cahn | Yuletide tags are out: Frederician version

Come join us in this crazy Frederick the Great fandom and learn more about all these crazy associated people, like the star-crossed and heartbreaking romance between Maria Theresia's daughter Maria Christina and her daughter-in-law Isabella, wow.

OK, so, there are FOURTEEN characters nominated:
Anna Karolina Orzelska (Frederician RPF)
Elisabeth Christine von Preußen | Elisabeth Christine Queen of Prussia (Frederician RPF)
Francesco Algarotti (Frederician RPF)
François-Marie Arouet | Voltaire (Frederician RPF)
Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great (Frederician RPF)
Hans Hermann Von Katte (Frederician RPF)
Joseph II Holy Roman Emperor (Frederician RPF)
Maria Theresia | Maria Theresa of Austria (Frederician RPF)
Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf (Frederician RPF)
Peter Karl Christoph von Keith (Frederician RPF)
Sophia Dorothea of Hanover (Frederician RPF)
Stanisław August Poniatowski (Frederician RPF)
Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia (1709-1758) (Frederician RPF)
Yekatarina II Alekseyevna | Catherine the Great of Russia (Frederician RPF)

This means some fourth person kindly nominated Algarotti and -- I think? -- Stanislaw August Poniatowski! YAY! Thank you fourth person! Come be our friend! :D Yuletide is so great!

I am definitely requesting Maria Theresia, Wilhelmine, and Fritz (Put them in a room together. Shake. How big is the explosion?), and thinking about Elisabeth Christine, but maybe not this year.

I am also declaring this post another Frederician post, as the last one was getting out of hand. I think I'll still use that one as the overall index to these, though, to keep all the links in one place.

(seriously, every time I think the wild stories are done there is ANOTHER one)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

selenak

Voltaire! And Émilie du Châtelet! Three brilliant minds under the same roof! Living with Voltaire! *double take* Living with Voltaire? *sigh*

LOL. Thank you so much for this golden overview. (Jean-Jacques Rousseau would like to complain about Algarotti's calling himself the second most famous intellectual in Europe. Whose fanboys were running the French Revoultion, he'd like to know?)

(Giacomo Casanova is not sure whether or not he counts as an intellectual, though "man of letters" is certainly one description for him; he'd like to point out that a) he was better at job-hunting than Algarotti, from inventing the lottery in France to ending up as a librarian in Bohemia as a retirement job, b) his memoirs are still read, which is more than can be said about either the majority of Voltaire's or Rousseau's oeuvre, and c) his name is certainly better known than anyone else's.)

(Dr. Johnson harrumphs and privately wonders whether his fame is too centred on the Anglosaxon world to make him enter this particular competition. THe answer is yes.)

Lady Mary Wortley Montague also briefly showed up in my MT biographies since she, tireless traveller who she was, was convinced MT's police agents had it in for her and were observing her the entire time she was in MT's territories. What with, you know, those sex policing rules. No note of the Austrian police on Lady Mary has survived, though, if they did take any.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Hey, self-promotion is part of marketing, and if there's one thing Algarotti was into, it was marketing! (At least according to the dissertation about marketing techniques.)

No note of the Austrian police on Lady Mary has survived, though, if they did take any.

*spits drink*

Algarotti's not big on sex policing *cough*, but would like to know if the sex police maybe have a sideline in restraining orders. :P

From:

selenak

Okay, have now read Lady Mary's wiki entry to brush up on my (very vague) knowledge of her and am mightily amused that her wiki entry has Algarotti and Hervey duking it out for her favour. To quote:

In the same year, Mary met and fell in love with Count Francesco Algarotti, who competed with an equally smitten John Hervey for her affections.

Lady Mary wrote many letters to Algarotti in English and in French after his departure from England in September 1736. In July 1739 Lady Mary departed England ostensibly for health reasons declaring her intentions to winter in the south of France. In reality, she left to visit and live with Algarotti in Venice. Their relationship ended in 1741 after Lady Mary and Algarotti were both on a diplomatic mission in Turin.

