She had a name for him, at once childish and oracular; it seems to show that her woman’s intuition pierced the secret of his character. She never named him save as “the bad man.” The bad man. Yes, that he was, with the emphasis as much on man as on bad. The mysteries of sex are very profound, never will they be quite explained. Was it that this king could not endure women because he was such a bad man, or that he was such a bad man because he could not endure women? A riddle not to be unriddled. But that the two things were somehow dependent on each other--of that I feel certain. “The bad man”: he was that to everybody, though it was Maria Theresa who by preference and from the depths of her heart gave him the name. There was always a whispering and a plotting and a conspiring round about him--defensively, of course, in the end, and as precautionary measures--all directed against him; he had always to realize it, even when he knew nothing specific; and he parried, as well as he could, ten years long. Yes, we must agree that during all that time he was, diplomatically speaking, on the defensive against his worse nature--though one might, indeed, get the impression that even this behaviour was dictated by sheer malice and in order to lead honest people by the nose.... To sum up, the constellation of great powers was at that time as follows: The traditional, three-hundred-year-old rivalry between France and Austria was a settled factor, a political constant, which it seemed would have to be reckoned with to all eternity. It had brought France and Prussia together and the alliance of June 1744 had still up to ’56 to run. But that alliance had become rather loose and unreliable, after Frederick withdrew--prematurely, in the view of France--from the War of the Succession. As for England, her hostility toward France was if possible even more venerable than that country’s toward Austria. France loomed large upon the continent, France had a fleet, overseas interests (there were disputes in America, more precisely in Canada)--in short, quite enough to make England keep a sharp eye on her. And George II could endure Frederick as little as anybody else. He too, though not a female, had been satirized in an epigram. And so England clave to Russia, where the amateur of strong drink and muscular soldiers sat enthroned; and did this with especial reference to Prussia; Prussia being still regarded as an ally of France, and in a position, in case of war between the latter and the English, to attack England on her continental heel of Achilles--in other words, Hanover.... The attitude of Saxon Poland was particularly curious, involved, and timid--under an Augustus anything but Strong, or, rather, under his prime minister and head of the Cabinet, Count Brühl, a great spender, a great roué and intriguer, who presently ruined the country financially and after that politically too. This man possessed two hundred pairs of shoes, eight