It was raining, the night was dark and everything went off well. I had, however, to wade through the public drain and this I had not foreseen. I only sank into it just above the knees, but was not able to work my way out of it. I did all I could, but stuck so fast that at last I lost all my strength and called to the sentry on the rampart, ‘Tell the commandant that Trenck is sticking in the mire!’ “Now to augment my misfortune, it happened that General Fouquet was at that time commandant in Glatz. He was a well known misanthrope, had fought a duel with my father and been wounded by him, and the Austrian Trenck had taken his baggage from him in 1744. He was therefore a great enemy to the Trenck name, and consequently made me remain in the filth for some hours as a public spectacle to the garrison, then had me pulled out and confined in my cell, allowing no water to be taken to me for cleaning purposes. No one can imagine how I looked; my long hair had got into the mud, and my condition was really pitiable until some prisoners were permitted to wash and cleanse me.” When he finally escaped from Glatz, he went to Bohemia, to Nürnberg and to Vienna, whence he passed into Russia and entered the service of the czar for a time. Then he again travelled through northern Europe and returned to Vienna, where he was coldly received, and he started once more for Russia, but was intercepted at Danzig and again arrested in 1753, after which he suffered a more severe imprisonment for nearly ten years, characterised with such inhuman treatment that it must ever tarnish the reputation of the monarch who posed as a poet and a philosopher, the friend of Voltaire. Frederick the Great would hardly have earned his ambitious epithet had it depended upon the measure he meted out to his turbulent subject, Friedrich von der Trenck. He hated him cordially and persecuted him cruelly, behaving with a pitiless severity, and exhibiting such a contemptible spirit of revenge that he has been hopelessly disgraced by the enlightened verdict of history.