....so, Mildred, your comment?

From:

mildred_of_midgard

...This was going to be a short comment, but it turned into the history of everything ever, as per my usual. Anyway, here goes.

Lol. Well, the Algarotti dissertation has quotes from her letters indicating that, while Algarotti may or may not have encouraged her attentions on his first trip to London when he thought there was a chance of getting a job through her, after that it's all her complaining that she's always writing to him and sending him her unsolicited portrait and he never writes her back, so...maybe they're both right? Maybe during his first stay in London, the two men were competing for her interest, and afterward, Lady Mary and Lord Hervey for Algarotti's?

But even the Lady Mary's wiki entry has *her* writing letters to Algarotti, and not the other way around. And "In reality, she left to visit and live with Algarotti in Venice. Their relationship ended in 1741 after Lady Mary and Algarotti were both on a diplomatic mission in Turin" is correct but misleading. She left in 1739 with the intention of living with him in Venice, but he was in St. Petersburg at the time. She didn't see him for two more years, and here's the chronology of that encounter:

January 1741: Algarotti arrives in Turin from Berlin.
March 1741: Lady Mary arrives in Turin.
May 1741: Lady Mary leaves Turin.
13 June 1741: Algarotti is already back in Berlin.

So they were not exactly living together. In fact, the dissertation has a footnote: "In this year, Algarotti spent some months in Turin in the guise of secret diplomat for Frederick II (the Great). Wortley Montagu also happened to be in the city at this time. Accordingly, the two met up. The details of this meeting are unclear; however, it must have been quite unpleasant, as the two did not communicate with each other at all for several years thereafter." Also, if she was on a diplomatic mission to Turin, that's news to me. They were certainly not on the same diplomatic mission, as Wikipedia implies*.

Furthermore, she wrote a letter to him in May 1741 stating that "the prism of his eyes had allowed her to see into his soul, and although she saw many beautiful fantasies there, when combined, they formed indifference. This would be the last letter exchanged between the two for fifteen years."

Googling doesn't want to seem to yield up a copy of the letter in question. Gutenberg has her letters only from 1708 to 1720, archive.org has a selection that doesn't include Algarotti (I wonder if it excises declarations of love to a man she's not married to), and the complete edition of her letters on oxfordscholarlyeditions.com requires a subscription. However, I can view the list of letters there, and I see 26 from her to him and 0 from him to her in the 1721-1751 period, then 6 from her to him in 1752-1762 and 1 from him to her in 1757.

Interesting, the 1861 foreword to the first volume of the extremely incomplete edition on archive.org says that the 1837 compiler, her great-grandson, had taken many liberties with omitting passages, combining several letters, or passages from several letters, to form one letter, adding unsupported dates, etc. So this is an extremely corrupt edition. In which I don't see a single letter to Algarotti. Man, that rococo frankness did not fare well in the Victorian era, did it?

...And, reading to the end of the foreward, the 1861 editor quotes the 1837 editor, saying, "With regard to the freedom of expression in which Lady Mary indulged...[1837 great-grandson editor] justly remarks that she wrote 'at a period when the feeling upon such subjects was by no means so nice as it now is; and that expressions, with which we now find great fault, might then be used by persons of the greatest propriety of conduct, and would only be considered as painting freely, and more keenly ridiculing, the vices and follies of the society in which the writer found herself, and not as used for the purpose of indulging in grossness of language.' It requires but small familiarity with the originals of the private correspondence of those days, to perceive that Lady Mary's standards of delicacy and propriety were simply those of her time."

Yeeeaaah, I'm gonna go with "all the Algarotti letters got cut from the 1837 edition because she was totes married to another man when she decided to go chasing him." That said, even without Algarotti, she appears to have stayed abroad for the next twenty years anyway, only returning to London in 1761 when she heard of her husband's death, there to die herself in 1762. (Algarotti to follow them into death shortly, as we know, in 1764.)

In conclusion, documentary evidence seems to be that she wanted Algarotti more than the other way around post 1736. Before that, it's hard to tell.

