The Vizir, Ibrahim Molla, who had been so bent on war with the Russians in opposition to the favourite, was pressed to death between two doors. The post of Vizir was now so dangerous that none dare take the office; but after it had been vacant for about six months, the favourite Ali-Coumourgi took it. Then the King of Sweden abandoned all hope. He really knew Coumourgi, because he had been of service to him when the favourite’s interest had corresponded with his own. He had spent eleven months buried in idleness and oblivion at Demotica; this extreme idleness, following the most violent exercise, made the illness which he had before assumed a fact. All Europe believed he was dead, and the Regency which he had settled when he left Stockholm, getting no word from him, the Senate went to the Princess Ulrica Eleanora to ask her to take the Regency during the absence of her brother. She accepted it; but when she found that the Senate were trying to force her to peace with the King of Denmark, who was attacking Sweden from all sides, and with the Czar, she resigned the Regency in the certainty that her brother would never ratify the peace, and sent a long account of the affair to him in Turkey. The King received the dispatches at Demotica, and the despotic theories which he had inherited made him forget that Sweden had once been free, and that the Senate had formerly governed the kingdom together with the Kings. He looked on them as servants, who were usurping the government in the absence of their master; he wrote to them that if they wanted to govern he would send them one of his boots, to whom they might apply for orders. Then, to prevent any attempt to overthrow his authority in Sweden, and to defend his country, hoping for nothing further from the Ottomans, he depended on himself, and told the Grand Vizir that he would go through Germany. Desaleurs, the French ambassador who transacted all the affairs of Sweden, made the proposal to the Vizir. “Well,” said the Vizir, “didn’t I say that the year would not pass without the King’s asking to go? Tell him that he is free to go or stay, but that he must fix his day, that we may not have a repetition of the trouble we had with him at Bender.” Count Desaleurs softened the form of this message to the King. The day was fixed, but Charles wished, in spite of his wretched position, to show the pomp of a grand king before leaving. He made Grothusen his ambassador extraordinary, and sent him to make a formal leave at Constantinople, with a suite of fourscore persons in rich attire. But the splendour of the Embassy was not so great as the mean shifts to which he descended to provide it were disgraceful. M. Desaleurs lent the King 40,000 crowns, Grothusen borrowed, through his agents at Constantinople, 1,000 from a Jew, at the rate of fifty per cent., besides 200 pistoles of an English merchant, and 1,000 of a Turk.