Hither this evening, and in all privacy meet me in the palace at such an hour (hour of midnight or thereby); which of553 course G?rtz, duly invisible to mankind, does. Frederick explains: an errand to München; perfectly secret, for the moment, and requiring great delicacy and address; perhaps not without risk, a timorous man might say: will your brother go for me, think you? G?rtz thinks he will.543 I look upon this day, the king replied, as the fairest of my life; for it will become the epoch of uniting two houses which have been enemies too long, and whose mutual interests require that they should strengthen, not weaken, one another.
His affability, his kindliness, to whoever had the honor of speech with this great king, who shall describe it! After talking a good while with the merchants deputation from the hill country, he said, Is there any thing more, then, from any body? Upon which the president stepped forward and said, The burned-out inhabitants of Greiffenberg have charged me to express once more their most submissive gratitude for the gracious help in rebuilding; their word of thanks is indeed of no importance; but they daily pray God to reward such royal beneficence. The king was visibly affected, and said, You dont need to thank me; when my subjects fall into misfortune, it is my duty to help them up again; for that reason am I here.For the most part, one of his own grenadiers was the model from which he copied. And when the portrait had more color in it than the original, he was in the habit of coloring the cheeks of the soldier to correspond with the picture. Enchanted with the fruits of his genius, he showed them to his courtiers, and asked their opinion concerning them. As he would have been very angry with any one who had criticised them, he was quite sure of being gratified with admiration.Frederick received the disastrous news on the 24th of July, the day after the calamity. In the exercise of an unusual spirit of forbearance, he sent word to the defeated general, It is not your fault; I dreaded something of the kind. The kings brother Henry was in command of a few thousand men near Bautzen, in Saxony. Frederick wrote to him to forward his troops immediately, so as to form a union with the retreating army under Wedell. Henry himself was to repair to the vicinity of Landshut, and take command of the army which was to be left in that vicinity confronting General Daun. The king took about thirty thousand picked troops, and hurried to the north to gather up by the way the troops of Henry and of Wedell, and with that combined force of forty-eight thousand men make a new attack upon the ninety-six thousand Russians.131
