"J'ai été hier au consistoire, c'est à dire, dans la maison de M. Leibziger, et après que le président eût prononcé avec toute la politesse du monde une sentence qui n'est guère polie, le surintendant me regala d'un plat de son métier, car les prêtres veulent toujours se mêler de tout; mais j'abrégai la harangue en disant, Monsieur, je sais ce que vous voulez dire. Nous sommes tous de grands pécheurs, cela est vrai; la preuve en est faite.' Je fis la révérence, et je laissai ce qu'on appelle le consistoire dans la méditation de la grande vérité que je venais de lui dire." Maurice, though he had spent 200,000 thalers of his wife's money, was magnanimous enough to keep on friendly terms with her, and it is pleasing to know that Victoria was consoled by a second marriage for all the pain of the first, and that she reared a prosperous family, who inherited her estates. Maurice thus started afresh in life, without a tie in the world except his mother-the deserted mistress and provostess at Quedlinburg, whose anxiety about him met with little attention. Full of life and energy, of Herculean strength, and a proficient in every kind of athletic exercise, he ran about courting the wildest adventures: at one time he stood under the fire of a battery at Stralsund to get a view of Charles XII., of whom he was a great admirer; at another time, in one of his Polish journeys, he rivalled the exploit of the Swede himself at Bender. A squadron of Polish cavalry in revolt against his father surrounded a house in which he was at dinner with five officers and twelve attendants, and he kept the assailants at bay for a whole day, and then cut his way through them at night. A little after this, at a hunting-party, he rode neck and neck with a stag, and cut its head off at one blow. Such feats of strength and dexterity he had ever at command, as later, when he astonished the fine ladies of Versailles by twisting a horseshoe with his fingers into the form of a corkscrew. Maurice, however, finding the ministers about his father, and especially Fleming, opposed to giving him any prospect of advancement, bethought himself of going to France to try his fortune there. He arrived in Paris during the time that the world was wild with the golden visions of Law and scrambling for Mississippi shares in the Rue Quincampoix, and with Maurice's gambling propensities it is not certain that the young adventurer was not drawn to Paris with the hope of retrieving his damaged fortunes in the monetary Tophet of the time. Maurice, though he did nothing but lose by Law's bank, bethought himself of other schemes: he visited all the great people, especially the old Princess Palatine, the Duchess of Orleans, the mother of the Regent-the pious old cross-grained German princess who abominated all the immoral madness of the time-she who boxed the ears of her son for consenting to marry the illegitimate daughter of Louis XIV. This severe old lady took interest in Maurice, nevertheless, and gave him good advice; but she died soon after his arrival in France. He saw her on her deathbed, and she asked him, with a smile, "Have you read the third chapter of Ecclesiastes? (Habt er wohl das drite Capitel in Prediger Salamonis gelesen ?)” Maurice, on returning home, found this and other passages pencil-marked in his German Bible, but never suspected that it was the good old lady herself who had taken the pains to do this for the young reprobate. For the young fellow had thrown himself into all the follies and libertine practices of the time and place, and his name was noised about in those brilliant and vicious circles, together with that of the Princess de Conti, Adrienne Lecouvreur, the famous tragic actress, and a score of other beauties. The Prince de Conti, who was Maurice's evil genius through life, and whose rapier-point, if legend may be trusted, put the profligate hero out of the world at the last, scandalized the fine people of Versailles by getting furiously jealous, and bursting into the princess's room on one occasion with drawn sword. "Pourquoi ce bruit?" she scornfully said. "Si vous aviez pensé qu'il y eût un homme chez moi, vous vous auriez bien gardé d'y paraitre." However, the martial spirit was sufficiently strong in Maurice to make him something more than a mere libertine; he got a regiment from the king, and took to studying engineering, and military tactics, and strategy with great energy, in which he was assisted by the Chevalier Folard—an eminent tactician who had published Polybius with military notes, and fought under Vendôme and Charles XII., and who, when he first saw Maurice review his regiment, declared that he possessed as great military genius as any man of the time; "as," he said, “will appear when a war breaks out." An European war was indeed what Maurice longed for some brouillamini général, to use his own expression, in which, amid a universal scramble, he might be able to get something worth having. A crown, indeed, of some kind he seems to think nature mostly fashioned his head for, and indeed we may say he would have made as good a king as any of the time, Frederick the Great excepted. This, indeed, is a very curious point about Maurice's character. The adventurer was all his life fishing for a crown, and although he was very near getting one on sundry occasions, yet