rming them.

Incomplete as the convention was, it nevertheless excited great emotion
in Europe. The Duke of Cumberland had lost the military reputation
acquired at Fontenoy; the King of Prussia remained alone on the
Continent, exposed to all the efforts of the allies; every day fresh
reverses came down upon him; the Russian army had invaded the Prussian
provinces and beaten Marshal Schwald near Memel; twenty-five thousand
Swedes had just landed in Pomerania. Desertion prevailed amongst the
troops of Frederick, recruited as they often were from amongst the
vanquished; it was in vain that the king, in his despair, shouted out on
the battle-field of Kolin, "D'ye expect to live forever, pray?" Many
Saxon or Silesian soldiers secretly left the army. One day Frederick
himself kept his eye on a grenadier whom he had seen skulking to the rear
of the camp. "Whither goest thou?" he cried. "Faith, sir," was the
answer, "I am deserting; I'm getting tired of being always beaten." "
Stay once more," replied the king, without showing the slightest anger;
"I promise that, if we are beaten, we will both desert together." In the
ensuing battle the grenadier got himself killed.

For a moment, indeed, Frederick had conceived the idea of deserting
simultaneously from the field of battle and from life. "My dear sister,"
he wrote to the Margravine of Baireuth, "there is no port or asylum for
me any more save in the arms of death." A letter in verse to the Marquis
of Argens pointed clearly to the notion of suicide. A firmer purpose,
before long, animated that soul, that strange mixture of heroism and
corruption. The King of Prussia wrote to Voltaire,--

"Threatened with shipwreck though I be,
I, facing storms that frown on me,
Must king-like think, and live, and die."

Fortune, moreover, seemed to be relaxing her severities. Under the
influence of the hereditary grand-duke, a passionate admirer of Frederick
II., the Russians had omitted to profit by their victories; they were by
this time wintering in Poland, which was abandoned to all their
exactions. The Swedes had been repulsed in the Island of Rugen, Marshal
Richelieu received from Versailles orders to remain at Halberstadt, and
to send re-enforcements to the army of the Prince of Soubise; it was for
this latter that Madame de Pompadour was reserving the honor of crushing
the Great Frederick. More occupied in pillage than in vigorously pushin