To reform Frederick’s monarchy would have required no less genius than it took to create it. Reform, however, was indispensable, since Frederick alone was capable of holding up the composite edifice he had built. Hence a threatening and wellnigh inevitable catastrophe. “All will go on almost of its own accord, so long as foreign affairs are quiet and unbroken,” wrote Mirabeau after Frederick’s death. “But at the first gunshot or at the first stormy situation the whole of this little scaffolding of mediocrity will topple to the ground. How all these underling Ministers would crumple up! How everyone, from the distracted chief to the convict-gang, would shout for a pilot! Who would that pilot be?” V. Frederick’s nephew, who was called upon to succeed him, was not made for so great a rôle. In every respect he offered a complete contrast to the Prince whose weighty heritage he took up. Frederick in person was infirm and sober; all his prestige lay in the gaze of his great eyes, which, as Mirabeau put it, “at the will of his heroic soul, carried fascination or terror.” Frederick William II. was a _bel homme_, highly sanguine, very robust, fond of violent exercise and coarse pleasures. “The build and strength of a Royal Guardsman,” wrote the French Minister d’Esterno, who had no liking for him. “An enormous machine of flesh,” said an Austrian diplomat who saw him at Pillnitz in 1791. “The true type of a King,” according to Metternich, who was presented to him in 1792 at Coblenz, at the time of the German crusade against France and the Revolution. “His stature,” he added, “was gigantic, and his corpulence in keeping. In every company he stood a head higher than the surrounding crowd. His manners were noble and engaging.” He expressed himself with a certain effort, in little abrupt phrases. There was nothing in him to recall the implacable and sovereign irony of Frederick. “His look,” said one apologist, “does not betoken a man of genius, but German candour shines on his brow.” Strange candour, scarcely recognizable if you take the word in its common and proper sense. It must be taken, as was then the practice in Germany, through translations of Rousseau, in the equivocal and refined acceptation which reconciled innocence with indecency, virtue with every disorder of the imagination and the heart. Ecstatic and sensual, devout and licentious, a prey to violent appetites, tormented by scruples, superstitious and debauched, believing in ghosts, with a tendency towards cabal, Frederick William had a taste for ethics and a feeling for religion. He spoke of them with respect, with awe, with emotion. In his case it was a natural penchant and at the same time a pose, the attitude of every heir-presumptive towards the crowned head, a way of winning admiration and captivating by force of contrast. VI.