ONE:��Monseigneur,��I am bound to give your excellency some account of my journey to Aix la Chapelle. I could not leave Brussels until the second of this month. On the road I met a courier from the King of Prussia, coming to reiterate his master��s orders on me. The king had me lodged in quarters near his own apartment. He passed, for two consecutive days, four hours at a time in my room, with all that goodness and familiarity which form, as you know, part of his character, and which does not lower the king��s dignity, because one is duly careful not to abuse it. I had abundant time to speak with a great deal of freedom on what your excellency had prescribed to me, and the king spoke to me with an equal frankness.Frederick, with grim humor characteristic of him, sent back the courier with the following response, as if from the Russian general, signed Fermor, but in the king��s handwriting: TWO:��Not long ago we mentioned the Prince of Prussia��s marriage with Elizabeth of Brunswick. The husband, young and dissolute, given up to a profligate life, from which his relatives could not correct him, was continually committing infidelities to his wife. The princess, who was in the flower of her beauty, felt outraged by such neglect of her charms. Her vivacity and the good opinion she had of herself brought her upon the thought of avenging her wrongs by retaliation. Speedily she gave into excesses scarcely inferior to those of her husband. Family quarrels broke out, and were soon publicly known. The antipathy which ensued took away all hope of succession. The brothers of the king, Henry and Ferdinand, avowed frankly that they would never consent to have, by some accidental birth, their rights of succession to the crown carried off. In the end, there was nothing for it but proceeding to a divorce.��176THREE:By order of the king, Fritz, who had also been condemned to die and was awaiting his doom, was brought down into a lower room of the fortress, before whose window the scaffold was erected, that he might be compelled ��to see Katte die.�� At his entrance the curtains were closed, shutting out the view of the court-yard. Upon the drawing of the curtains, Fritz, to his horror, beheld the scaffold draped in black on a level with the window, and directly before it.