The Consistory did not require to deliberate a second time; precedents had been established, and they were followed. The marriage took place on April 10, 1790, and it was the Court preacher, Zœllner, who consecrated it, as he had consecrated that with Mademoiselle de Voss. The Queen gave the bride girandoles of diamonds. The Queen-Dowager received her, and everyone at Court made a fuss of her. All the same, she was no more successful than Mademoiselle de Voss in getting rid of Madame Rietz. This favourite, who had been given 70,000 crowns to take her departure, remained, took an officer as her lover, and even got the King to promote him. X. And so, in 1790, the King of Prussia, Mademoiselle de Voss’s widower, had three wives living: the Princess of Brunswick, who was repudiated; the Princess of Darmstadt, who, although divorced, still kept the rank of Queen; and Mademoiselle Dœnhof, morganatic wife. This third wife, wrote one diplomat, will not be the last, for “those the King longs for will also want to be married.” The Prince in any case was always ready. Polygamy, in his eyes, was a prerogative of royalty. As the result of a Court intrigue in 1792 he had himself separated from Mademoiselle Dœnhof, crowning by this divorce the strange series of his conjugal evolutions. Then he offered his heart and hand to a lady called Bethmann, a banker’s daughter whom he had known at Frankfurt, and found very much to his liking. This young person, in the words of Lord Malmesbury, was “all sentiment and all fire”; but she had principles and discretion. She had misgivings about the character of the marriage and the constancy of the bridegroom. She refused, thus sparing the Berlin casuists the trouble of a deliberation still more ticklish than before. I know not whether these accommodating theologians, reared in the school of Voltaire and Frederick, took these simultaneous marriages very seriously or not; abroad they afforded subject for ridicule, and Catherine the Great, who herself did not feel bound to observe so many formalities, was highly amused at them; “that big lout of a Gu”—such was her name for Frederick William in her letters to Grimm—“that big lout has just married a third wife; the libertine never has enough legitimate wives; for a conscientious libertine, commend me to him.” XI.