History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 10 [7]
Souvenirs d'un Citoyen, i. 33-39.] and other learned things,--we heard of him long since, in Toland and the Republican Queen's time, as a light of the world. He is now fourscore, grown white as snow; very serene, polite, with a smack of French noblesse in him, perhaps a smack of affectation traceable too. The Crown-Prince, on one of his Berlin visits, wished to see this Beausobre; got a meeting appointed, in somebody's rooms "in the French College," and waited for the venerable man. Venerable man entered, loftily serene as a martyr Preacher of the Word, something of an ancient Seigneur de Beausobre in him, too; for the rest, soft as sunset, and really with fine radiances, in a somewhat twisted state, in that good old mind of his. "What have you been reading lately, M. de Beausobre?" said the Prince, to begin conversation. "Ah, Monseigneur, I have just risen from reading the sublimest piece of writing that exists."--"And what?" "The exordium of St. John's Gospel: In the Beginning was the Word; and the Word was with God, and the Word was--" Which somewhat took the Prince by surprise, as Formey reports; though he rallied straightway, and got good conversation out of the old gentleman. To whom, we perceive, he writes once or twice, [ OEuvres de Frederic, xvi. 121-126. Dates are all of 1737; the last of Beausobre's years.]--a copy of his own verses to correct, on one occasion,--and is very respectful and considerate.
Formey tells us of another French sage, personally known to the Prince since Boyhood; for he used to be about the Palace, doing something. This is one La Croze; Professor of, I think, "Philosophy" in the French College: sublime Monster of Erudition, at that time; forgotten now, I fear, by everybody. Swag-bellied, short of wind; liable to rages, to utterances of a coarse nature; a decidedly ugly, monstrous and rather stupid kind of man. Knew twenty languages, in a coarse inexact way. Attempted deep kinds of discourse, in the lecture-room and elsewhere; but usually broke off into endless welters of anecdote, not always of cleanly nature; and after every two or three words, a desperate sigh, not for sorrow, but on account of flabbiness and fat. Formey gives a portraiture of him; not worth copying farther. The same Formey, standing one day somewhere on the streets of Berlin, was himself, he cannot doubt, SEEN by the Crown-Prince in passing; "who asked M. Jordan, who that was," and got answer:--is not that a comfortable fact? Nothing farther came of it;--respectable Ex-Parson Formey, though ever ready with his pen, being indeed of very vapid nature, not wanted at Reinsberg, as we can guess.
There is M. Achard, too, another Preacher, supreme of his sort, in the then Berlin circles; to whom or from whom a Letter or two exist. Letters worthless, if it were not for one dim indication: That, on inquiry, the Crown-Prince had been consulting this supreme Achard on the difficulties of Orthodoxy; [ OEuvres de Frederic, xvi. pp. 112-117: date, March-June, 1736.] and had given him texts, or a text, to preach from. Supreme Achard did not abolish the difficulties for his inquiring Prince,--who complains respectfully that "his faith is weak," and leaves us dark as to particulars. This Achard passage is almost the only hint we have of what might have been an important chapter: Friedrich's Religious History at Reinsberg. The expression "weak faith" I take to be meant not in mockery, but in ingenuous regret and solicitude; much painful fermentation, probably, on the religious question in those Reinsberg years! But the old "GNADENWAHL" business, the Free-Grace controversy, had taught him to be cautious as to what he uttered on those points. The fermentation, therefore, had to go on under cover; what the result of it was, is notorious enough; though the steps of the process are not in any point known.
Enough now of such details. Outwardly or inwardly, there is no History, or almost none, to be had of this Reinsberg Period; the extensive records