ormidably fanged head of IT out of
Alsace, five hundred miles all at once,--there would be a business!

We will now quit the Rhine Operations, which indeed are not now of
moment; Friedrich being suddenly the key of events again. I add only,
what readers are vaguely aware of, that King Louis did not die; that he
lay at death's door for precisely one week (8th-15th August), symptoms
mending on the 15th. In the interim,--Grand-Almoner Fitz-James (Uncle
of our Conte di Spinelli) insisting that a certain Cardinal, who had got
the Sacraments in hand, should insist; and endless ministerial intrigue
being busy,--moribund Louis had, when it came to the Sacramental
point, been obliged to dismiss his Chateauroux. Poor Chateauroux; an
unfortunate female; yet, one almost thinks, the best man among them:
dismissed at Metz here, and like to be mobbed! That was the one issue
of King Louis's death-sickness. Sublime sickness; during which all Paris
wept aloud, in terror and sorrow, like a child that has lost its mother
and sees a mastiff coming; wept sublimely, and did the Prayers
of Forty-Hours; and called King Louis Le BIEN-AIME (The
Well-beloved):--merely some obstruction in the royal bowels, it turned
out;--a good cathartic, and the Prayers of Forty-Hours, quite reinstated
matters. Nay reinstated even Chateauroux, some time after,--"the Devil
being well again," and, as the Proverb says, quitting his monastic view.
Reinstated Chateauroux: but this time, poor creature, she continued only
about a day:--"Sudden fever, from excitement," said the Doctors: "Fever?
Poison, you mean!" whispered others, and looked for changes in the
Ministry. Enough, oh, enough!--

Old Marshal Wade did not awaken, though bawled to by his Ligoniers and
others, and much shaken about, poor old gentleman. "No artillery to
speak of," murmured he; "want baggage-wagons, too!" and lay still. "Here
is artillery!" answered the Official people; "With my own money I will
buy you baggage-wagons!" answered the high Maria Anna, in her own name
and her Prince Karl's, who are Joint-Governors there. Possibly he would
have awakened, had they given him time. But time, in War especially, is
the thing that is never given. Once Friedrich HAD struck in, the moment
was gone by. Poor old Wade! Of him also enough.

Chapter II.--FRIEDRICH MARCHES UPON PRAG, CAPTURES PRAG.

It was on Saturday, "early in the morning," 15th August, 1744, that
Friedrich set out, attended by his two