he never succeeded; so that he was in fact a disappointed man, and had to put up with crownings with gold laurels at the opera after his victories of Fontenoy, Raucoux, and Laufeld, and with a sort of sham sovereignty at Chambord, where he played the little monarch with permission of the French court after he had retired from business. Visionary crowns and diadems in every part of the world gleamed before his eyes all his life. Courland, Corsica, Madagascar and Tobago might have owned him for king; and strange to say he had two chances of being Emperor of All the Russias, and missed both opportunities chiefly through his libertine conduct. In Courland, however, he really was monarch for a short time. Courland was an ancient and independent duchy, which only became Russian at the time of the partition of Poland. It was about the size of Würtemberg or Tuscany, and spread its sandy wastes, pine-forests, and arable land to the shores of the Baltic between Lithuania and Livonia. It was recovered from heathendom by the Sword-Brothers, who afterwards amalgamated into the Teutonic Knights, whose old palace still exists at the capital Mitau. When the order of the Teutonic Knights was abolished by the Poles, the last grand master, Kettler, was established as Duke of Courland, which was made an hereditary fief of Poland. In Maurice's day the old race was dying out--an old man of seventy, the last male, was on the throne, and the electors of the duchy were looking out for a new chief. At the same time two Russian ladies of great dignity were wanting husbands: the one, the Dowager Duchess Anna Ivanovna, the widow of the brother of the reigning duke, was old and ugly, but she was the niece of Peter the Great, and subsequently became Empress; the other was Elizabeth Petrovna, the daughter of Peter the Great, who also subsequently became Empress, and was both young and handsome. Either of these ladies might make anybody Duke of Courland, since Russia was beginning to be all-powerful in those quarters, and this espe cially since the great Northern war, of which Augustus the Strong had been a prime mover. Both of these ladies seem to have been willing to marry Maurice, and, indeed, the former used her influence and did get him duly elected duke by the Diet of Mitau; and Maurice, after exhausting the dissipations of Paris, Dresden, and Warsaw, appeared for a time as Duke of Courland. Intrigue, however, was busy in the court of Russia,-he lost the support of Anna Ivanovna, it is said-though the story seems doubtful-through a scandalous discovery of an amour with one of her maids of honour. A new adventurer, Menschikoff, made his appearance, supported by Russian troops; and Maurice, at the head of a little army of 400 infantry, 98 dragoons, and 33 domestics, was at last besieged in a little isle of the Baltic, from which he escaped by night alone on horseback, after giving orders to his small troop to surrender in the morning. After all his failures to get a crown in other directions, Maurice clung to his title of ex-Duke of Courland, and had many a visionary hope of being restored to his duchy. Maurice might thus have made a seventh crownless monarch among the group with whom Candide banqueted at VeniceSultan Achmet, the Czar Ivan, Charles Edward, August III. of Poland, Stanislas Leckzinska, and Theodore de Neuhoff, ex-king of Corsica; and it is strange that Voltaire should not have admitted his friend to the honour of sharing the society of the discrowned banqueters. Maurice after this returned again to France in 1729, to which country he devoted his services up to the time of his death in 1750. Like a true condottiere, when the war of the Polish succession broke out, he did not shrink from engaging in the service of France, which supported Stanislas Leckzinska, the father of the French queen, as king of Poland, against Russia, Austria, and his own brother, Augustus III. He was made lieutenantgeneral, and his first military achievement of distinction was the daring escalade of Prague, followed by the taking of Egra. The pacific and timid Fleury was, however, not disposed to carry on war in a manner in which Maurice could make much progress. The incompetent Marshal de Broglie undid all the work of his brilliant lieutenant-general, and the capture of Prague was followed by that disastrous and horrible retreat amid the snow of a deadly winter, in which France lost thousands of brave soldiers, and from whose effects died after two years of painful illness the young, sensitive and noble-hearted Vanvenargues, the purest spirit, perhaps, of the whole century. In 1740, however, occurred an event which was for Maurice an unlooked-for piece of good fortune,-though it brought calamity and desolation in almost every corner of Europe, was the cause of the death of millions of men, and of bloodshed in every quarter of the globe. The Emperor Charles VI. of Austria died unexpectedly of a fit of indigestion, and his daughter, a girl of twenty-two, but of heroic spirit, was left alone to contend for her right of succession to an immense empire against the whole troop of faithless and covetous potentates of Europe. Maurice saw at a glance that his brouillamini général had arrived. "Le brouillamini général qui s'apprête peut très bien après tout m'apporter quelque chose," is