cahn | Frederick the Great, discussion post 5: or: Yuletide requests are out!

Entry tags:

Frederick the Great, discussion post 5: or: Yuletide requests are out!

All Yuletide requests are out!

Yuletide related:
-it is sad that I can't watch opera quickly enough these days to have offered any of them, these requests are delightful!

-That is... sure a lot of prompts for MCS/Jingyan. But happily some that are not :D (I like MCS/Jingyan! But there are So Many Other characters!)

Frederician-specific:
-I am so excited someone requested Fritz/Voltaire, please someone write it!!

-I also really want someone to write that request for Poniatowski, although that is... definitely a niche request, even for this niche fandom. But he has memoirs?? apparently they are translated from Polish into French

-But while we are waiting/writing/etc., check out this crack commentfic where Heinrich and Franz Stefan are drinking together while Maria Theresia and Frederick the Great have their secret summit, which turns into a plot to marry the future Emperor Joseph to Fritz...

Master link to Frederick the Great posts and associated online links

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

The Duc de Croy, who had an endearingly open mind for an older gent and was fascinated by the sciences, mmet Franklin repeatedly and thought Franklin rocked. The first time, he did what a fanboy (at whatever age) would and had Franklin explain electricity to him. The second meeting he writes at length about came after our Duke had read about the exploits of Captain James Cook, and was mightly impressed:

Emmanuel de Croy: Wow. Just wow. Captain Cook is a most valiant man. May he go on exploring the planet some more and write about it so I can read it! Hang on, zomg, I've just remembered: He's British. We're at cold-hot-cold-hot war with England. What if our ships meet him at seas and stop this most wonderful man from exploring? #saveJamesCook

*goes on to write a memo to the French admirality that all French ships should be told to treat Captain Cook with the utmost courtesy should they meet him*

Admirality: Okay, Monsieur Le Duc, you have the requisite number of ancestors, so... I guess we'll forward the memo.

EdC: Excellent! But wait! What if AMERICAN buccaneers encounter and harm wonderful Captain Cook? #saveJamesCook

*off he goes to Franklin*

F: Hi, glad to see you. We're as always out of money and guns and would be grateful for more of same. More Lafayettes, too.

EdC: I sympathize, but that's not why I'm here. We must #saveJamesCook! Promise me! No American ship must ever harm him and stop him from exploring!!!!

F:...Okay.

When I read that I thought the Duke was lucky not to have run into the considerably more short tempered John Adams, who was replacing Franklin as Ambassador until he in turn was replaced by Jefferson. BTW, the Duke was also thrilled when the brothers Montgolfier did their great balloon launch at Versailles, something that's wonderfully visualized in the miniseries John Adams, because Adams, Abigail and Jefferson watched it together, here.

The Duke was so thrilled that he made his own little balloon (without a living person in it) afterwards and send it across the channel in the general direction of Dover, noting in his diary how lucky he was to have lived into a time where people could now fly and the wonderful Captain Cook was exploring the other side of the planet. #saveJamesCook

Yes; my paternal grandmother reacted very similarly when my grandfather died, she withdrew from her friends, stopped doing so many things she'd enjoyed doing together with my grandfather - they'd been in a bowling club together, they'd travelled a lot, they had had favourite restaurants etc - , and then felt her friends were deserting her when after a while, they didn't try anymore to coax her back. But the social conditions around her were widely different.

There's a great Horrible Histories song about it, but YouTube only has the start, so I can't link you. Anyway, the gist of it:

Henry VIII, at his prime, i.e. not yet fat and an active sportsman but most certainly already his macho self: So, Francis, this summit may be to foster peace but hey, want to get beaten by me, err, I mean, wrestle a bit?

Henry's courtiers: Agincourt, Agincourt! Show that French guy what's what!

Francis I *sophisticated Renaissance guy, Leonardo da Vinci fan and fans of all things Italy, future father-in-law to Catherine de Medici*: Sure, why not. ~~You people never remember who actually won the 100 Years War, do you?~~

Henry & Francis: *wrestle*

Henry: Agin - Hang on. Are you - why are you winning? How can you win? At wrestling? AGAINST ME? What about Agincourt?

