e, now or never, to become so in fact! Forward
with your Saxons:" urges Friedrich: "The Austrians and their Lobkowitz
are weak in that Country: at Iglau, just over the Moravian border, they
have formed a Magazine; seize that, snatch it from Lobkowitz: that gives
us footing and basis there. Forward with your Saxons; Valori gives us
so-many French; I myself will join with 20,000: swift, steady, all at
once; we can seize Moravia, who knows if not Vienna itself, and for
certain drive a stroke right home into the very bowels of the Enemy!"
That is Friedrich's theme from the first hour of his arrival, and during
all the four-and-twenty that he stayed.

In one hour, Polish Majesty, who is fonder of tobacco and pastimes than
of business, declared himself convinced;--and declared also that
the time of Opera was come; whither the two Majesties had to proceed
together, and suspend business for a while. Polish Majesty himself was
very easily satisfied; but with the others, as Valori reports it, the
argument was various, long and difficult. "Winter time; so dangerous, so
precarious," answer Bruhl and Comte de Saxe: There is this danger, this
uncertainty, and then that other;--which the King and Valori, with all
their eloquence, confute. "Impossible, for want of victual," answers
Maurice at last, driven into a corner: "Iglau, suppose we get it, will
soon be eaten; then where is our provision?"--"Provision?" answers
Valori: "There is M. de Sechelles, Head of our Commissariat in Prag;
such a Commissary never was before." "And you consent, if I take that in
hand?" urges Friedrich upon them. They are obliged to consent, on that
proviso. Friedrich undertakes Sechelles: the Enterprise cannot now
be refused. [_OEuvres de Frederic_, ii. 170; Valori, i. 139; &c. &c.]
"Alert, then; not a moment to be lost! Good-night; AU REVOIR, my noble
friends!"--and to-morrow many hours before daybreak, Friedrich is off
for Prag, leaving Dresden to awaken when it can.

At Prag he renews acquaintance with his old maladroit Strasburg friend,
Marechal de Broglio, not with increase of admiration, as would seem;
declines the demonstrations and civilities of Broglio, business being
urgent: finds M. de Sechelles to be in truth the supreme of living
Commissaries (ready, in words which Friedrich calls golden, "to make
the impossible possible"): "Only march, then, noble Saxons: swift!"--and
dashes off again, next morning, to northeastward, through Leopold's
Bohemian