"Whither goest thou ?" he cried.

"Faith, sir," was the answer, "I am deserting; I'm getting tired of being always beaten." " Stay once more," replied the king, without showing the slightest anger; "I promise that, if we are beaten, we will both desert together." In the ensuing battle the grenadier got himself killed.
For a moment, indeed, Frederick had conceived the idea of deserting simultaneously from the field of battle and from life.

"My dear sister," he wrote to the Margravine of Baireuth, "there is no port or asylum for me any more save in the arms of death." A letter in verse to the Marquis of Argens pointed clearly to the notion of suicide.

A firmer purpose, before long, animated that soul, that strange mixture of heroism and corruption.

The King of Prussia wrote to Voltaire,-- "Threatened with shipwreck though I be, I, facing storms that frown on me, Must king-like think, and live, and die." Fortune, moreover, seemed to be relaxing her severities.