Montcalm and Wolfe | Page 9

The prestige of the monarchy was declining with the ideas that had
given it life and strength. A growing disrespect for king, ministry, and
clergy was beginning to prepare the catastrophe that was still some
forty years in the future. While the valleys and low places of the
kingdom were dark with misery and squalor, its heights were bright
with a gay society,--elegant, fastidious, witty,--craving the pleasures of
the mind as well as of the senses, criticising everything, analyzing
everything, believing nothing. Voltaire was in the midst of it, hating,
with all his vehement soul, the abuses that swarmed about him, and
assailing them with the inexhaustible shafts of his restless and piercing
intellect. Montesquieu was showing to a despot-ridden age the
principles of political freedom. Diderot and D'Alembert were beginning
their revolutionary Encyclopaedia. Rousseau was sounding the first
notes of his mad eloquence,--the wild revolt of a passionate and
diseased genius against a world of falsities and wrongs. The salons of
Paris, cloyed with other pleasures, alive to all that was racy and new,
welcomed the pungent doctrines, and played with them as children play
with fire, thinking no danger; as time went on, even embraced them in
a genuine spirit of hope and goodwill for humanity. The Revolution
began at the top,--in the world of fashion, birth, and intellect,--and
propagated itself downwards. "We walked on a carpet of flowers,"
Count Ségur afterwards said, "unconscious that it covered an abyss;"
till the gulf yawned at last, and swallowed them.
Eastward, beyond the Rhine, lay the heterogeneous patchwork of the
Holy Roman, or Germanic, Empire. The sacred bonds that throughout
the Middle Ages had held together its innumerable fragments, had lost
their strength. The Empire decayed as a whole; but not so the parts that
composed it. In the south the House of Austria reigned over a
formidable assemblage of states; and in the north the House of
Brandenburg, promoted to royalty half a century before, had raised
Prussia into an importance far beyond her extent and population. In her
dissevered rags of territory lay the destinies of Germany. It was the late
King, that honest, thrifty, dogged, headstrong despot, Frederic William,

who had made his kingdom what it was, trained it to the perfection of
drill, and left it to his son, Frederic II. the best engine of war in Europe.
Frederic himself had passed between the upper and nether millstones of
paternal discipline. Never did prince undergo such an apprenticeship.
His father set him to the work of an overseer, or steward, flung plates at
his head in the family circle, thrashed him with his rattan in public,
bullied him for submitting to such treatment, and imprisoned him for
trying to run away from it. He came at last out of purgatory; and
Europe felt him to her farthest bounds. This bookish, philosophizing,
verse-making cynic and profligate was soon to approve himself the first
warrior of his time, and one of the first of all time.
Another power had lately risen on the European world. Peter the Great,
half hero, half savage, had roused the inert barbarism of Russia into a
titanic life. His daughter Elizabeth had succeeded to his throne,--heiress
of his sensuality, if not of his talents.
Over all the Continent the aspect of the times was the same. Power had
everywhere left the plains and the lower slopes, and gathered at the
summits. Popular life was at a stand. No great idea stirred the nations to
their depths. The religious convulsions of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries were over, and the earthquake of the French Revolution had
not begun. At the middle of the eighteenth century the history of
Europe turned on the balance of power; the observance of treaties;
inheritance and succession; rivalries of sovereign houses struggling to
win power or keep it, encroach on neighbors, or prevent neighbors from
encroaching; bargains, intrigue, force, diplomacy, and the musket, in
the interest not of peoples but of rulers. Princes, great and small,
brooded over some real or fancied wrong, nursed some dubious claim
born of a marriage, a will, or an ancient covenant fished out of the
abyss of time, and watched their moment to make it good. The general
opportunity came when, in 1740, the Emperor Charles VI. died and
bequeathed his personal dominions of the House of Austria to his
daughter, Maria Theresa. The chief Powers of Europe had been pledged
in advance to sustain the will; and pending the event, the veteran Prince
Eugene had said that two hundred thousand soldiers would be worth all
their guaranties together. The two hundred thousand were not there,

and not a sovereign kept his word. They flocked to share the spoil, and
parcel out the motley heritage of the young Queen. Frederic of Prussia
led the way,