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This is totally too good to keep to myself: on my "I showed my family opera clips" post,

selenak are talking about Frederick the Great (by way of Don Carlo, of course) and it is like this amazing virtuoso spontaneous thing and whoa

Things I knew about Frederick the Great before a year ago: he was king of... Prussia??

Additional things I knew about Frederick the Great before the last couple of days:

selenak informed me last year that he and his dad may well have been at least somewhat the inspiration for Schiller's Don Carlos, and everything that goes with that: his dad (Friedrich Wilhelm, henceforth FW) was majorly awful, he had a boyfriend (Katte) who was horribly killed by his dad

Only a partial list of the additional things I now know about Frederick the Great (henceforth "Fritz") and associated historical figures due to mildred and selenak:
-Fritz and Katte's escape plan (which resulted in Katte's execution) was... really, really boneheaded. As boneheaded as opera plots! :P
-Katte was in the process of destroying 1,500 letters when he got caught (! puts all those letters in Don Carlos into perspective) (ETA: but also see mildred's comment below)
-Fritz wrote opera libretti and so did his sister
-Fritz decided to use himself as an experimental test subject to see if it was entirely possible to do without sleep via the application of coffee WITH PEPPERCORNS AND MUSTARD
-Fritz wrote a poem about orgasm that also reads as if he's never actually, like, had sex (although that was not in this post, it was in the comments to this one)
-FW apparently beat up George II when they were kids
-I am totally not even going to try to summarize the discussion about FW's "rationalized sadism" and sexual hangups and the reeeeeally bizarre Dresden interlude (go down a couple of comments for the really insane stuff)
-Fritz' sister Wilhemina wrote tell-all memoirs about her totally insane family which I am SUPER going to read now, watch this space

Also, there is apparently some subplot involving Russian fanboys that introduces an entirely new cast of people which I am dying to find out about

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Well, the earlier mentioned Lieselotte certainly proves you can have a successful arranged marriage with your very gay husband, and it's true, Amelia wouldn't have been cast as "the woman Dad forced me to marry". Also, the Countess Orzelska proves he could pull off het romance at least once. Assuming the marriage would not have been a catastrophe and went as well as it could under the circumstances, do you think it would have changed anything in terms of alliances? For example, would G2 have been a bit more supportive in the 7-years-war, or would Fritz have helped out nephew G3 in the colonies later?

Interesting questions! I don't know G2 (or his ministers) well enough to say. If there had been, say, 25 years of closer relations between the countries, maybe? If Amelia is willing to try to get concessions out of her father the way Fritz used EC to try to get concessions out of his father, and if G2 is susceptible to Amelia's intervention, maybe.

Fritz and G3 I'm much more skeptical about. Maaaybe if the Seven Years' War had been less devastating to Prussia, and if that was due in an undeniable way to help from Britain? But Fritz was never known for gratitude toward his allies. I can see him helping out G3 if he expects to get something out of it; when he's already gotten what he wanted and is nearing the end of his life, what's the point? He's got problems closer to home to worry about.

The first question that comes to my mind is: helped out how? Going in person? Not a chance. Shipping mass troops overseas where he couldn't personally oversee them? Seems OOC. Money? I don't know, was he in the habit of giving money to his allies when he could use it on opera houses? (Half rhetorical, half serious question: I have an impression of Fritz as reluctant to part with money in general, but there may be examples I'm forgetting where he subsidized other countries to get what he wanted. But again, what does he want here?)

Writing letters to other European monarchs about how democracy was the scourge of the earth and the colonies owed obedience to their British overlords? Yeah, sure, but I don't think history changes much. (While I would never expect him to support democracy as a system of government, I'm curious if you know what his RL opinions were about specific American reforms.)

So that leaves shipping officers overseas to help out the British against the likes of von Steuben and Lafayette (I have to assume Fritz's acid letters to France just made the French-American alliance stronger, if anything). That I could see Fritz doing. He doesn't have to fear mass desertion among his officer corps nearly as much as the rank and file, the cost-benefit ratio is good as long as he has enough officers at home to make up for the losses in the Americas (he never minded losing his officers in battle), he gets to take some credit if the British win, some of his officers presumably come home with more battlefield experience, and he gets goodwill from Britain at pretty low cost.

If we're talking about changes caused by the personalities involved in the double marriage, well, Wilhelmine is long dead and was never queen, and Fritz presumably keeps Amelia as far from power as he can, the same way he did his mother. To the extent that she tries to influence politics anyway, and to the extent that she succeeds, to that extent I predict a less successful marriage.

