oet determined to slip away, imagining that in a "free
city" like Frankfort he could not be disturbed. He was mistaken. The
freedom of Frankfort was subject to the will of Frederick. The poet
tells for himself what followed.

"The moment I was off, I was arrested, I, my secretary and my people; my
niece is arrested; four soldiers drag her through the mud to a
cheesemonger's named Smith, who had some title or other of privy
councillor to the King of Prussia; my niece had a passport from the King
of France, and, what is more, she had never corrected the King of
Prussia's verses. They huddled us all into a sort of hostelry, at the
door of which were posted a dozen soldiers; we were for twelve days
prisoners of war, and we had to pay a hundred and forty crowns a day."

Voltaire was furious; Madame Denis was ill, or feigned to be; she wrote
letter after letter to Voltaire's friends in Prussia, and to the king
himself. The affair was growing daily more serious. Finally the city
authorities themselves, who doubtless felt that they were not playing a
very creditable part, put an end to it by ordering Freytag to release
his prisoner. Voltaire, set free, travelled leisurely towards France,
which, however, he found himself refused permission to enter. He
thereupon repaired to Geneva, and thereafter, freed from the patronage
of princes and the injustice of the powerful, spent his life in a land
where full freedom of thought and action was possible.

As for the worthy Freytag, he felicitated himself highly on the way he
had handled that dabbler in _poeshy_. "We would have risked our lives
rather than let him get away," he wrote; "and if I, holding a council of
war with myself, had not found him at the barrier but in the open
country, and he had refused to jog back, I don't know that I shouldn't
have lodged a bullet in his head. To such a degree had I at heart the
letters and writing of the king."

The too trusty agent did not feel so self-satisfied on receiving the
opinion of the king.

"I gave you no such orders as that," wrote Frederick. "You should never
make more noise than a thing deserves. I wanted Voltaire to give you up
the key, the cross, and the volume of poems I had intrusted to him; as
soon as all that was given up to you I can't see what earthly reason
could have induced you to make this uproar."

It is very probable, however, that Frederick wished to humiliate
Voltaire, and the latter did not fail to revenge hims