This edition features
• two complete books
• a linked Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION.
Frederick Von der Trenck who here tells a story of himself that abounds in lively illustration of the days of Frederick the Great. He professes that Frederick the King owed him a grudge, because Frederick the Trenck had, when eighteen years old, fascinated the Princess Amalie at a ball. But as Frederick the Greater was in correspondence with his cousin Franz at the time when that redoubtable personage was planning the seizure of Frederick the Great, there may have been better ground for the Trenck’s arrest than he allows us to imagine. Mr. Carlyle shows that Frederick von der Trenck had been three months in prison, and was still in prison, at the time of the battle of the Sohr, in which he professes to have been engaged. Frederick von der Trenck, after his release from imprisonment in 1763, married a burgomaster’s daughter, and went into business as a wine merchant. Then he became adventurous again. His adventures, published in German in 1786-7, and in his own French version in 1788, formed one of the most popular books of its time. Seven plays were founded on them, and ladies in Paris wore their bonnets à la Trenck. But the French finally guillotined the author, when within a year of threescore and ten, on the 26th of July, 1794. He had gone to Paris in 1792, and joined there in the strife of parties. At the guillotine he struggled with the executioner.
