ening to a perspective of artificial ruins, with
broken pillars lifting a conscious fragment of architrave against the
sky. Within, all again was French in the design, the decoration and the
furnishing. At that time there, was in fact no other taste, and
Frederick, who despised and disused his native tongue, was resolved upon
French taste even in his intimate companionship. The droll story of his
coquetry with the terrible free spirit which he got from France to be his
guest is vividly reanimated at Sans Souci, where one breathes the very
air in which the strangely assorted companions lived, and in which they
parted so soon to pursue each other with brutal annoyance on one side,
and with merciless mockery on the other. Voltaire was long ago revenged
upon his host for all the indignities he suffered from him in their
comedy; he left deeply graven upon Frederick's fame the trace of those
lacerating talons which he could strike to the quick; and it is the
singular effect of this scene of their brief friendship that one feels
there the pre-eminence of the wit in whatever was most important to
mankind.

The rain had lifted a little and the sun shone out on the bloom of the
lovely parterre where the Marches profited by a smiling moment to wander
among the statues and the roses heavy with the shower. Then they walked
back to their carriage and drove to the New Palace, which expresses in
differing architectural terms the same subjection to an alien ideal of
beauty. It is thronged without by delightfully preposterous rococco
statues, and within it is rich in all those curiosities and memorials of
royalty with which palaces so well know how to fatigue the flesh and
spirit of their visitors.

The Marches escaped from it all with sighs and groans of relief, and
before they drove off to see the great fountain of the Orangeries, they
dedicated a moment of pathos to the Temple of Friendship which Frederick
built in memory of unhappy Wilhelmina of Beyreuth, the sister he loved in
the common sorrow of their wretched home, and neglected when he came to
his kingdom. It is beautiful in its rococco way, swept up to on its
terrace by most noble staircases, and swaggered over by baroque
allegories of all sorts: Everywhere the statues outnumbered the visitors,
who may have been kept away by the rain; the statues naturally did not
mind it.

Sometime in the midst of their sight-seeing the Marches had dinner in a
mildewed restaurant, where a c