One of Katarzyna Kossakowska’s farthest journeys was the one she made in 1777 to Vienna, where she went to receive the title of Countess and the Order of the Starry Cross from Empress Maria Theresa. She was accompanied by her nephew, Ignacy Potocki, whom she loved as a son. Apparently, her straightforwardness was a big hit with the empress, who went so far as to call her “my dear good friend.”
During the ball given in honor of those so decorated, an overjoyed Ignacy presented Katarzyna Kossakowska with a surprise.
“Just guess, my dear good aunt, whom I have brought to see you,” he said excitedly.
A lady in a celadon dress, beautiful and elegant, stood before Kossakowska, face flushed. Smiling widely, she bowed in a gesture of profound respect. Kossakowska was overwhelmed with embarrassment, her eyes smoldering at Ignacy, who had unwittingly put her in an incredibly uncomfortable situation. Then the woman said, politely and in Polish:
“I must remind Your Ladyship of who I am—for I am Eva Frank.”
There was not, however, much time for a conversation. Ignacy only whispered into his aunt’s ear that the gossip here at the court was that Eva Frank had been mistress to the emperor himself, which brought about such overwhelming astonishment in Kossakowska, and brought back such a crush of memories, that she began to cry in their carriage as they were returning from the ball.
Ignacy mistook the tears for the natural emotions of an older woman who has just received an honor, and was not alarmed by them. He merely mentioned in passing that the local Freemasons, with whom young Potocki maintained close ties, had a great deal of good to say of Eva Frank’s father.
Katarzyna died on her estate in Krystynopol at a very advanced age, tenderly nursed through her infirmities by an almost equally decrepit Agnieszka.
Samuel Ascherbach and his sisters
Samuel Ascherbach, son of Rudolf and Gertruda, fell into bad company at university, but he completed his degree successfully, albeit with some difficulties along the way. After a brief, failed practice at one of Vienna’s law firms, where he was perpetually in conflict with his superior, he gave it all up, and, going into some debt, he set off for Hamburg without his parents’ knowledge. There, he first found work with a shipowner as a clerk, then began to practice law again, earning a reputation for consistently managing to win his clients enormous insurance payouts. For reasons not entirely clear (but that apparently had to do with some swindling), after a year of a career that he had been developing successfully, he disappeared. His parents finally received a letter from him from America and spent a long time staring at the envelope, with its stamps that had crossed the ocean. The letter was from Pennsylvania, and it was signed by one Samuel Uscher. They learned from the letter that he had married the daughter of a governor, and that he had become a respected lawyer. Evidently his wife was a good influence on him. From newspapers overseas, which unfortunately had no chance of making it into the Viennese coffeehouse Gertruda and Rudolf Ascherbach liked to frequent, it could eventually be gleaned that his American career culminated in his appointment as a Supreme Court judge. He sired seven children. He died in 1842.
His twin sisters settled in Weimar and Breslau, where they married respectable Jewish burghers. Christina’s husband, Dr. L?we, was an active member of Breslau’s First Society of Brothers, an organization of progressive Jews. Husband and wife both played a part in the establishment and construction of the famous White Stork Synagogue. Katarina, unfortunately, died in her first childbirth, and no trace of her was left.
The Za?uski Brothers’ Library and Canon Benedykt Chmielowski
The collections amassed so industriously and at such extravagant expense by the two brother bishops, the state of which had so worried Father Chmielowski, eventually attained an unprecedented size—around four hundred thousand volumes and twenty thousand manuscripts, not even counting the thousands of etchings and engravings. In 1774, the library was taken over by the Commission of National Education, and in 1795, after the final partition of Poland, the library was sent in its entirety to Petersburg, by order of Catherine the Great. Having taken several months to make its way, in carts and wagons, it remained there until the First World War. In 1921, the collections were partially returned to Poland, but they burned during the Warsaw Uprising.
It is a good thing Father Chmielowski did not live to see that sight—the flames devouring the letters, little flakes of paper flying high into the sky.
If human beings had only known how to truly preserve their knowledge of the world, if they had just engraved it into rock, into crystals, into diamond, and in so doing, passed it on to their descendants, then perhaps the world would now look altogether otherwise. For what are we to do with such a brittle stuff as paper? What can come of writing books?
In the case of Father Chmielowski, wood, brick, stone—every seemingly stronger material—failed him just as paper would have done. Nothing was left of his presbytery, not even the garden, nor the lapidary. Turf grew over the broken inscription, where rhizomes multiplied, and now those carved letters of his hold their court underground. Blind moles pass by them every day, and earthworms on their winding travels, indifferent to the fact that the letter N in No is written backward.
The martyrdom of Junius Frey
After the Lord’s death, Thomas von Sch?nfeld was summoned by Eva to Offenbach as the Lord’s “nephew.” Oddly, now the younger people, especially the true believers from Moravia and Germany, welcomed him as the Lord’s rightful successor. Some of the Poles joined them, including the ?ab?ckis and Jan Wo?owski’s children. Yet apparently one evening it all culminated in a great quarrel, and Thomas packed up and left the next day.
That same month, he arrived in revolutionary France, under the identity of Junius Brutus Frey, along with his sister Leopoldyna and his brother Immanuel. The siblings were carrying a number of letters that commended their services, and they managed to find themselves right at the center of events at once.