So, while I see Fritz potentially being 5% more chill in his overall personality because he wasn't forced into a marriage he hated, and at least 50% more willing to make an effort within the context of that marriage, if you assume everything else stays the same, it's hard for me to believe it affects his foreign policy *that* much.

Open to other arguments, though! I am definitely not up on the political nuances here, and am arguing almost solely from Fritz psychology.

Lieselotte certainly proves you can have a successful arranged marriage with your very gay husband

Oh, she was married to Philippe d'Orleans! Thanks, Wikipedia. Yeah, no, Fritz couldn't even have aspired to that level of gayness.

Oh, Philippe d'Orleans! Even this person-who-knows-zero-history knows about him. (To be fair, my French history is very slightly better than my rest-of-European-history because I had a great French teacher who was always feeding me historical fiction, rightly guessing that I would learn more history from that than if she tried to teach it to me directly.)

Whoa, go French teacher! *applauds* I'm glad you had a good one to make up for your US history teacher.

I also learned much of my history (not Fritz, though) in high school from historical fiction. Well, a weird self-taught mixture of history and historical fiction--I'd read the fiction to make the history stick in my memory, and the history to know what I should and shouldn't believe in the fiction. It worked pretty well: much of what I've been regurgitating for you the last few days is from 20-year-old memories. (I'll admit I was a bit nervous writing the Seven Years' War summary and relieved when

selenak didn't find any egregious errors and gave it the seal of approval.)

Well, and then there was the part where I spent a good half of high school writing an 18th-century alternate history military history novel that I abandoned at 800 pages, because that's so on-brand for me. *That*'ll fix stuff in your memory! (Fritz was a fairly minor secondary character in this novel, but it was specifically researching this novel that led me to discover who he was, fall in love within the first few minutes of flipping through a short bio, proceed to read everything I could get my hands on, and spend the next two years trying to keep him from playing an unrealistically large role in my plot, haha. Then, when I abandoned this novel, I handed him over to my immortal Mary Sue character and said, "Here, he can fit into your eventful life story. Have fun.")

Oh, don't feel bad for me, my history teacher was my only terrible teacher in high school, and she wasn't bad in a way that was particularly detrimental to me in any way except that I didn't learn very much US history. I had a fair number of reasonably competent teachers, several good-to-quite-good ones (including that French teacher -- who also gets major major points for recognizing me as a lonely nerd who would totally love ALL THE BOOKS to read), and two great teachers (English lit senior year and physics), which I feel is really more than my fair share :)

Well, that's good to know. :) As you know, my parents literally told me it didn't matter what high school I went to, as long as my brother got into a good elementary school, so my high school was less than well suited to my needs, and that was fine by them.

My individual teachers were by and large not terrible (unlike the guidance counselor), and I got along with a lot of them as people, and a number of them were even good teachers for the rank and file, and I respect that, but the vast majority were not invested in challenging me. Plus the whole system was set up to make sure my time was being wasted, and you know how my parents were about supplementing school with extracurriculars. My two exceptional teachers were US History and junior + senior English. (Not surprisingly, the English teacher was the most hated and feared teacher in the school. She was my favorite.) The librarian was wonderful, I miss her so much (cancer shortly after I graduated). <3 :'-(

My freshman English teacher, god, I liked him as a person, but he argued with me that "The volleyball team played good" was grammatically correct and "The volleyball team played well" was incorrect, because "volleyball team" is a noun, so it takes an adjective. <-- My education.

Freshman me actually asked him to his face what he had majored in, because I didn't think it was English. When my mother heard this story, she made me write him a note of apology. To this day, I think that question was justified.

I think you were justified in asking that as well!

heh, yup, my US History teacher was also a super nice person! She also told us at some point that the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis were the same thing, which even as high schoolers we were pretty sure was not the case. But she often just didn't even show up for class (we were sent to the library to work on history outlines, which you will be unsurprised to hear none of us actually did), so the amount of actually false things we imbibed was fairly low.

I'm told that earlier classes remembered her fondly, so apparently she wasn't always like that -- I wonder what happened.

Wow. I feel like at my high school, that's the teacher who *would* have been remembered fondly, but learning things was not considered cool, so...

Yeah, that was when I was at the Really Good High School. But even before that, I was at Decent High School where doing well in classes was something people were interested in (even if it wasn't always the most important thing), so such a teacher might have been liked, but not respected.

