They showed me the New Palace, already falling to pieces. In the old palace of Potsdam, they preserve the tobacco-stains, the worn and soiled chairs, in a word, all the traces of the renegade Prince's uncleanliness. This place immortalizes at once the dirt of the cynic, the impudence of the atheist, the tyranny of the despot, and the glory of the soldier. One thing alone attracted my attention: the hands of a clock fixed at the moment of Frederic's death; I was deceived by the immobility of the picture: hours never stay their flight; it is not man that stops the career of time, it is time that stops the career of man. Besides, it matters little what part we have played in life; the brilliancy or obscurity of our doctrines, our riches or poverty, our joys or sorrows in no way influence the length of our days. Whether the hands of the clock move over a golden or wooden face, whether the face be large or small, and fill the bezel of a ring or the rose-window of a cathedral, the hour has but one duration. In a vault of the Protestant church, immediately below the pulpit of the unfrocked schismatic, I saw the coffin of the crowned sophist. The coffin is of bronze; when you strike it, it resounds. The dragoon who slumbers in this brassy bed would not even be roused from sleep by the noise of his fame; he will awake only to the sound of the trumpet which shall summon him to his last battle-field, face to face with the Lord of Hosts. I had so great a need of a change of impressions that I found relief in visiting the Marble House. The king who built it once spoke some flattering words to me when, a poor officer, I passed through his army. This king at least shared the ordinary failings of mankind: vulgar like other men, he took refuge in pleasures. Do the two skeletons trouble themselves today about the difference that once existed between them, when one was Frederic the Great and the other Frederic William[180]? Sans-Souci and the Marble House are both ruins without masters. Upon the whole, though the immensity of the events of our own time has lessened past events, though Rosbach, Lissa, Liegnitz, Torgau are mere skirmishes beside the battles of Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, the Moskowa, Frederic suffers less than other personages by comparison with the giant enchained at St. Helena. The King of Prussia and Voltaire are two strangely-grouped figures who will live: the second destroyed a society with a philosophy which assisted the first in founding a kingdom.