ONE:Four days after, in anticipation of an immediate attack from the Russians, he again wrote to the same address, Remain at Berlin, or retire to Potsdam. In a little while there will come some catastrophe. It is not fit that you suffer by it. If things take a good turn, you can be back to Berlin. If ill luck still pursue us, go to Hanover, or to Zelle, where you can provide for your safety.Wilhelmina gives the following account of this transaction, as communicated to her by her brother: As I entered the kings room this morning, he first seized me by the hair and then threw me on the floor, along which, after having exercised the vigor of his arm upon my unhappy person, he dragged me, in spite of all my resistance, to a neighboring window. His intention apparently was to perform the office of the mutes of the seraglio, for, seizing the cord belonging to the curtain, he placed it around my neck. I seized both of his hands, and began to cry out. A servant came to my assistance, and delivered me from his hands.
FORE:Gentlemen, gentlemen, it is of no use to think about it. Establishment of the Berlin Academy of Sciences.Religious Toleration.A Free Press.Sternness of the young King.Domestic Habits of the King.Provision for the Queen-mother.Absolutism of the King.Journey to Strasbourg.First Interview with Voltaire.
FORE:Chaplain Müller was especially directed to argue with Frederick upon this point, and, if possible, to convert him to Christianity. The correspondence which ensued between the king and Müller is preserved. The king wrote to the chaplain, under date of November 3d, 1730:The sage Maupertuis, for example, had climbed some tree, or place of impregnability, hoping to see the battle there. And he did see it much too clearly at last! In such a tide of charging and chasing on that Right Wing, and round all the field in the Prussian rear; in such wide bickering and boiling of Horse-currents, which fling out round all the Prussian rear-quarters such a spray of Austrian Hussars for one element, Maupertuis, I have no doubt, wishes much he were at home doing his sines and tangents. An Austrian Hussar party gets sight of him on his tree or other stand-point (Voltaire says elsewhere he was mounted on an ass, the malicious spirit!)too certain the Austrian Hussars got sight of him; his purse, gold watch, all he has of movable, is given frankly; all will not do. There are frills about the man, fine laces, cloth; a goodish yellow wig on him for one thing. Their Slavonic dialect, too fatally intelligible by the pantomime accompanying it, forces sage Maupertuis from his tree or stand-point; the big red face flurried into scarlet, I can fancy, or scarlet and ashy-white mixed; andLet us draw a veil over it. He is next seen shirtless, the once very haughty, blustery, and now much humiliated man; still conscious of supreme acumen, insight, and pure science; and, though an Austrian prisoner and a monster of rags, struggling to believe that he is a genius, and the Trismegistus of mankind. What a pickle!
