l his descendants. After making a profound
investigation of several days' duration in the tower of the Dresden
palace, the men could not agree as to whether the prophecy referred to
remote centuries or, perhaps, to the present time, with a possible
reference to the King of Poland, with whom the relations were still of
a very warlike nature. The disquietude, not to say the despair, in
which the unhappy sovereign was plunged, was only increased by such
learned disputes, and finally was so intensified as to seem to his
soul wholly intolerable. In addition, just at this time the
Chamberlain charged his wife that before she left for Berlin, whither
she was about to follow him, she should adroitly inform the Elector,
that, after the failure of an attempt, which he had made with the help
of an old woman who had kept out of sight ever since, there was but
slight hope of securing the paper in Kohlhaas' possession, inasmuch as
the death sentence pronounced against the horse-dealer had now at last
been signed by the Elector of Brandenburg after a minute examination
of all the legal documents, and the day of execution already set for
the Monday after Palm Sunday. At this news the Elector, his heart torn
by grief and remorse, shut himself up in his room like a man in utter
despair and, tired of life, refused for two days to take food; on the
third day he suddenly disappeared from Dresden after sending a short
communication to the Government Office with word that he was going to
the Prince of Dessau's to hunt. Where he actually did go and whether
he did wend his way toward Dessau, we shall not undertake to say, as
the chronicles--which we have diligently compared before reporting
events--at this point contradict and offset one another in a very
peculiar manner. So much is certain: the Prince of Dessau was
incapable of hunting, as he was at this time lying ill in Brunswick at
the residence of his uncle, Duke Henry, and it is also certain that
Lady Heloise on the evening of the following day arrived in Berlin at
the house of her husband, Sir Kunz, the Chamberlain, in the company of
a certain Count von Koenigstein whom she gave out to be her cousin.

In the mean time, on the order of the Elector of Brandenburg, the
death sentence was read to Kohlhaas, his chains were removed, and the
papers concerning his property, to which papers his right had been
denied in Dresden, were returned to him. When the councilors whom the
court had dispatch