e de Voss, she had the same jumble of
pietism and virtue. It was once more a case of marrying. The King saw
no difficulty in the way. "I am separated from the Queen," he wrote to
Mademoiselle Doenhof; "Madame d'Ingenheim has left me a widower; I
offer you my heart and hand." He made no concealment of it, openly
declaring that he had grounds for repudiating the Queen, but he
refrained from taking action upon them in order to maintain the
dignity of the throne.

The Consistory did not require to deliberate a second time; precedents
had been established, and they were followed. The marriage took place
on April 10, 1790, and it was the Court preacher, Zoellner, who
consecrated it, as he had consecrated that with Mademoiselle de Voss.
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 Doenhof, 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 Doenhof, 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 Gr