Also, the dates on her 1736 letters to Algarotti after he left England are kind of hilarious. I really wish I could read them.

April 1736, May 1736, August 1736, September 1736, 10 September 1736, 20 September 1736, 29 September 1736, 21 October 1736, December 1736.

I can't view it, but the December 1736 letter is apparently the one where she 1) got upset that he wouldn't write to her even after she sent him a portrait of herself, 2) announced that if he wouldn't come back to London, she'd go to Italy to be with him.

* Can you imagine Fritz sending her to Turin to spy on the King of Sardinia for him? "Pretend you're obsessed with Algarotti, but tell me if the King is open to an alliance. For hundreds of years, no one will ever suspect you're spying for me. Perfect cover story!" I can almost hear the Prussian cyber agents from the beyond typing. "Curses, Wikipedia is onto our boss's Cunning Plan!"

Edited (pronoun fix) Date: 2019-11-04 12:28 pm (UTC)

From:

cahn

Heh, I realize your sources (and you) are choosing what data to display, but this is hilarious. "the prism of his eyes had allowed her to see into his soul, and although she saw many beautiful fantasies there, when combined, they formed indifference. This would be the last letter exchanged between the two for fifteen years." lol.

omg, yeah, the dates on those letters and the last in that sequence apparently being the one where she complains about him not writing to her... hee.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Context for the prism metaphor: optics (Newtonian optics specifically) was one of Algarotti's main interests, and one of his main accomplishments was reproducing the experiments that backed Newton's findings and publicizing his results. He was the first person in Italy to be able to reproduce Newton's results. Other people had failed and concluded Newton was wrong. Algarotti got his hands on some really high-quality prisms and reproduced the results.

From:

cahn

OK, that's actually really cool. Go Algarotti!

From:

cahn

Well... I've heard of Rousseau (possibly even had to read a little of him in high school?) and I hadn't heard of Algarotti until now :P Of course, some of this has to do with, well, the US being a Thing, which is hardly Algarotti's fault :)

I think that at least Candide is more read than Casanova's memoirs? If only because of Bernstein :) Though I can't argue that Casanova's name is better known than anyone else's!

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Oh, but that's what I'm saying! NO ONE's heard of Algarotti any more. He went from celebrity status in the 18th century to "Posterity: Algarotti who?" in like a hundred years.

Seriously, I had never heard of Algarotti except in the Fritz context--and that was minimal enough that, while I must have read about him 20 years ago, I did not remember him at all from that period, and had to relearn who he was from scratch this time around. The dissertation I summarized (written in 2010) is the closest thing to a bio that's been written about him in any language since 1913, and the only one ever in English, and it states that the only other biography about him was written in 1770. There've been a few monographs on his works, and he gets occasional (usually unimpressed) entries in biographical dictionaries. And that's it for Mr. Used to Really Be Someone.

Poor Algarotti. Maybe if he'd been better at job-hunting...or Fritz had been a better boss.

The dissertation's final chapter is on how the mighty have fallen, and it turns out some of it has to do with Algarotti being a polymath instead of a specialist (I sympathize; if I were a specialist, I'd be a lot more famous now too), but much of it has to do with the period when Italian nationalism took off. You see, Algarotti the cosmopolitan wasn't considered sufficiently patriotic, always living abroad, working for foreign monarchs, getting art out of Italy and into foreign collections, and ick, that spying on the King of Sardinia for Old Fritz.

Edited Date: 2019-11-01 11:38 pm (UTC)

From:

cahn

Yeah, I sympathize with the polymath stuff too :P Huh, interesting about Italian nationalism, I could see how that might do a number on his reputation. Interesting though that a dissertation about sales techniques has to end with "...and these techniques worked for a while but then completely fell apart once he was dead."

From:

mildred_of_midgard

On the other hand, invade Silesia and you'll be famous FOREVER!

"...and these techniques worked for a while but then completely fell apart once he was dead."

Yep, sometimes fate screws you over. Especially when a major standard for fame is: "How much did you aggrandize your country?" Fritz: lots. Algarotti: not so much.