resting-place this hot July evening. Yes, your Majesty, here was a feat of storming done—pang, pang!—such a noise as never jingled on that Hill before: like Doomsday come; and a hero-head to rule the Doomsday, and turn it to heroic marching music. A very pretty feat of war, your Majesty! His Majesty well knows it; feat of his Marlborough's doing, famed everywhere for the twenty-six years last past; and will go to see the Schellenberg and its Lines. The great Duke is dead four years; sank sadly, eclipsed under tears of dotage of his own, and under human stupidity of other men's! But Buddenbrock is still living, Anhalt-Dessau and others of us are still alive a little while!
Hochstadt itself—Blenheim, as the English call it, meaning BLINDHEIM, the other village on the Field—is but a short way up the River; well worth such a detour. By what way they drove to the field of honor and back from it, I do not know. But there, northward, towards the heights, is the little wood where Anhalt-Dessau stood at bay like a Molossian dog, of consummate military knowledge; and saved the fight in Eugene's quarter of it. That is visible enough; and worth looking at. Visible enough the rolling Donau, Marlborough's place; the narrow ground, the bordering Hills all green at this season;—and down old Buddenbrock's cheek, end Anhalt's, there would roll an iron tear or two. Augsburg is but some thirty miles off, once we are across the Donau—by the Bridge of Donauworth, or the Ferry of Hochstadt—swift travellers in a long day, the last of July, are soon enough at Augsburg.
As for Friedrich, haunted and whipt onwards by that scene at Feuchtwang, he is inwardly very busy during this latter part of the route. Probably there is some progress towards gaining Page Keith, Lieutenant Keith of Wesel's Brother; some hope that Page Keith, at the right moment, can be gained: the Lieutenant at Wesel is kept duly advised. To Lieutenant Katte at Berlin Friedrich now writes, I should judge from Donauworth or Augsburg, "That he has had a scene at Feuchtwang; that he can stand it no longer. That Canstatt being given up, as Katte cannot be there to go across the Kniebiss with us, we will endure till we are near enough the Rhine. Once in the Rhineland, in some quiet Town there, handy for Speyer, for French Landau,"—say Sinzheim; last stage hitherward of Heidelberg, but this we do not write—"there might it not be? Be, somewhere, it shall and must! You, Katte, the instant you hear that we are off, speed you towards the Hague; ask for 'M. le Comte d'Alberville;' you will know that gentleman WHEN you see him: Keith, our Wesel friend, will have taken the preliminary soundings;—and I tell you, Count d'Alberville, or news of him, will be there. Bring the great-coat with you, and the other things, especially the 1,000 gold ducats. Count d'Alberville at the Hague, if all have gone right:—nay if anything go wrong, cannot he, once across the Rhine, take refuge in the convents in those Catholic regions? Nobody, under the scapulary, will suspect such a heretic as him. Speed, silence, vigilance! And so adieu!" A letter of such purport Friedrich did write; which Letter, moreover, the Lieutenant Katte received: it was not this, it was another, that stuck upon the road, and fell into the Rittmeister's hand. This is the young Prince's ultimate fixed project, brought to birth by that slight accident of dropping the knife at Feuchtwang; [Ranke, i. 304.] and hanging heavy on his mind during this Augsburg drive. At Augsburg, furthermore, "he bought, in all privacy, red cloth, of quantity to make a top-coat;" red, the gray being unattainable in Katte's hands: in all privacy; though the watchful Rochow had full knowledge of it, all the same.
Chapter VI. — JOURNEY HOMEWARDS FROM THE REICH; CATASTROPHE ON JOURNEY HOMEWARDS.
The travelling Majesty of Prussia went diligently up and down, investigating ancient Augsburg: saw, I doubt not, the FUGGEREI, or ancient Hospice of the Fuggers—who were once Weavers in those parts, and are now Princes, and were known to entertain Charles V. with fires of cinnamon, nay with transient flames of Bank-bills on one old occasion. Saw all the Fuggeries, I doubt not; the ancient Luther-and-Melanchthon relics, Diet-Halls and notabilities of this renowned Free Town;—perhaps remembered Margraf George, and loud-voiced Kurfurst Joachim with the Bottle-nose (our DIRECT Ancestor, though mistaken in opinion on some points!), who were once so audible there.
