Voltaire was furious; Madame Denis was ill, or feigned to be; she wrote letter after letter to Voltaire’s friends in Prussia, and to the king himself.  The affair was growing daily more serious.  Finally the city authorities themselves, who doubtless felt that they were not playing a very creditable part, put an end to it by ordering Freytag to release his prisoner.  Voltaire, set free, travelled leisurely towards France, which, however, he found himself refused permission to enter.  He thereupon repaired to Geneva, and thereafter, freed from the patronage of princes and the injustice of the powerful, spent his life in a land where full freedom of thought and action was possible.

As for the worthy Freytag, he felicitated himself highly on the way he had handled that dabbler in poeshy.  “We would have risked our lives rather than let him get away,” he wrote; “and if I, holding a council of war with myself, had not found him at the barrier but in the open country, and he had refused to jog back, I don’t know that I shouldn’t have lodged a bullet in his head.  To such a degree had I at heart the letters and writing of the king.”

The too trusty agent did not feel so self-satisfied on receiving the opinion of the king.

“I gave you no such orders as that,” wrote Frederick.  “You should never make more noise than a thing deserves.  I wanted Voltaire to give you up the key, the cross, and the volume of poems I had intrusted to him; as soon as all that was given up to you I can’t see what earthly reason could have induced you to make this uproar.”

It is very probable, however, that Frederick wished to humiliate Voltaire, and the latter did not fail to revenge himself with that weapon which he knew so well how to wield.  In his poem of “La Loi naturelle” he drew a bitter but truthful portrait of Frederick which must have made that arbitrary gentleman wince.  He was, says the poet,—­

  “Of incongruities a monstrous pile,
  Calling men brothers, crushing them the while;
  With air humane, a misanthropic brute;
  Ofttimes impulsive, sometimes over-’cute;
  Weak ’midst his choler, modest in his pride;
  Yearning for virtue, lust personified;
  Statesman and author, of the slippery crew;
  My patron, pupil, persecutor too.”

SCENES FROM THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR.

[Illustration:  SANS SOUCI, PALACE OF FREDERICK THE GREAT.]

The story of Frederick the Great is a story of incessant wars, wars against frightful odds, for all Europe was combined against him, and for seven years the Austrians, the French, the Russians, and the Swedes surrounded his realm, with the bitter determination to crush him, if not to annihilate the Prussian kingdom.  England alone was on his side.  Russia had joined the coalition through anger of the Empress Elizabeth at Frederick’s satire upon her licentious life; France had joined it through hostility to England; Austria had organized it from indignation at Frederick’s lawless seizure of Silesia; the army raised to operate against Prussia numbered several hundred thousand men.