“Choose whatever apartment in our house you like. Regulate yourself all that you want, either for comfort or luxury. Make your arrangements in such a way as that you may be happy and comfortable, and leave it to me to provide for the rest. You will be always entirely free, and master to choose your own way of life. My only pretension is to enchain you by friendship and kindness. “You will have passports for the post-horses, and whatever else you may ask. I hope to see you on Wednesday. I shall then profit by the few moments of leisure which remain to me, to enlighten myself by the blaze of your powerful genius. I entreat you to believe I shall always be the same toward you. Adieu.” Voltaire has given a detailed account of the incidents connected with this visit to his Prussian majesty. It is a humiliating exhibition of the intrigues and insincerity which animated the prominent actors in those scenes. “The public affairs in France,” writes Voltaire, “continued in as bad a state after the death of Cardinal De Fleury as during the last two years of his administration. The house of Austria rose again from its ashes. France was cruelly pressed upon by that power and by England. No other resource remained to us but the chance of regaining the King of Prussia, who, having drawn us into the war, had abandoned us as soon as it was convenient to himself so to do. It was thought advisable, under these circumstances, that I should be sent to that monarch to sound his intentions, and, if possible, persuade him to avert the storm which, after it had first fallen on us, would be sure, sooner or later, to fall from Vienna upon him. We also wished to secure from him the loan of a hundred thousand men, with the assurance that he could thus better secure to himself Silesia. “The minister for foreign affairs was charged to hasten my departure. A pretext, however, was necessary. I took that of my quarrel with the Bishop Mirepoix. I wrote accordingly to the King of Prussia that I could no longer endure the persecutions of this monk, and that I should take refuge under the protection of a philosophical sovereign, far from the disputes of this bigot. When I arrived at Berlin the king lodged me in his palace, as he had done in my former journeys. He then led the same sort of life which he had always done since he came to the throne. He rose at five in summer and six in winter.[75] A single servant came to light his fire, to dress and shave him. Indeed, he dressed himself almost without any assistance. His bedroom was a handsome one. A rich and highly ornamented balustrade of silver inclosed apparently a bed hung with curtains, but behind the curtains, instead of a bed, there was a library. As for the royal couch, it was a wretched truckle-bed, with a thin mattress, behind a screen, in one corner of the room. Marcus Aurelius and Julian, his favorite heroes, and the greatest men among the Stoics, were not worse lodged.”