Few could.:) Mind you, Liselotte had her difficulties at the French court in general and with her husband in particular, though his sexuality was but one factor; she had to convert to Catholicism to marry him, which she never quite adjusted to (especially the Catholic religion as practised in France seemed ridiculous to her), all the stuffy protocol collided with her bluntness, and of course she was very upsest indeed when Louis used her marriage as pretext to invade her home country, the Palatinate. The English Wikipedia entry is sadly lacking in the witty letter excerpts the German wiki has; Liselotte wrote about 60 000 letters in her life; we have about 6000 left, of which two thirds are in German and one third in French. (Behold: Liselotte was that rare German noble actually liking the German language. Also, it was practical for her to write in, if her letters got intercepted, which they sometimes were.)

So here is Liselotte, writing to her German relations re: men who love men in general:

„Wo seydt Ihr und Louisse denn gestocken, daß ihr die weldt so wenig kendt? (…) wer alle die haßen woldt, so die junge kerls lieben, würde hier kein 6 menschen lieben können!

(What is it with you and Louise knowing the world so little? If one would hate all those who love young men, one could love all but six people here!") (The English, alas, doesn't convey Liselotte being extremely informal here; that she wrote baroque slang Germman is part of the appeal of her letters.)

Didn't mean she had a high opinion of her husband's boyfriends, whom she regarded as parasites, or of his habit of spending gigantic sums on them:

„Monsieur... hat nichts in der welt im kopf als seine junge kerls, umb da ganze nächte mit zu fressen, zu saufen, und gibt ihnen unerhörte summen gelds, nichts kost ihm noch ist zu teuer vor die bursch

("Monsieur thinks of nothing but his young fellows; they spend the nights stuffing themselves, drinking themselves to oblivion, and he gives Incredible amounts of Money to them, nothing is too expensive for him as far as the boys are concerned.")

She also wasn't impressed with their proclaimed affections; when, in 1702, she was told that the Earl of Albermale, William II.'s boyfriend, supposedly had nearly died of a broken heart following William's death, she wryly commented : "We didn't see such affection from any of the fellows for Monsieur."

But still: they produced children, were both relieved when enough of those were around to make marital sex unnnecessary, and sometimes made each other laugh; at one occasion, they got into a farting contest with their oldest son (the later Regent of France). At that point, Liselotte considered having to put up with Louis XIV's Maitresse en titre, Madame de Maintenon, a greater trial than Philippe's boys, and that was what she was referring to when writing to Sophia of Hannover (she who raised GII, SD the younger and for a few years FW at home):

Madame sein ist ein ellendes handwerck, hette ichs wie die chargen hir im landt verkauffen können, hette ichs lengst feil getragen“.

"Being Madame is a lousy job; if I could have sold it like every lackey in this country does with their office, I'd have done it a long time ago."

Edited 2019-08-25 08:34 (UTC)

Also, it was practical for her to write in, if her letters got intercepted, which they sometimes were

LOL, this made me laugh -- all the nobility hated the German language so much at this point that it was a good way of encrypting messages from said nobility! Heh.

one could love all but six people here!

Do you mean "there are not six people here one could love"? (it just seems like it would make a little more sense in context)

Those letters sound awesome. And it sounds like, while maybe not a perfect marriage, a generally successful and sometimes even happy one, which is rather a relief after reading about all these terrible ones :P :)

"there are not six people here one could love

What she meant was if one could love only people not into m/m sex at the court of Versailles, there would be only six or thereabouts left, so - yes? Also, found a good Translation of the entire passage, Liselotte writing to her nieces at home:

"Where have you and Luise been that you know so little of the world? It seems to me that one does not have to live at court very long to know all about it; but if one were to hate all those who love young fellows, one could not love - or at least not hate - six persons here. There are various kinds of such people; some of them hate women like the plague and can only love other men, others love both men and women … some only go for children of ten or eleven, others want young fellows between seventeen and twenty-five, and these are the most numerous; some of the debauched characters love neither men nor women and have their pleasure by themselves, but there are fewer of them than of the others. Some also engage in debaucheries of various kinds, with animals or people, whatever comes their way. I know one man here who boasts that he has done it with everything, even down to toads. Ever since I learned this, I loathe the sight of this fellow."