Francis: It's called tactics and gravity, mon ami.

Henry: *never ever gets over being beaten in public, tries to have his own Agincourt periodically for the rest of his life, fails miserably at it*

If you want the more sober version, it's here.

A man still gets more commonly described as "gutaussehend" - handsome - than as "schön" - Beautiful - but "ein schöner Mann" is still a valid phrasing occasionally used.

(Now what really gets debated is whether Napoleon's remark about Goethe upon meeting him - "Voilà un homme" - should have the "homme" translated as "Mann" or "Mensch", i.e. "man" or "human being" - could be either in French.) :)

#FrenchGermanTranslations

Re: the alterations in Casanova's original text - blame the 19th century mores again. I remember an article that lists the most annoying examples, I shall see whether I can find it for you.

Hiiii! I missed you guys! I hope this means I'm back, but each day is a surprising new adventure in Medical Land, so who knows what tomorrow will bring. But I'm going to try to read through the backlog of comments before bed and hopefully reply to a few. I also have a backlog of topics I want to discuss, haha, because of course I do.

But before I start rereading comments, I'm going to share a couple things with you that I put together in the last day or two. One I'll do in the Algarotti thread, and the other here.

So remember when

selenak shared with us a map of Wilhelmine's itinerary on her trip to France and Italy? And I said I wanted one for Fritz, but like every month of his life?

Well, it occurred to me that you could put together a pretty good approximation from his correspondence. It's obviously going to be very light on the early years, especially pre-1730. You'd have to do that manually. But after 1740, we have reams and reams of correspondence for him, and it all comes with locations.

So I, uh, wrote some code. Like I do.

Then it turned out that code is easy, data wrangling is hard. (This is the mantra of data scientists everywhere.) In our case, data wrangling = converting the 18th century German names of cities into 21st century German, Polish, and Czech names with standardized spellings, and getting the latitude and longitude manually for the really small and obscure ones. Ahahahaaaa.

So I went with his personal correspondence for my first stab at this project. It gives you much less granularity than the political correspondence, but a much smaller and therefore more manageable data set, and it also gives you some of the 1730-1740 period.

I ended up manually googling 150 names that I couldn't automatically match to any modern place names. Some of them were pretty damn hard to track down. In a few cases, I had to go read the letter in question to figure out where the fuck he was, or his memoirs. Fortunately, in the one case where I absolutely could not find a modern equivalent even after reading the letter and would have been stumped, he conveniently described his location in the letter as "near this city, on this river, and just on the opposite side of this other river from this other city," which meant I could get fairly precise coordinates even without being able to match up names. Thanks, Fritz! His memoirs were actually pretty useful too in giving geographical descriptions. But you can see why I used the personal correspondence.

That got me a rough map of his travels 1730-1786. Or at least a data set that allows me to generate rough maps. Attempting to generate one single map crashed my laptop.

Then I picked out one small period and went through it by hand and attempted to clean up the data as best I could. (Some guesses have been made, but the final result doesn't have him jumping to the other side of Germany and back overnight, which is how I'm judging "good enough".) Now it looks like an actual map.

But he moved around and backtracked so much, that it would be unreadable as a static map with overlapping names and dates. So I made it into a gif.

And without further ado, behold the First Silesian War! (You'll need to click on the gif and zoom in to make out the text. Depending on your connection, the transitions may be a little jerky if you view it in the cloud, but when I downloaded it to my computer, it was much better quality. It's in the same folder as the screenshots, so you should be able to view it, but let me know if not.)

If we wanted to tackle this project properly, this would be my todo list:
1) Clean up the entire data set, 1730-1786.
2) Make the map all pretty with colors and better titles and stuff.
3) Use the political correspondence, omg.
4) Maybe see if it would be possible to make static maps covering short time frames that aren't unreadably cluttered?

What I should do is the initial number crunching on the political correspondence just to see exactly how much work it would be to make that data set usable. Would it be a couple hundred place names that needed to be manually wrangled (doable), or a couple thousand (lol no)?

