第310章

"But there will be difficulties; your Highness to change your religion, for one thing?--PRINCE: Won't, by any means:--SCHULENBURG: And give up the succession to Prussia?--PRINCE: A right fool if I did!--SCHULENBURG: Then this marriage comes to nothing.--Thereupon next he said, If the Kaiser is so strong for us, let him give me his second Daughter;" lucky Franz of Lorraine is to get the first.--"SCHULENBURG: Are you serious?--PRINCE: Why not? with a Duchy or two it would do very well.--SCHULENBURG: No Duchies possible under the Pragmatic Sanction, your Highness: besides, your change of religion?--PRINCE: Oh, as to that, never!--Then this marriage also comes to nothing Of the English, and their Double-Marriage, and their Hotham brabble, he spoke lightly, as of an extinct matter,--in terms your Excellency will like.

"But, said I, since you speak so much of marriages, I suppose you wish to be married?--PRINCE: No; but if the King absolutely will have it, I will marry to obey him. After that, I will shove my wife into the corner (PLANTERAI LA MA FEMME), and live after my own faucy.--SCHULENBURG: Horrible to think of! For, in the first place, your Highness, is it not written in the Law of God, Adulterers shall not inherit the Kingdom of Heaven?" And in the second place; and in the third and fourth place!--To all which he answered as wild young fellows do, especially if you force marriage on them. "I can perceive, if he marries, it will only be to have more liberty than now. It is certain, if he had his elbows free, he would strike out (S'EN DONNERAIT A GAUCHE). He said to me several times: 'I am young; I want to profit by my youth.'"A questionable young fellow, Herr General; especially if you force marriage on him.

"This conversation done," continues the General, "he set to talking with the Madam Wreech," and her complexion of lily and rose; "but he did not stay long; drove off about five [dinner at the stroke of twelve in those countries], inviting me to see him again at Custrin, which I promised."And so the Prince is off in the Autumn sunset, driving down the peaty hollow of the Warta, through unpicturesque country, which produces Wreechs and incomparable flowers nevertheless. Yes; and if he look a six miles to the right, there is the smoke of the evening kettles from Zorndorf, rising into the sky; and across the River, a twenty miles to the left, is Kunersdorf: poor sleepy sandy hamlets; where nettles of the Devil are to be plucked one day!--"The beautiful Wreech drove off to Tamsel," her fine house; I to this wretched tavern; where, a couple of hours after that conversation, I began writing it all down, and have nothing else to do for the night. Your Excellency's most moral, stiff-necked, pipe-clayed and extremely obedient, "VON SCHULENBUBG."[Forster, iii. 65-71.]

This young man may be orthodox on Predestination, and outwardly growing all that a Papa could wish; but here are strange heterodoxies, here is plenty of mutinous capricious fire in the interior of him, Herr General! In fact, a young man unfortunately situated; already become solitary in Creation; has not, except himself, a friend in the world available just now.

Tempestuous Papa storms one way, tempestuous Mamma Nature another; and between the outsids and the inside there are inconsistencies enough.

Concerning the fair Wreech of Tamsel, with her complexion of lily and rose, there ensued by and by much whispering, and rumoring underbreath; which has survived in the apocryphal Anecdote-Books, not in too distinct a form. Here, from first hand, are three words, which we may take to be the essence of the whole.

Grumkow reporting, in a sordid, occasionally smutty, spy manner, to his Seckendorf, from Berlin, eight or ten months hence, has this casual expression: "He [King Friedrich Wilhelm] told me in confidence that Wreech, the Colonel's Wife, is--to P. R.

(Prince-Royal); and that Wreech vowed he would not own it for his.

And his Majesty in secret is rather pleased," adds the smutty spy.

[Grumkow to Seckendorf, Berlin, 20th August, 1732 (Forster, iii.

112).] Elsewhere I have read that the poor object, which actually came as anticipated (male or female, I forget), did not live long;--nor had Friedrich, by any opportunity, another child in this world. Domestic Tamsel had to allay itself as it best could;and the fair Wreech became much a stranger to Friedrich,--surprisingly so to Friedrich the KING, as perhaps we may see.--Predestination, GNADENWAHL, Herr General: what is orthodoxy on Predestination, with these accompaniments! [For Wreech, see <italic> Benekendorf, <end italic> v. 94; for Schulenburg, ib. 26;--and <italic> Militair-Lexikon, <end italic> iii. 432, 433, and iv. 268, 269. Vacant on the gossiping points; cautiously official, both these.] We go now to the Second Letter and the Third,--from Landsberg about a fortnight later:--No. 2. TO HIS EXCELLENCY (shovelful of titles) VON GRUMKOW, IN BERLIN.

"LANDSBERG, 19th October, 1731.

"The day before yesterday [that is, Wednesday, 17th October] Ireceived an Order, To have only fifty Horse at that post, and"--Order which shows us that there has fallen out some recruiting squabble on the Polish Frontier hereabouts; that the Polack gentlemen have seized certain Corporals of ours, but are about restoring them; Order and affair which we shall omit. "Corporals will be got back: but as these Polack gentlemen: will see, by the course taken, that we have no great stomach for BITING, I fancy they will grow more insolent; then, 'ware who tries to recruit there for the future!