ck sausage, secretly given me by a friend, occasioned an
indigestion, which endangered my life; a putrid fever followed, and my
body was reduced to a skeleton. Medicines, however, were conveyed to me
by the officers, and, now and then, warm food.

After my recovery, I again thought it necessary to endeavour to regain my
liberty. I had but forty louis-d'ors remaining, and these I could not
get till I had first broken up the flooring.

Lieutenant Sonntag was consumptive, and obtained his discharge. I
supplied bins with money to defray the expenses of his journey, and with
an order that four hundred florins should be annually paid him from my
effects till his death or my release. I commissioned him to seek an
audience from the Empress, endeavour to excite her compassion in my
behalf, and to remit me four thousand florins, for which I gave a proper
acquittance, by the way of Hamburgh. The money-draft was addressed to my
administrators, Counsellors Kempf and Huttner.

But no one, alas! in Vienna, wished my return; they had already begun to
share my property, of which they never rendered me an account. Poor
Sonntag was arrested as a spy, imprisoned, ill treated for some weeks,
and, at last, when naked and destitute, received a hundred florins, and
was escorted beyond the Austrian confines. The worthy man fell a
shameful sacrifice to his honesty, could never obtain an audience of the
Empress, and returned poor and miserable on foot to Berlin, where he was
twelve months secretly maintained by his brother, and with whom he died.
He wrote an account of all this to the good Knoblauch, my Hamburgh agent,
and I, from my small store, sent him a hundred ducats.

How much must I despair of finding any place of refuge on earth, hearing
accounts like these from Vienna.

A friend, whom I will never name, by the aid of one of the lieutenants,
secretly visited me, and supplied me with six hundred ducats. The same
friend, in the year 1763, paid four thousand florins to the imperial
envoy, Baron Reidt, at Berlin, for the furthering of my freedom, as I
shall presently more fully show. Thus I had once more money.

About this time the French army advanced to within five miles of
Magdeburg. This important fortress was, at that time, the key of the
whole Prussian power. It required a garrison of sixteen thousand men,
and contained not more than fifteen hundred. The French might have
marched in unopposed, and at once have put an en