers to seventy or seventy-two, when he was at Wuster- hausen, and the queen at Berlin; to fifty-five when their Majesties were together. He interdicted ship- ments from Hamburg, whence came the delicacies of the table, and charged them not to fail in serving him only with "good beef, good fat chickens, an