aesar to Vendome! Such conversations must make deep
and dangerous impressions on a young, ardent, and virgin mind, and such
theories could not be without their results.

In the midst of this well regulated and virtuous court, accustomed,
after the example of its ruler, to honest pleasures and harmless
amusements, Rodolph, instructed by Polidori, dreamt of the dissipated
nights of Versailles, the orgies of Choisy, the attractive
voluptuousness of the Parc-au-Cerfs, and also, from time to time, of
some romantic amours contrasting with these. Neither had the doctor
failed to prove to Rodolph that a prince of the Germanic Confederation
should not have any military pretension beyond sending his contingent to
the Diet. The feeling of the time was not warlike. According to the
doctor, to pass his time delightfully and idly amongst women and the
refinements of luxury,--to repose from time to time from the animation
of sensual pleasures, amidst the delightful attractions of the fine
arts,--to hunt occasionally, not as a Nimrod, but as an intelligent
epicurean, and enjoy the transitory fatigues which make idleness and
repose taste but the sweeter,--this, this was the only life which a
prince should think of enjoying, who (and this was his height of
happiness) could find a prime minister capable of devoting himself
boldly to the distressing and overwhelming burden of state affairs.

Rodolph, in abandoning himself to ideas which were free from
criminality, because they did not spring from the circle of fatal
probabilities, resolved that when Providence should call to himself the
Grand Duke, his father, he would devote himself to the life which Cesar
Polidori had painted to him under such brilliant and attractive colours,
and to have as his prime minister one whose knowledge and understanding
he admired, and whose blind complaisance he fully appreciated. It is
useless to say that the young prince kept the most perfect silence upon
the subject of those pernicious hopes which had been excited within him.
Knowing that the heroes of the Grand Duke's admiration were Gustavus
Adolphus, Charles XII., and the great Frederic (Maximilian Rodolph had
the honour of belonging to the royal house of Brandenburg), Rodolph
thought, reasonably enough, that the prince, his father, who professed
so profound an admiration for these king-captains, always booted and
spurred, continually mounted on their chargers, and engaged in making
war, would consider