tesse de Rudolstadt._]

When her history begins again under the title she has "reneged," the
reader may for no short time think that the curse of the sequel--a curse
only too common, but not universal--is going to be averted. She is in
Berlin alone (see note above); is successful, but not at all
happy--perhaps least of all happy because the king, partly out of
gratitude for his safety, partly out of something like a more natural
kind of affection than most authors have credited him with, pays her
marked attentions. For a time things are not unlively; and even the very
dangerous experiment of a supper--one of those at which Frederic's
guests were supposed to have perfectly "free elbows" and availed
themselves of the supposition at their peril--a supper with Voltaire, La
Mettrie, Algarotti, D'Argens, Poellnitz, and "Quintus Icilius"
present--comes off not so badly. One of the reasons of this is that
George Sand has the sense to make Voltaire ill and silent, and puts the
bulk of the "business" on La Mettrie--a person much cleverer than most
people who have only read book-notices of him may think, but not
dangerously brilliant. Then Consuelo, or "La Porporina," as her stage
name is, gets mixed up--owing to no fault of her own in the first place
at any rate--with the intrigues of the Princess Amelie of Prussia and
her lover, the less bad Trenck. This has two awkward results--for
herself an imprisonment at Spandau, into which she is cast by Frederic's
half jealous, half purely tyrannical wrath, and for us a revival of all
the _massacrant_ illuminism in which the Princess herself is dabbling.
So we have on the scene not only (as the reader sees at once, though
some rather clumsy efforts are made to hide it) the resuscitated Albert,
who passes as a certain Trismegistus, not only the historical charlatan
Saint-Germain, but another charlatan at this time not at all historical
(seeing that the whole story ends in 1760, and he never left Palermo
till nine years later), Cagliostro. Even at Spandau Consuelo herself is
not quite uninteresting; but the Illuminati determine to rescue her, and
for the latter part of the first volume and the whole of the second the
entire thing is, once more, Bosh. The most absurd "double-gangings" take
place between an _inconnu_ named Liverani, whom Consuelo cannot help
loving, and Albert himself, who _is_ Liverani, as everybody but herself
sees at once, interspersed between endless tracts of the usual ru