Pale and downcast, he took off his hat to salute me,"-- poor Katte, to me always so prostrate in silent respect, and now so unhappy! A moment after, the King, hearing he was come, went out exclaiming, 'Now I shall have proof about the scoundrel Fritz and the offscouring (CANAILLE) Wilhelmina; clear proofs to cut the heads off them.'"-- The two Hofdames again interfered; and one of them, Kamecke it was, rebuked him; told him, in the tone of a prophetess, To take care what he was doing.

Whom his Majesty gazed into with astonishment, but rather with respect than with anger, saying, "Your intentions are good!" And so his Majesty flung out, seeking Katte; and vanished: Wilhelmina saw no more of him for about a year after; being ordered to her room, and kept prisoner there on low diet, with sentries guarding her doors, and no outlook but the worst horror her imagination pleased to paint.
This is the celebrated assault of paternal Majesty on Wilhelmina; the rumor of which has gone into all lands, exciting wonder and horror, but could not be so exact as this account at first hand.

Naturally the crowd of street-passengers, once dispersed by the Guard, carried the matter abroad, and there was no end of sympathetic exaggerations.

Report ran in Berlin, for example, that the poor Princess was killed, beaten or trampled to death; which we clearly see she was not.

Voltaire, in that mass of angry calumnies, very mendacious indeed, which he calls VIE PRIVEE DU ROI DE PRUSSE, mentions the matter with emphasis; and says farther, The Princess once did him (Voltaire) the "honor to show him a black mark she carried on her breast ever after;"-- which is likelier to be false than true.