I don't blame her. Toads!

a generally successful and sometimes even happy one, which is rather a relief after reading about all these terrible ones :P :)

Okay, here's Liselotte telling her aunt a story she had from her husband's favourite boyfriend, the Chevalier de Lorraine, and bear in mind this is an ex-Protestant who only converted because she had to writing to a still Protestant:

: I know some fine stories, one of which I simply must tell Your Grace: I heard it three or four days ago, and it happened in a Jesuit college. The Chevalier de Lorraine claims that it is his son who did this trick and that he does this sort of thing all the time. One of the pupils at the college was full of mischief of all kinds, ran around all night long, and did not sleep in his room. So the reverend fathers threatened him with a tremendous beating if he did not stay in his room at night. The boy goes to a painter and asks him to paint two saints on his buttocks, on the right cheek Saint Ignatius of Loyola and on the left Saint François Xavier, which the painter did. With that the boy tidily pulls up his breeches, goes back to his college, and starts making all kinds of trouble. When the reverend fathers catch him at it, they tell him, “This time you’ll be whipped.” The boy begins to struggle and plead, but they say that pleading will not do him any good. So the boy gets down on his knees and says, “O Saint Ignatius, o Saint Xavier, have pity upon me and perform a miracle for me to prove my innocence.” With that the fathers pull down his breeches, and, as they lift up his shirt to beat him, the boy calls out, “I am praying with such fervor that I am certain my invocation will be heard!” When the fathers see the two painted saints, they exclaim: “A miracle! the boy whom we thought a rogue is a saint!” And with that they fall on their knees to kiss the behind and then call together all the pupils and make them come in procession to kiss the holy behind, which all of them do.

And here is a great vid showing Liselotte, Philippe d'Orleans and the Chevalier de Lorraine as depicted in the tv Show Versailles.

Edited 2019-08-28 17:00 (UTC)

"there are not six people here one could love

What she meant was if one could love only people not into m/m sex at the court of Versailles, there would be only six or thereabouts left, so - yes?

cahn, yes, when I was reading this, I had to look at the German to figure out the intended meaning. (My German being just good enough to be not totally a black box, if I have a lot of vocab help.)

selenak, "One could love all but six people here" means that, if there are one thousand people at court, you could love the 994 of them that are not into m/m sex. Which, of course, is the opposite of what she's saying, hence our confusion. "There are not six people here one could love" means at least 995 of the thousand are into m/m sex. Which sounds about right. :P

Got it! Yes, the later was what she meant.

Yes, I know just enough German (not very coincidentally, I decided I should learn German when discovering Die Zauberflöte -- but did not get very far; this whole conversation is making me think I should, though, someday when I have more tiiiiime) that I thought I might be able to parse it. It helps that German structure is very much like archaic English structure :P :)

Toads! OMG.

Oh man, Liselotte sounds amazing. LOL.

Also I adore that vid. Should I put Versailles on the queue? (...though I am way behind on TV shows, I might get to it... next year?? at the rate I'm going)

Versailles: the first two seasons are trashy fun, and I reviewed them here, the third and final one was something of a let down, hence no review, though Liselotte is still great in it. The show isn’t a must, and its nods at history grow fewer and fewer as it progresses, but it does offer pretty costumes, pretty people, same sex relationships given the same amount of narrative detail as het ones and, by the end, a successful OT3, so there’s that.

OTOH, if there’s an audiobook in English for LIselotte’s letters, go for it. They need to be read out loud for maximum enjoyment. (I’m only sorry that those English translations I’ve seen invariably sound more formal than Liselotte does in in German, because the fact she writes informal baroque slang German at the extremely formal court of France is part of the appeal.

Ah. Sounds like I got the best part of it from the vid that you linked, then :)

Man, I am totally going to find Liselotte's letters, though! They sound amazing.

Yup, and here are some more vids covering the enjoyable aspects of Versailles:

This one about the Louis (XIV)/Philippe (d'Orleans) relationship through three seasons, and this one about the Philippe/Liselotte relationship in s2 (angstier than the OT3 one I linked earlier as it lacks the happy s3 conclusion, but covers more detail).

One of these days, I should create a poll. Would you rather marry into

- the Hohenzollern
- the Habsburg
- the Hannover
- The Bourbon Family?

(Really evil choices.)

Edited 2019-09-02 16:45 (UTC)

Ooh, so pretty! I like both, though of course I prefer Liselotte, having enjoyed the letter excerpts so very much :D

Agh! Evil choices indeed.

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