the ingratitude, the baseness, the lies of his distinguished guest,—­and their friendship ended in utter vanity.  What friendship can last without mutual respect?  The friendship of Frederic and Voltaire was hopelessly broken, in spite of the remembrance of mutual admiration and happy hours.  It was patched up and mended like a broken vase, but it could not be restored.  How sad, how mournful, how humiliating is a broken friendship or an alienated love!  It is the falling away of the foundations of the soul, the disappearance forever of what is most to be prized on earth,—­its celestial certitudes.  A beloved friend may die, but we are consoled in view of the fact that the friendship may be continued in heaven:  the friend is not lost to us.  But when a friendship or a love is broken, there is no continuance of it through eternity.  It is the gloomiest thing to think of in this whole world.

But Frederic was too busy and pre-occupied a man to mourn long for a departed joy.  He was absorbed in preparations for war.  The sword of Damocles was suspended over his head, and he knew it better than any other man in Europe; he knew it from his spies and emissaries.  Though he had enjoyed ten years’ peace, he knew that peace was only a truce; that the nations were arming in behalf of the injured empress; that so great a crime as the seizure of Silesia must be visited with a penalty; that there was no escape for him except in a tremendous life-and-death struggle, which was to be the trial of his life; that defeat was more than probable, since the forces in preparation against him were overwhelming.  The curses of the civilized world still pursued him, and in his retreat at Sans-Souci he had no rest; and hence he became irritable and suspicious.  The clouds of the political atmosphere were filled with thunderbolts, ready to fall upon him and crush him at any moment; indeed, nothing could arrest the long-gathering storm.

It broke out with unprecedented fury in the spring of 1756.  Austria, Russia, Sweden, Saxony, and France were combined to ruin him,—­the most powerful coalition of the European powers seen since the Thirty Years’ War.  His only ally was England,—­an ally not so much to succor him as to humble France, and hence her aid was timid and incompetent.

Thus began the famous Seven Years’ War, during which France lost her colonial possessions, and was signally humiliated at home,—­a war which developed the genius of the elder Pitt, and placed England in the proud position of mistress of the ocean; a war marked by the largest array of forces which Europe had seen since the times of Charles V., in which six hundred thousand men were marshalled under different leaders and nations, to crush a man who had insulted Europe and defied the law of nations and the laws of God.  The coalition represented one hundred millions of people with inexhaustible resources.