One passing phenomenon we expressly know he saw; a human, not a historically important one. Driving through the streets from place to place, his Majesty came athwart some questionable quaint procession, ribbony, perhaps musical; Majesty questioned it: "A wedding procession, your Majesty!"—"Will the Bride step out, then, and let us see how she is dressed!" "VOM HERZEN GERN; will have the honor." Bride stept out, with blushes—handsome we will hope; Majesty surveyed her, on the streets of Augsburg, having a human heart in him; and (says Fassmann, as if with insidious insinuation) "is said to have made her a present." She went her way; fulfilled her destiny in an anonymous manner: Friedrich Wilhelm, loudly named in the world, did the like; and their two orbits never intersected again.—Some forty-five miles south of Augsburg, up the Wertach River, more properly up the Mindel River, lies Mindelheim, once a name known in England and in Prussia; once the Duke of Marlborough's "Principality:" given him by a grateful Kaiser Joseph; taken from him by a necessitous Kaiser Karl, Joseph's Brother, that now is. I know not if his Majesty remembers that transaction, now while in these localities; but know well, if he does, he must think it a shabby one.
On the same day, 1st August, 1730, we quit Augsburg; set out fairly homewards again. The route bends westward this time; towards Frankfurt-on-Mayn; there yachts are to be ready; and mere sailing thenceforth, gallantly down the Rhine-stream—such a yacht-voyage, in the summer weather, with no Tourists yet infesting it—to end, happily we will hope, at Wesel, in the review of regiments, and other business. First stage, first pause, is to be at Ludwigsburg, and the wicked old Duke of Wurtemberg's; thither first from Augsburg. We cross the Donau at Dillingen, at Gunzberg, or I know not where; and by to-morrow's sunset, being rapid travellers, find ourselves at Ludwigsburg—clear through Canstatt, Stuttgard, and certainly no Katte waiting there! Safe across the intermediate uplands, here are we fairly in the Neckar Country, in the Basin of the Rhine again; and old Duke Eberhard Ludwig of Wurtemberg bidding us kindly welcome, poor old bewildered creature, who has become the talk of Germany in those times. Will English readers consent to a momentary glance into his affairs and him? Strange things are going on at Lndwigsburg; nay the origin of Ludwigsburg, and that the Duke should be there and not at Stuttgard, is itself strange. Let us take this Excerpt, headed LUDWIGSBURG in 1730, and then hasten on:—
LUDWIGSBURG IN 1730.
"Duke Eberhard Ludwig, now an elderly gentleman of fifty-four, has distinguished himself in his long reign, not by political obliquities and obstinacies, though those also were not wanting, but by matrimonial and amatory; which have rendered him conspicuous to his fellows-creatures, and still keep him mentionable in History, briefly and for a sad reason. Duke Eberhard Ludwig was duly wedded to an irreproachable Princess of Baden-Durlach (Johanna Elizabeth) upwards of thirty years ago; and he duly produced one Son in consequence, with other good results to himself and her. But in course of time Duke Eberhard Ludwig took to consorting with bad creatures; took, in fact, to swashing about at random in the pool of amatory iniquity, as if there had been no law known, or of the least validity, in that matter.
"Perceiving which, a certain young fellow, Gravenitz by name, who had come to him from the Mecklenbnrg regions, by way of pushing fortune, and had got some pageship or the like here in Wurtemberg, recollected that he had a young Sister at home; pretty and artful, who perhaps might do a stroke of work here. He sends for the young Sister; very pretty indeed, and a gentlewoman by birth, though penniless. He borrows clothes for her (by onerous contract with the haberdashers, it is said, being poor to a degree); he easily gets her introduced to the Ducal Soirees; bids her—She knows what to do? Right well she knows what; catches, with her piquant face, the dull eye of Eberhard Ludwig, kindles Eberhard Ludwig, and will not for something quench him. Not she at all: How can SHE; your Serene Highness, ask her not! A virtuous young lady, she, and come of a stainless Family!—In brief, she hooks, she of all the fishes in the pool, this lumber of a Duke; enchants him, keeps him hooked; and has made such a pennyworth of him, for the last twenty years and more,
