edrich, by this time, probably begins
to discover;--though indeed to Friedrich the thing is of finite moment;
by no means of infinite, as it was to Voltaire. "At worst, nothing but
a little money thrown away!" thinks Friedrich: "Sure enough, this is a
strange Trismegistus, this of mine: star fire-work shall we call him, or
terrestrial smoke-and-soot work? But one can fence oneself against the
blind vagaries of the man; and get a great deal of good by him, in the
lucid intervals." To Voltaire himself the position is most agitating;
but then its glories, were there nothing more! Besides he is always
thinking to quit it shortly; which is a great sedative in troubles.
What with intermittencies (safe hidings in one's MARQUISAT, or vacant
interlunar cave), with alternations of offence and reconcilement; what
with occasional actual flights to Paris (whitherward Voltaire is always
busy to keep a postern open; and of which there is frequent talk, and
almost continual thought, all along), flights to be called "visits,"
and privately intending to be final, but never proving so,--the
Voltaire-Friedrich relation, if left to itself, might perhaps long have
staggered about, and not ended as it did.

But, alas, no relation can be left to itself in this world,--especially
if you have a porous skin! There were other French here, as well as
Voltaire, revolving in the Court-circle; and that, beyond all others,
proved the fatal circumstance to him. "NE SAVEZ-VOUS PAS, Don't you
know," said he to Chancellor Jarriges one day, "that when there are two
Frenchmen in a Foreign Court or Country, one of them must die (FAUT QUE
L'UN DES DEUX PERISSE)?" [Seyfarth, ii. 191; &c. &c.] Which shocked the
mind of Jarriges; but had a kind of truth, too. Jew Hirsch, run into for
low smuggling purposes, had been a Cape of Storms, difficult to weather;
but the continual leeshore were those French,--with a heavy gale on, and
one of the rashest pilots! He did strike the breakers there, at last;
and it is well known, total shipwreck was the issue. Our Second Act,
holding out dubiously, in continual perils, till Autumn, 1752, will have
to pass then into a Third of darker complexion, and into a Catastrophe
very dark indeed.

Catastrophe which, by farther ill accident, proved noisy in the extreme;
producing world-wide shrieks from the one party, stone-silence from the
other; which were answered by unlimited hooting, catcalling and haha-ing
from all parts of the Wor