In the meantime General Fleming, King Augustus’s minister and favourite, maintained a private correspondence with the Kan of Tartary and the serasquier of Bender. A German colonel, whose name was La Mare, had made more than one journey from Bender to Dresden, and these were an object of suspicion. Just at this time the King of Sweden caused a courier sent from Fleming to the Tartar prince to be seized on the Wallachian frontier. The letters were brought to him and deciphered; there was obviously a correspondence going on between the Tartars and Dresden, but the references were so general and ambiguous that it was hard to say whether King Augustus’s plan was to detach the Turks from the Swedish alliance, or to persuade the Kan to hand over Charles to his Saxons as he attended him on the road to Poland. It is hard to imagine that so generous a prince as Augustus would, for the sake of seizing the King of Sweden, risk the lives of his ambassadors and 300 Poles, detained at Adrianople as hostages for Charles’s safety. On the other hand, Fleming was absolute, very shrewd, and quite unscrupulous. The outrageous treatment of the Elector by King Charles might be thought an excuse for any method of revenge, and if the Court of Dresden could buy Charles of the Kan of Tartary they may have thought that it would be no difficult matter to purchase the liberty of the Polish hostages of the Ottoman Porte. These reasons were argued between the King, Mullern, his private chancellor, and his favourite Grothusen. They read the letters over and over again, and, their wretched plight increasing their suspicions, they resolved to believe the worst. Some days later the King was confirmed in his suspicions by the sudden departure of Count Sapieha, who had sought refuge with him, and now left him suddenly to go to Poland and throw himself into the arms of Augustus. On any other occasion he would have regarded Sapieha as a malcontent, but in the critical state of affairs he felt certain that he was a traitor; the repeated requests to him to begone made his suspicions a certainty. His own positiveness, together with all these probabilities, made him continue in the certainty that there had been a plot to betray him and deliver him up to his enemies, although the plot had never been proved. He might be wrong in thinking King Augustus had made a bargain with the Tartars for his person, but he was much more so in depending on the Ottoman Porte. But in any case he resolved to gain time. He told the Pasha of Bender that he could not go till he had the wherewithal to pay his debts, for though his thaim had been regularly paid his liberality had always forced him to borrow. The Pasha asked how much he needed. The King answered at hazard 1,000 purses, that is, about 1,500,000 francs French money full weight. The Pasha wrote to his master about it; the Sultan, instead of the 1,000 purses which he demanded, sent him 1,200 with the following letter to the Pasha--