German Problems and Personalities Part 18

The Queen gave the bride girandoles of diamonds. The Queen-Dowager received her, and everyone at Court made a fuss of her. All the same, she was no more successful than Mademoiselle de Voss in getting rid of Madame Rietz. This favourite, who had been given 70,000 crowns to take her departure, remained, took an officer as her lover, and even got the King to promote him.

X.

And so, in 1790, the King of Prussia, Mademoiselle de Voss's widower, had three wives living: the Princess of Brunswick, who was repudiated; the Princess of Darmstadt, who, although divorced, still kept the rank of Queen; and Mademoiselle Dnhof, morganatic wife. This third wife, wrote one diplomat, will not be the last, for "those the King longs for will also want to be married." The Prince in any case was always ready. Polygamy, in his eyes, was a prerogative of royalty. As the result of a Court intrigue in 1792 he had himself separated from Mademoiselle Dnhof, crowning by this divorce the strange series of his conjugal evolutions. Then he offered his heart and hand to a lady called Bethmann, a banker's daughter whom he had known at Frankfurt, and found very much to his liking. This young person, in the words of Lord Malmesbury, was "all sentiment and all fire"; but she had principles and discretion. She had misgivings about the character of the marriage and the constancy of the bridegroom. She refused, thus sparing the Berlin casuists the trouble of a deliberation still more ticklish than before. I know not whether these accommodating theologians, reared in the school of Voltaire and Frederick, took these simultaneous marriages very seriously or not; abroad they afforded subject for ridicule, and Catherine the Great, who herself did not feel bound to observe so many formalities, was highly amused at them; "that big lout of a Gu"-such was her name for Frederick William in her letters to Grimm-"that big lout has just married a third wife; the libertine never has enough legitimate wives; for a conscientious libertine, commend me to him."

XI.

Frederick William loved women. Women, however, did not govern him. But if he escaped the influence of mistresses, he fell under the influence of favourites, and the people were none the better off. Badly brought up, kept apart from State affairs by his uncle, distrusting others because he was very distrustful of himself, he knew nothing of the art of government, and dallied with vague reform projects. The Ministers whom Frederick left behind, although very second-rate, made him ill at ease. He was afraid of being considered under their thumb; besides, these Ministers represented ideas and a system which he affected to condemn. "The King will be led just because he is afraid of being so,"

wrote Mirabeau. The fear of being governed by his Ministers delivered him into the hands of underlings, who promptly gained a mastery over him by humbling themselves before him, rea.s.suring his suspicious pride, flattering his pa.s.sions-above all, exploiting the shortcomings of his mind. Frederick William desired the good of the State; he had a hazy but quite keen idea of the necessity of counteracting the excesses of Frederick's Government; but his intentions rambled, and his reform fancies, more mystical then political, proceeded not so much from the idea of the interests of the State as from the influence of a secret doctrine with which he was imbued. The statesman in him was but an adept in magic; for Ministers he took mere charlatans.

Skilled conjurers replaced at Potsdam Frederick's "judicious Ministers."

XII.

Of all these mystical adventurers, the one whose influence was perhaps the most baneful for the Prussian State was Wllner, a pure intriguer.

Son of a country pastor, he worked his way into the household of General d'Itzenplitz; after wheedling the mother, he ended by marrying the daughter. Frederick, who was anything but indulgent to mis-alliances, had him clapped into prison in Berlin. The hatred of Wllner for the Philosopher-King dated from that day. At that time he was a rationalist and a disciple of Wolf; he became a Freemason. But already in high society in Germany the wind no longer set in the direction of pure Deism. Wllner, always a perfect sceptic, changed his convictions. Considering himself as fitted as any other for the apparition business and the mystery industry, he decided to turn "honest broker" between the powers of this world and those of the next, basing his credit with the former on that which he claimed with the latter. He joined the Rosicrucians, and soon became one of the leading lights of the Order.

Thus he knew the man who was to counterbalance his favour at the Court of Berlin and one day share with him Frederick's Government, the Saxon Bischoffswerder. The son of a small n.o.ble, an officer of fortune, come like so many others to seek service in Prussia, he had wormed his way into the favour of the Prince-Royal, and had quickly taken him in.

XIII.

Mistresses and favourites, Rosicrucians and valets, theosophists and _femmes galantes_, on the whole got on very well together and agreed surprisingly. It was but a step from the laboratory of the Rosicrucians to the boudoir of Madame Rietz, and these mystic personages cleared it without a sc.r.a.p of shame. They formed a close alliance with the _valet de chambre_ and his wife, the _maitresse d'habitude_, who throughout all the matrimonial pranks of the King managed to preserve her credit by artifices a.n.a.logous to those which at Versailles had so long maintained that of Madame de Pompadour.

Around them swarmed a crowd of subordinate intriguers, the "clique,"

as they were called in Berlin, ready for all sorts of jobs behind the scenes at Court, in the Army, in politics, in diplomacy-above all, in finance. Needy and greedy, they had a firmly established reputation in Europe for venality. "I maintain," declared Mirabeau, "that with a thousand louis you could, if need be, know perfectly all the secrets of the Berlin Cabinet.... So the Emperor has a faithful record of every step of the King, day by day, and could know everything he planned, if he planned anything." These were the methods, as Custine affirmed in 1792, that every diplomatist in the world employed; all the Ministers who resided in Berlin used them with more success and more generally than elsewhere.

XIV.

Such was the strange band of adventurers who pounced on the monarchy and the treasury of Frederick the Great. Their course of action, very complex and very powerful, was well designed to captivate a fantastic and voluptuous bigot. However, they would never have gained more than an antechamber or alcove influence, they would never have risen to political influence, had they not known how to pervert the n.o.blest inclinations of the King, whilst flattering the lowest. Mediocre and secondary as was his place in the line of the Hohenzollerns, Frederick William was not devoid of all royal qualities. He was brave, he was kind-hearted, or rather he was a man of "sensibility"; he desired the public weal; he had suffered, like the nation, from the pitiless regime of Frederick; like the whole nation, he wanted to reform the State by lightening the yoke. He believed himself inspired from on high, "illumined," and called by Providence to restore the morals and faith of a country which, he was told, and he himself believed, was perishing through the scepticism of men's minds and the looseness of men's morals.

How could he combine such tendencies with such tastes, such aspirations with such pa.s.sions, such beliefs with such debauchery? It was just therein that he showed himself a weak character and a mystic; that was why he joined theurgic sects instead of submitting to the Church; why he believed in visions more than in the Gospel, listened to a ventriloquist mimicking the voice of Frederick instead of listening to the voices of the Ministers, the great King's disciples; that is why he distrusted wise, thoughtful, experienced people and surrendered himself to charlatans and favourites.

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

H. IBSEN LA LIBERTe ET LE DeTERMINISME ESSAIS DE PHILOSOPHIE ET DE LITTeRATURE (2 VOLS.) THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION (1905) THE BALKAN QUESTION CARDINAL NEWMAN AND HIS INFLUENCE ON RELIGIOUS THOUGHT VICTOR HUGO LIFE OF TOLSTOY THE ANGLO-GERMAN PROBLEM HOW BELGIUM SAVED EUROPE EUROPE'S DEBT TO RUSSIA THE FRENCH RENASCENCE