"Hold your tongue, madame la baronne de Pamklek, you are a flatterer.
There is a crowned head which for thirty years has desired to visit
France, but I have always turned a deaf ear, and will resist it as
long as possible."

"Who, sire, is the king so unfortunate as to banished by you from
your majesty's presence?"


"Who? The king of philosophers, the rival of Voltaire, my brother
of Prussia. Ah, my dear baronne, he is a bad fellow; he detests me,
and I have no love for him. A king does wisely, certainly, to submit
his works to the judgment of a Freron! It would be outrageous
scandal if he came here. Great and small would crowd around him,
and there would not be twenty persons in my train."

"Ah! sire , do you think so?"

"I am sure of it. The French now-a-days do not care for their
kings, and will be renewed at an early day. After
all, philosophers believe that Frederick II protects them: the
honest man laughs both at them and me."

"At you, sire? Impossible."

"No, no; I know the impertinences he is guilty of towards me:
but let him. I prefer making my court to the pretty women of my
kingdom instead of to my pages. You may depend upon it that if
he came to Versailles he would debauch some of them."