ONE:Wilhelminas purse was generally empty, and she was often in great want of money. Her penurious father had married her below her rank that he might escape settling upon her a dowry. Though her husband was heir to the marquisate of Baireuth, his father was still living. That father was a drunkard and a miser. It seems that the son received but little more than his wages as colonel in the army. Wilhelmina records that one day her brother Fritz came to her and said,
ONE:The Prussian kingdom, which thus fell to Frederick by divine right, consisted of an assemblage of duchies, marquisates, principalities, and lordships, comprising an area of nearly fifty-seven thousand square miles, being about the size of the State of Michigan, and very similarly situated as to climate and soil. It was unfortunately not a compact country, as several of the states could only be reached by passing through the territories of other powers. The annual revenue amounted to a little over six million dollars. There was also in the treasury a sum, which Frederick William had saved, of about seven million dollars. The army consisted of seventy-six thousand men, in the highest state of discipline, and abundantly furnished with all the materiel of war.
ONE:Helvetius, another of the distinguished French deistical philosophers, was invited to Berlin to assist the king in his financial operations. To aid the mechanics in Berlin, and to show to the world that the king was not so utterly impoverished as many imagined, Frederick, on the 11th of June, 1763, laid the foundation of the sumptuous edifice called The New Palace of Sans Souci.
