Foreign opinion was no less enthusiastic. In the Protestant cantons of
Switzerland there was as warm sympathy with the King's fate as if the
descendants of the Ruetli men had never been separated from the German
empire. There were people there who were made ill by vexation when the
King's cause was in a bad way. It was the same in England. Every
victory of the King aroused wild joy in London. Houses were
illuminated and pictures and laudatory poems offered for sale. In
Parliament Pitt announced with admiration every new deed of the great
ally. Even at Paris, in the theatres and salons, people were rather
Prussian than French. The French derided their own generals and the
clique of Madame de Pompadour. Whoever was on the side of the French
arms, so Duclos reports, hardly dared to give expression to his views.
In St. Petersburg, the grand duke Peter and his party were such good
Prussians that they grieved in secret at every reverse of Frederick's
cause. The enthusiasm penetrated even to Turkey and to the Khan of
Tartary; and this respectful admiration of a whole continent outlasted
the war. When Hackert, the painter, was traveling through the interior
of Sicily, a gift of honor of wine and fruit was offered him by the
city council because they had heard that he was a Prussian, a subject
of the great King for whom they wished thereby to show their
reverence; and Muley Ismail, the emperor of Morocco, released without
any ransom the crew of a ship belonging to a citizen of Emden, whom
the Berbers had brought prisoner to Mogador, sent them in new clothes
to Lisbon, and assured them that their King was the greatest man in
the world, that no Prussian should be a prisoner in his land, and that
his cruisers would never attack the Prussian flag.
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