“One soldier was the only guard I found. The Privy-Councillor and Minister of State was walking in the court-yard blowing his fingers. He had on a large pair of coarse ruffles, a hat all in holes, and a judge’s old wig, one side of which hung into his pocket and the other scarcely touched his shoulder. They informed me that this man was charged with a state affair of great importance, and so indeed he was. I was conducted into his majesty’s apartments, in which I found nothing but four bare walls. By the light of a taper I perceived a small truckle-bed two feet and a half wide in a closet, upon which lay a little man wrapped in a morning dressing-gown of blue cloth. It was his majesty who lay perspiring and shaking beneath a miserable coverlet in a violent ague fit. I made my bow, and began my acquaintance by feeling his pulse, as if I had been his first physician. The fit left him, and he rose, dressed himself, and sat down to table with Algerotti, Maupertuis, the ambassador of the States-general, and myself. At supper he treated most profoundly of the soul, natural liberty, and the _Androgynes_ of Plato. I soon found myself attached to him, for he had wit, an agreeable manner, and moreover was a king, which is a circumstance of seduction hardly to be vanquished by human weakness. Generally speaking, it is the employment of men of letters to flatter kings, but in this instance I was praised by a king from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet at the same time that I was libelled at least once a week by the Abbé Desfontaines and other Grub-street poets of Paris.” Voltaire received a pressing invitation to Berlin. “But I had before given him to understand I could not come to stay with him; that I deemed it a duty to prefer friendship to ambition; that I was attached to Mdlle. de Châtelet, and that, between philosophers, I loved a lady better than a king. He approved of the liberty I took, though, for his part, he did not love the ladies. I went to pay him a visit in October, and the Cardinal de Fleury [the French premier] wrote me a long letter, full of praises of the _Anti-Machiavel_, and of the author [Friedrich], which I did not forget to let him see.”