Oh, btw, you know the 46 volumes of political correspondence? They stop in March 1782! I don't know what happened to the last 4.5 years. Maybe everyone who was compiling his correspondence died of old age and forgot to name literary executors, haha.

But anyway, enjoy watching Fritz invade Silesia and Bohemia in the meantime! ("Pragmatic Sanction? What Pragmatic Sanction? Anti-Machiavel? What Anti-Machiavel? *shifty eyes* Posterity is going to make MAPS commemorating this!")

Also: "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." I certainly learned a lot about Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic from this exercise. To the point where I'm starting to have intuitions about what's been misgeocoded just from proximity to surprisingly obscure villages and rivers. :P

I give you...Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's letters to Algarotti! (From 1721-1751. For the last few letters, I'm still waiting on that volume from the library. But this is most of them.)

Guys, they're in French! I had no idea. She broke into French for her most passionate letters, apparently because French is the language of love and English couldn't begin to express the depth and strength of her emotions.

This is not something she normally does! In 500 pages of letters, 32 are in French, and 11 of those are to Algarotti. The others seem to be largely to French people who presumably don't speak English. But she starts writing to Algarotti in English, and then switches to French when her emotions become too strong (switching occasionally back to English). Woooow.

Guys, she's obsessed. o.O

After picking my very slow way through a subset of the French, I accidentally discovered that the back of the book has the English translations, haha. (I discovered this while deciding to flip through the entire book to see how often she writes in French. Then all the French letters were collated and translated in the last few pages, yay. Then I felt silly. :P) So I scanned and uploaded those as well, for those of us whose French is very slow.

Oh, and apologies for the sometimes slanted or wavy writing. Holding the book flat and scanning and getting a good quality picture was hard. But it should be readable in all cases. As always, let me know if you can't access the files. (I live in horror of this, ever since sending a blast email announcing my wedding, with a link to our wedding registry that apparently worked only if you were logged in as me.)

Oh, damn. Wow, that is one complicated history, and of *course* the only version I can read is a highly inaccurate one. Dammit!

Thank you for sharing the history of the memoirs. That was super fascinating, even without the warning that I'm reading a very bastardized copy if I read the Gutenberg one.

That's... not something I'm used to seeing from a translator :)

Yeah, it was a *thing*. I would love to see the list if

selenak can dig it up.

Re "fine", when I read that, I took it as meaning "good-looking" in rather old-fashioned English, and the Oxford English Dictionary agrees with me: "Of a person or thing: remarkably attractive; good-looking. Now somewhat dated, except U.S. slang (originally and chiefly African-American), of a person: sexually attractive," with examples of the older meaning up to the early 20th century. So since the Machen translation is over 100 years old, I'm willing to go with "good-looking" as the originally intended meaning.

Thank you so much for the native speaker interpretation! That makes such a difference.

Well, you know, clearly, when he called Katte his lover, he was speaking metaphorically before.

Well, the thing is, he might have been. The subtitles say "lover", but I don't trust subtitles (for the very reasons you outlined!), and since he immediately goes on to say "we have not sinned," I originally concluded "lover" was a poor translation for "beloved" or something similar. I assume the commenter in question, watching a subtitled version and commenting in English, was also restricted to interpreting the subtitles (through a homophobic lens, to boot).

Knowing that it was an unambiguous "lover" in the original, and that you translated it as "offended" rather than "sinned", does make it more explicitly gay, yes, and then all the Friedemann stuff has to be interpreted in that light.

Speaking of ambiguities, I've read that FW's "Did you [verb] Katte or did he [verb] you?" to Fritz is ambiguous as to whether he meant "seduce [sexually]" or "corrupt [morally, into desertion]" in German. Both are somewhat ambiguous in English, but "seduce" is getting more and more confined to the sexual sense, and "corrupt" to a financial sense.

And he'd never, ever, fancy someone one of his siblings has slept with. Clearly. Not Fritz! Slander!

Not our Fritz!

