no longer set in the
direction of pure Deism. Woellner, 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 noble, 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 scrap 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 analogous 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