his philosophic view of the question. Out of the brouillamini général Maurice contrived to pick the staff of Marshal of France in 1744, and after that he led the French army through a series of victories; and it marks the degraded state into which France had fallen in the last days of the monarchy, that the only victories she obtained were under the guidance of this Saxon adventurer. "Encore un coup du Maréchal de Saxe," Barbier the journalist cries at every fresh intelligence of victory:-Fontenoy in 1745, Raucoux in 1746, Laufeld in 1747, the taking of Brussels in 1748, besides the capture of a crowd of smaller towns, led up to the peace of Amiens. It is sufficient for Maurice's military fame that his operations were considered almost faultless in tactics and strategy by Frederick the Great, who always expressed the highest admiration of his genius. He was accused by his jealous critics at Versailles-whose hatred and envy of the "bâtard étranger" was immense of prolonging the war as much as possible for selfish purposes; but it is a singular circumstance that Maurice, with all his recklessness of private life, when once in the field, was one of the most cautious of commanders, and never threw away a man unnecessarily. On one occasion, when he was urged by a lieutenant-general to take a post he did not want to take, he asked how many men it would cost. Not more than a dozen, was replied. "Passe encore," Maurice said, "si c'était douze lieutenants-généraux." He did all he could to keep up the spirits of both his men and their officers, and for this purpose had a theatre in his camp, with a troop of actors paid by himself. On the evening before Laufeld, the chief actress, Madame Favart, announced from the stage, by Maurice's orders, "Demain, relâche, cause de battaille; après demain, jour de victoire, on donnera Le Coq du Village.' Maurice had a quick sense of humour in the gravest circumstances. "What a fool you were to risk your life for a crown?" he said to a marauder on his way to the gallows. Why, I risk it every day for less," the soldier replied. Maurice said, "Give him his life." Maurice shared in the general discontent caused by the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, in which the king abandoned all the ground he had won, alleging absurdly that he would make peace "pas en marchand, mais en roi." The very fishwomen in France cried "Bête comme la paix," and a chanson went about whose rhymes, after the light French fashion, sung that the kingPrit deux étrangers pour tout prendre, Prit un étranger pour tout rendre, Prit le Prétendant pour le vendre. The deux étrangers were Maurice and his second in command, the Dane Löwendhal, another condottiere. The French negotiator was also a foreigner, and the exile of the Pretender and his seizure at the opera were measures as distasteful to Maurice as they were considered shameful by France, since Maurice and the Pretender were great friends since 1743, when they were both at Dunkirk making preparations for an invasion of England-the army was ready, the ships were waiting, part of the troops were embarked, when storm after storm came on, stranded and broke up half the vessels, and the scheme was abandoned. "Les vents," said Maurice, n'étaient pas Jacobites." 66 After the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, and after receiving all the honours, ovations, pensions, and court favours which he could well desire, Maurice, who was always ill at ease among the courtiers of Versailles, who hated the generals of the ante-chamber and had no taste for the daily company of the Eil de Boeuf, retired to his château at Chambord, where he lived in mock semblance of royal estate in the enormous old palace of the Valois. The king, to humour his pretensions to royalty as ex-Duke of Courland, allowed him to keep a regiment of Uhlans there, and their long lances, strange costumes, their turbans on the helmets, and their Hungarian boots, excited the wonder of the neighbourhood. Maurice had cannon to guard his gate, and sentinels to stand beside his door. English, Austrian, and Dutch flags of trophy were hung in his hall. He had his hunts, his little court pageants, and his jours de grands couverts,-days when, in imitation of Versailles, the people of Blois were admitted to come and see the victor of Fontenoy at table. A troop of actors and actresses came enliven the vast halls of Chambord, and he kept up a menagerie and breeding stud of horses for his cavalry. His old mania for getting a kingdom of Barataria, somehow or other, still revived from time to time. He had royal projects about Madagascar, Corsica, Tobago, and he entertained at one time the singular scheme of collecting together all the Jews of Europe, and taking them over to America, and founding a Hebrew empire in those regions. Maurice, up to the last day of his life, kept up a series of amours with a succession of frail and facile beauties. Of fine ladies he had, for the most part, a horror. To his rough irregular condottiere nature, constancy to woman was an unimaginable virtue. His life presented no very admirable aspect from any point of view; but his relations with his innumerable mistresses were all coarse and momentary, and his treatment of them sometimes barbarous. The most famous of all his mistresses was Adrienne |