Frederic William I.[94], father of the great Frederic, a stern and eccentric man, was brought up by Madame de Rocoules, the refugee: he loved a young woman who was unable to soften him; his drawing-room was a smoking-room. He nominated the buffoon Gundling[95] President of the Royal Academy of Berlin; he shut up his son in the Citadel of Custrin, and Quatt had his head chopped off before the young Prince's eyes: that was the private life of that time. Frederic the Great, having ascended the throne, had an intrigue with an Italian dancer, the Barbarini, the only woman he ever approached: he contented himself on his wedding-night with playing the flute under the window of the Princess Elizabeth of Brunswick[96] when he married her. Frederic had a taste for music and a mania for verses. The intrigues and epigrams of the two poets, Frederic and Voltaire[97], disturbed Madame de Pompadour[98], the Abbé de Bernis[99] and Louis XV.[100] The Margravine of Bayreuth[101] was mixed up in all this with love, such as a poet might feel. Literary parties at the King's; next, dogs on unclean arm-chairs; next, concerts before statues of Antinous; next, great dinner-parties; next, a quantity of philosophy; next, the liberty of the press and blows with the stick; next, a lobster or an eel-pie, which put an end to the days of an old great man who wanted to live: these are the things with which private society occupied itself in that time of letters and battles. And, notwithstanding, Frederic renovated Germany, established a counterpoise to Austria, and altered all Germany's relations and all her political interests. In the later reigns, we find the Marble Palace, Frau Rietz[102], with her son, Alexander Count von der Marck, the Baroness von Stoltzenberg, mistress to the Margrave Schwed, and formerly an actress; Prince Henry[103] and his suspicious friends, Fräulein Voss, Frau Rietz's rival; an intrigue at a masked ball between a young Frenchman and the wife of a Prussian general; lastly Madame de F------, whose adventure we can read in the _Histoire secrète de la cour de Berlin_[104]: who knows all those names? Who will remember ours? To-day, in the Prussian capital, octogenarians scarcely preserve the memory of that past generation. [Sidenote: Berlin society.] The habits of Berlin society suited me: people "went to evening-parties" between five and six; all was over by nine, and I used to go to bed just as though I had not been an ambassador. Sleep devours existence, which is a good thing: "The hours are short and life is long," says Fénelon.