This is the astonishing fact for the Cause of Liberty; and no
clamor and execration will avail anything. This man is prompt, too;
does not linger in getting out his Sword, when he has talked of it.
Prince Karl's Operation is likely to be marred amazingly. If this
swift King (comparable to the old Serpent for devices) were to
burst forth from his Silesian strengths; tread sharply on the TAIL
of Prince Karl's Operation, and bring back the formidably fanged
head of IT out of Alsace, five hundred miles all at once,--there
would be a business!

We will now quit the Rhine Operations, which indeed are not now of
moment; Friedrich being suddenly the key of events again. I add
only, what readers are vaguely aware of, that King Louis did not
die; that he lay at death's door for precisely one week (8th-15th
August), symptoms mending on the 15th. In the interim,--Grand-
Almoner Fitz-James (Uncle of our Conte di Spinelli) insisting that
a certain Cardinal, who had got the Sacraments in hand, should
insist; and endless ministerial intrigue being busy,--moribund
Louis had, when it came to the Sacramental point, been obliged to
dismiss his Chateauroux. Poor Chateauroux; an unfortunate female;
yet, one almost thinks, the best man among them: dismissed at Metz
here, and like to be mobbed! That was the one issue of King Louis's
death-sickness. Sublime sickness; during which all Paris wept
aloud, in terror and sorrow, like a child that has lost its mother
and sees a mastiff coming; wept sublimely, and did the Prayers of
Forty-Hours; and called King Louis Le BIEN-AIME (The Well-
beloved):--merely some obstruction in the royal bowels, it turned
out;--a good cathartic, and the Prayers of Forty-Hours, quite
reinstated matters. Nay reinstated even Chateauroux, some time