"The moment I was off, I was arrested, I, my secretary and my people; my niece is arrested; four soldiers drag her through the mud to a cheese-monger's named Smith, who had some title or other of privy councillor to the King of Prussia; my niece had a passport from the King of France, and, what is more, she had never corrected the King of Prussia's verses.

They huddled us all into a sort of hostelry, at the door of which were posted a dozen soldiers; we were for twelve days prisoners of war, and we had to pay a hundred and forty crowns a day." [Illustration: Arrest of Voltaire----298] The wrath and disquietude of Voltaire no longer knew any bounds; Madame Denis was ill, or feigned to be; she wrote letter upon letter to Voltaire's friends at the court of Prussia; she wrote to the king himself.

The strife which had begun between the poet and the maladroit agents of the Great Frederick was becoming serious.

"We would have risked our lives rather than let him get away," said Freytag; "and if I, holding a council of war with myself, had not found him at the barrier, but in the open country, and he had refused to jog back, I don't know that I shouldn't have lodged a bullet in his head.

To such a degree had I at heart the letters and writings of the king." Freytag's zeal received a cruel rebuff: orders arrived to let the poet go.