One November day in 1797 Frederick William made his last public appearance at a banquet, with the Countess at his right hand; and seldom has festival had such a setting in tragedy.  “None of the guests,” we are told, “uttered a word or ate a mouthful of anything; the plates were cleared at the hasty ringing of a bell.  A convulsive movement made by the sick man showed that he was suffering agonies.  Before half-past nine every guest had left, greatly troubled.  The majority of those who had been present never saw the unfortunate monarch again.  They all shared the same presentiment of disaster, and wept.”

From that night the King was dead, even to his own Court.  The gates of his palace were closed against the world, and none were allowed to approach the chamber in which his life was ebbing away, save the Countess, his nurse, and his doctors.  Even his children were refused admittance to his presence.  As the Marquis de Saint Mexent said, “The King of Prussia ends his days as though he were a rich benefactor.  All the relations are excluded by the housekeeper.”

A few days before the end came the Countess was seen to leave the palace, carrying a large red portfolio—­a suspicious circumstance which the Crown Prince’s spies promptly reported to their master.  There could be only one inference—­she had been caught in the act of stealing State papers, a crime for which she would have to pay a heavy price as soon as her protector was no more!  As a matter of fact the portfolio contained nothing more secret or valuable than the letters she had written to the King during the twenty-seven years of their romance, letters which, after reading, she consigned to the flames in her boudoir within an hour of the suspected theft of State documents.

A few days later, on the night of the 16th of November (1797), the King entered on his “death agony,” one fit of suffocation succeeding another, until the Countess, unable to bear any longer the sight of such suffering, was carried away in violent convulsions.  She saw him no more; for by seven o’clock in the morning Frederick William had found release from his agony in death, and his son had begun to reign in his stead.

At last the long-delayed hour of revenge had come to Frederick William III., who had always regarded his father’s favourite as an enemy; and his vengeance was swift to strike.  Before the late King’s body was cold, his successor’s emissaries appeared at the palace door, Unter den Linden, with orders to search her papers and to demand the keys of every desk and cupboard.  Even then she scorned to fly before the storm which she knew was breaking.  For three days and nights her carriage stood at her gates ready to take her away to safety; but she refused to move a step.

Then one morning, before she had left her bed, a major of the guards, with a posse of soldiers, appeared at her bedroom door armed with a warrant for her arrest; and for many weeks she was a closely guarded prisoner in her own house, subject to daily insults and indignities from men who, a few weeks earlier, had saluted her as a Queen.