Page:Surprising adventures and sufferings of Frederick Baron Trenck.pdf/18

18 I was confined as a criminal in the citadel of Glaiz, I was not in a dungeon but in the officer’s guard-room, I was permitted to walk upon the ramparts, and was waited on by my own servants.

I wrote to the King, and demanded a court-martial, offering to submit to any punishment whatever if found guilty. So determined a style, in so young a man did not please him, and I received no answer.

From my female friend at Berlin, I received some consolation, and a thousand ducats.

‘Here the Baron enlarges on the different schemes he tried to effect his escape from the prison of Glaiz, his adventures in Bohemia and Poland, with Lieutenant Schell, who deserted along with him; the barbarous treatment he received from the Austrian Trenck at Vienna; and gives a recital of the causes of that General's disgrace and imprisonment, which ends with the following strange relation of the manner of his death.’

It was not in Trenck’s power to prevent my inheriting his father’s fortune, which was entailed on me; wishing however, to give me marks of his hatred after his death, he made a will full of absurd and contradictory clauses, which served the with-holders of his fortune, as a pretext to strip me of it.

Though Trenck was an atheist, nobody had a more ardent desire than he to acquire an extra-ordinary reputation; he therefore resolved to put an end to his existence; and to make himself pass for a saint at his death.

For this purpose, three days before his death,