O my King, is not this an outlook? Louis le Grand was
great; but you are likely to be Louis the Grandest; and here is a World
shaped, at last, after the real pattern!

Such are, in sad truth, Belleisle's schemes; not yet entirely hatched
into daylight or articulation; but becoming articulate, to himself and
others, more and more. Reader, keep them well in mind: I had rather
not speak of them again. They are essential to our Story; but they
are afflictively vain, contrary to the Laws of Fact; and can, now
or henceforth, in nowise be. My friend, it was not Beelzebub, nor
Mephistopheles, nor Autolyeus-Apollo that built this world and us; it
was Another. And you will get your crown well rapped, M. le Marechal,
for so forgetting that fact! France is an extremely pretty creature;
but this of making France the supreme Governor and God's-Vicegerent of
Nations, is, was, and remains, one of the maddest notions. France at its
ideal BEST, and with a demi-god for King over it, were by no means fit
for such function; nay of many Nations is eminently the unfittest for
it. And France at its WORST or nearly so, with a Louis XV. over it by
way of demi-god--O Belleisle, what kind of France is this; shining in
your grandiose imagination, in such contrast to the stingy fact: like
a creature consisting of two enormous wings, five hundred yards in
potential extent, and no body bigger than that of a common cock,
weighing three pounds avoirdupois. Cock with his own gizzard much out of
sorts, too!

It was "early in March" [Adelung, ii. 305.] when Belleisle, the
Artificial Sun-god, quitted Paris on this errand. He came by the Moselle
road; called on the Rhine Kurfursts, Koln, Trier, Mainz; dazzling them,
so far as possible, with his splendor for the mind and for the eye.
He proceeded next to Dresden, which is a main card: and where there is
immense manipulation needed, and the most delicate trout-tickling; this
being a skittish fish, and an important, though a foolish. Belleisle was
at Dresden when the Battle of Mollwitz fell out: what a windfall
into Belleisle's game! He ran across to Friedrich at Mollwitz, to
congratulate, to consult,--as we shall see anon.

Belleisle, I am informed, in this preliminary Tour of his, speaks only,
or hints only (except in the proper quarters), of Election Business;
of the need there perhaps is, on the part of an Age growing in liberal
ideas, to exclude the Austrian Grand-Duke; to curb that ponderous,
harsh, un