his ostentatious immorality (IMMORALITE AFFICHEE," ah, Madame!)"has much hurt public virtue [public orthodoxy, I mean], and there have been related to me [by mendacious or ill-informed persons]
barbarities which excite horror. He has done us all a great deal of ill. He has been a King for his own Country; but a Trouble-feast for those about him;--setting up to be the arbiter of Europe;always undertaking on his neighbors, and making them pay the expense. As Daughters of Maria Theresa, it is impossible we can regret him, nor is it the Court of France that will make his funeral oration." [Comte de Hunolstein, <italic> Correspondance inedite de Marie Antoinette <end italic> (Paris, 1864), pp. 136, 137, 149.--Hunolstein's Book, I since find, is mainly or wholly a Forgery! (NOTE of 1868.)]
From Sans-Souci the King did appear again on horseback; rode out several times ("Conde," a fine English horse, one of his favorites, carrying him,--the Conde who had many years of sinecure afterwards, and was well known to Touring people): the rides were short;once to the New Palace to look at some new Vinery there, thence to the Gate of Potsdam, which he was for entering; but finding masons at work, and the street encumbered, did not, and rode home instead:
this, of not above two miles, was his longest ride of all.
Selle's attendance, less and less in esteem with the King, and less and less followed by him, did not quite cease till June 4th;that day the King had said to Selle, or to himself, "It is enough."That longest of his rides was in the third week after; June 22d, Midsummer-Day. July 4th, he rode again; and it was for the last time. About two weeks after, Conde was again brought out; but it would not do: Adieu, my Conde; not possible, as things are!--During all this while, and to the very end, Friedrich's Affairs, great and small, were, in every branch and item, guided on by him, with a perfection not surpassed in his palmiest days: he saw his Ministers, saw all who had business with him, many who had little;and in the sore coil of bodily miseries, as Hertzberg observed with wonder, never was the King's intellect clearer, or his judgment more just and decisive. Of his disease, except to the Doctors, he spoke no word to anybody. The body of Friedrich is a ruin, but his soul is still here; and receives his friends and his tasks as formerly. Asthma, dropsy, erysipelas, continual want of sleep; for many months past he has not been in bed, but sits day and night in an easy-chair, unable to get breath except in that posture. He said one morning, to somebody entering, "If you happened to want a night-watcher, I could suit you well."His multifarious Military businesses come first; then his three Clerks, with the Civil and Political. These three he latterly, instead of calling about 6 or 7 o'clock, has had to appoint for 4each morning: "My situation forces me," his message said, "to give them this trouble, which they will not have to suffer long. My life is on the decline; the time which I still have I must employ. It belongs not to me, but to the State." [Preuss, iv. 257 n.] About 11, business, followed by short surgical details or dressings (sadly insisted on in those Books, and in themselves sufficiently sad), being all done,--his friends or daily company are admitted:
five chiefly, or (NOT counting Minister Hertzberg) four, Lucchesini, Schwerin, Pinto, Gortz; who sit with him about one hour now, and two hours in the evening again:--dreary company to our minds, perhaps not quite so dreary to the King's; but they are all he has left. And he talks cheerfully with them "on Literature, History, on the topics of the day, or whatever topic rises, as if there were no sickness here." A man adjusted to his hard circumstances; and bearing himself manlike and kinglike among them.
He well knew himself to be dying; but some think, expected that the end might be a little farther off. There is a grand simplicity of stoicism in him; coming as if by nature, or by long SECOND-nature;finely unconscious of itself, and finding nothing of peculiar in this new trial laid on it. From of old, Life has been infinitely contemptible to him. In death, I think, he has neither fear nor hope. Atheism, truly, he never could abide: to him, as to all of us, it was flatly inconceivable that intellect, moral emotion, could have been put into HIM by an Entity that had none of its own.
But there, pretty much, his Theism seems to have stopped.
Instinctively, too, he believed, no man more firmly, that Right alone has ultimately any strength in this world: ultimately, yes;--but for him and his poor brief interests, what good was it?
Hope for himself in Divine Justice, in Divine Providence, I think he had not practically any; that the unfathomable Demiurgus should concern himself with such a set of paltry ill-given animalcules as oneself and mankind are, this also, as we have often noticed, is in the main incredible to him.
A sad Creed, this of the King's;--he had to do his duty without fee or reward. Yes, reader;--and what is well worth your attention, you will have difficulty to find, in the annals of any Creed, a King or man who stood more faithfully to his duty; and, till the last hour, alone concerned himself with doing that. To poor Friedrich that was all the Law and all the Prophets: and I much recommend you to surpass him, if you, by good luck, have a better Copy of those inestimable Documents!--Inarticulate notions, fancies, transient aspirations, he might have, in the background of his mind. One day, sitting for a while out of doors, gazing into the Sun, he was heard to murmur, "Perhaps I shall be nearer thee soon:"--and indeed nobody knows what his thoughts were in these final months. There is traceable only a complete superiority to Fear and Hope; in parts, too, are half-glimpses of a great motionless interior lake of Sorrow, sadder than any tears or complainings, which are altogether wanting to it.