From time to time,çoisRené I came across the Duke of Cumberland, on horseback and almost blind, pulling up in front of an alder-tree, against which he had ridden and knocked his nose. Some six-horsed carriages would pass: in them were the Austrian Ambassadress or the Princess von Radziwill and her daughter, fifteen years of age, charming as one of those clouds with maidens' faces that surround Ossian's moon. The Duchess of Cumberland nearly always took the same walk as myself: at one time, she was returning from a cottage where she had been relieving a poor woman of Spandau; at another, she stopped and graciously told me that she had wanted to meet me: an amiable daughter of the thrones alighting from her car, like the Goddess of Night, to roam in the forest! I also saw her in her own house: she would repeat that she wished to entrust me with her son, that little "George[129]," since grown into the Prince whom his cousin Victoria[130] would, they say, have liked to place by her side on the throne of England.
The Princess Frederica has since dragged out her days on the banks of the Thames, in those gardens at Kew which formerly saw me wander between my two acolytes, illusion and poverty. After my departure from Berlin, she honoured me with a correspondence; in it she describes, from hour to hour, the life of an inhabitant of those heaths where Voltaire passed, where Frederic died, where that Mirabeau hid himself who was to commence the Revolution of which I was the victim. One's attention is captivated on seeing the links by which so many men are connected who have never seen each other.
Here are some extracts from the correspondence opened with me by H.R.H. the Duchess of Cumberland:
"This morning, on waking, I was handed the _last_ evidence of your remembrance; later, I passed before your house. I saw the windows open as usual, everything was in the same place, except yourself! I cannot tell you what this made me feel! I now no longer know where to find you; each moment carries you farther away; the only fixed point is the 26th, the day on which you count on arriving, and the memory which I retain of you.
"God grant that you may find everything changed for the better, both for yourself and for the general good! Accustomed as I am to sacrifices, I shall know also how to bear that of not seeing you again, if it is for your happiness and that of France."