Forward with your Saxons; Valori gives us so-many French; I myself will join with 20,000: swift, steady, all at once; we can seize Moravia, who knows if not Vienna itself, and for certain drive a stroke right home into the very bowels of the Enemy!" That is Friedrich's theme from the first hour of his arrival, and during all the four-and-twenty that he stayed.
In one hour, Polish Majesty, who is fonder of tobacco and pastimes than of business, declared himself convinced;--and declared also that the time of Opera was come; whither the two Majesties had to proceed together, and suspend business for a while.

Polish Majesty himself was very easily satisfied; but with the others, as Valori reports it, the argument was various, long and difficult.

"Winter time; so dangerous, so precarious," answer Bruhl and Comte de Saxe: There is this danger, this uncertainty, and then that other;--which the King and Valori, with all their eloquence, confute.

"Impossible, for want of victual," answers Maurice at last, driven into a corner: "Iglau, suppose we get it, will soon be eaten; then where is our provision ?"--"Provision ?" answers Valori: "There is M.de Sechelles, Head of our Commissariat in Prag; such a Commissary never was before." "And you consent, if I take that in hand ?" urges Friedrich upon them.

They are obliged to consent, on that proviso.