When her history begins again under the title she has "reneged," the reader may for no short time think that the curse of the sequel--a curse only too common, but not universal--is going to be averted. She is in Berlin alone (see note above); is successful, but not at all happy--perhaps least of all happy because the king, partly out of gratitude for his safety, partly out of something like a more natural kind of affection than most authors have credited him with, pays her marked attentions. For a time things are not unlively; and even the very dangerous experiment of a supper--one of those at which Frederic's guests were supposed to have perfectly "free elbows" and availed themselves of the supposition at their peril--a supper with Voltaire, La Mettrie, Algarotti, D'Argens, Poellnitz, and "Quintus Icilius" present--comes off not so badly. One of the reasons of this is that George Sand has the sense to make Voltaire ill and silent, and puts the bulk of the "business" on La Mettrie--a person much cleverer than most people who have only read book-notices of him may think, but not dangerously brilliant. Then Consuelo, or "La Porporina," as her stage name is, gets mixed up--owing to no fault of her own in the first place at any rate--with the intrigues of the Princess Amelie of Prussia and her lover, the less bad Trenck. This has two awkward results--for herself an imprisonment at Spandau, into which she is cast by Frederic's half jealous, half purely tyrannical wrath, and for us a revival of all the _massacrant_ illuminism in which the Princess herself is dabbling. So we have on the scene not only (as the reader sees at once, though some rather clumsy efforts are made to hide it) the resuscitated Albert, who passes as a certain Trismegistus, not only the historical charlatan Saint-Germain, but another charlatan at this time not at all historical (seeing that the whole story ends in 1760, and he never left Palermo till nine years later), Cagliostro. Even at Spandau Consuelo herself is not quite uninteresting; but the Illuminati determine to rescue her, and for the latter part of the first volume and the whole of the second the entire thing is, once more, Bosh. The most absurd "double-gangings" take place between an _inconnu_ named Liverani, whom Consuelo cannot help loving, and Albert himself, who _is_ Liverani, as everybody but herself sees at once, interspersed between endless tracts of the usual rubbish about underground tribunals, and judges in red cloaks, and skeletons, and museums of torture-implements, and all the Weishauptian trumpery of mixed occultism and revolutionary sentiment. The author has even the insufferable audacity to fling at us _another_ resuscitation--that of the Countess Wanda, Albert's mother, who appears to have transmitted to him her abominable habit of catalepsy. So ends, unsatisfactorily enough--unless anybody is satisfied by the fact that two solid children