ONE:150 The queen behaved very unamiably, plunged in black melancholy, and treating her new daughter-in-law with great contempt. There have been many sad weddings, but this was surely one of the saddest. Frederick had often declared that he never would receive the princess as his wife. In the evening, just after the newly-married couple had retired to their room, through the arrangement of the prince, a false alarm of fire was raised by some of his friends. This furnished him with the opportunity to rush from the apartment. He did not return. Ever after he saw the princess but unfrequently, treating her with cold politeness when they met, though on public occasions giving her, with all external forms of civility, the position of honor to which, as his wedded wife, she was entitled.
TWO:On the 5th of October, 1763, Augustus, the unhappy King of Poland, had died at Dresden, after a troubled reign of thirty years. The crown was elective. The turbulent nobles, broken up into antagonistic and envenomed cliques, were to choose a successor. Catharine, as ambitious as she was able and unprincipled, resolved to place one of her creatures upon the throne, that Poland, a realm spreading over a territory of 284,000 square miles, and containing a population of 20,000,000, might be virtually added to her dominions. Carlyle writes:
FORE:The king, Frederick I., had for some time been in a feeble state of health. The burden of life had proved heavier than he was able to bear. His wife was crazed, his home desolate, his health broken, and many mortifications and disappointments had so crushed his spirits that he had fallen into the deepest state of melancholy. As he was sitting alone and sad in a chill morning of February, 1713, gazing into the fire, absorbed in painful musings, suddenly there was a crash of the glass door of the apartment. His frenzied wife, half-clad, with disheveled hair,23 having escaped from her keepers, came bursting through the shattered panes. Her arms were gashed with glass, and she was in the highest state of maniacal excitement. The shock proved a death-blow to the infirm old king. He was carried to his bed, which he never left, dying in a few days. His grandson Frederick was then fourteen months old.
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