Ah, but I think the decent early years are a necessary but not sufficient component of why I'm capable of being casually indifferent to bonding. The personality/genetics/epigenetics are why I ended up casually indifferent given the decent early years (whereas most people with decent early years don't), but in an AU without the decent early years, I don't at all have the confidence I end up like this.

What I got out my early childhood was the idea that I don't need to please other people (and that saved me when I got a bit older and my parents started signalling that they weren't pleased with me). Fritz did not get that message in his early childhood, not from either of his parents.

I have a more well-thought-out rationale, but it's late and I have a long backlog of comments to work through. ;)

Hmm, I'm not entirely sure. I agree that the fic changes a *lot* of the external context and a lot of the characterization either directly or as a side effect, in combinations that don't always work for me, but two things:

1) I'd have to re-read, but I don't remember the AU bond coming across to me as quite so over-the-top intense in that fic as in real life. They're close, but they don't feel like "possible scandal that never happened because of his orientation/their low sex drives." Furthermore, she seems to need him *much* less in this AU than irl, and much less than he needs her.

2) I'm not entirely convinced a protective older sibling in an abuse situation wouldn't lead to a close (but not quite as borderline-romantically intense) relationship, especially one that's slanted more toward him needing her than vice versa. I would say the younger abused child might latch onto whatever affection he could get. (I do think the "older, protective" part is key--AW is a different kettle of fish.) For a fictional example of this dynamic that really works for me: Boromir and Faramir.

But I will think about this next time I reread the fic. It's an interesting thought.

So many great stories. SO MANY.

Oh, hey, I found the full Lafayette quote! "To Potsdam I went to make my bow to the king, and notwithstanding what I had heard of him, could not help being struck with the dress and appearance of an old, broken, dirty corporal, covered all over with Spanish snuff, with his head almost leaning on one shoulder, and fingers almost distorted by the gout; but what surprises me much more is the fire, and sometimes the softness, of the most beautiful eyes I ever saw, which give as charming an expression to his physiognomy, as he can take a rough and threatening one at the head of his troops."

This is 1785, just a year before Fritz died--possibly from all that snuff-taking. I would love to see a portrait of Old Fritz that depicts the state of his clothes, but I guess that's too much realism even for him. :P I just keep running across it in like every description of a foreign visitor. Nobody can pass by him in their memoirs without mentioning that he's covered in snuff. (I guess it's memorable when you start sneezing as you approach him, which at least one visitor accused him of.)

His ambassadors may have, but Fritz didn't want women spending 3 hours a day on their makeup and hair! He wanted them to read books and discuss music with him (which is why I find it less surprising that he was all over writing to MT's pen pal). It's also a reason their marriage AU is so interesting, in that it's not straight-out hatred or indifference, but something way, way more many-layered. (And they should definitely get annulled asap so she can marry FS.)

But I'm sure Fritz would like her to spend less time managing her country and army so effectively, and more time playing music. :P Much more appropriate for women.

Okay, my eyes are starting to glaze over and I need to go to bed, so will read and reply the remaining comments properly next time, but

ZOMG, mes amies, could he have been afraid she'd stay in Italy and he wouldn't see her again?

ZOMG. He had *just* lost Algarotti to Italy for health or "health" reasons. He couldn't know this, but he'd never see Algarotti again, and he was clearly starting to worry. The language he uses to her is much the same as he uses to Algarotti. "J'aimerais mieux que vous fussiez à Pise pour autre chose que pour y soigner votre santé, comme dit la chanson du pape. Vous obligera-t-elle de renoncer à l'Allemagne et aux climats hyperboréens?"

It makes so much sense if he's worrying about losing Wilhelmine there forever.

Omg, *hugs all of them*. You don't know how often I fantasize about giving them proper medical care to go with their therapists. Fritz has already gotten gene therapy in my head!

I went !! at the bit where Fritz actually had the self-awareness to pick up that he might be sour-graping :D

Same here, when I first read it. I was also struck by the second image he uses, of the galley slave.

Same! He has his moments of self-awareness, but then his behavior is such that you're always surprised when you see one.

The galley slave analogy is telling, agreed. He has another one (I think in that physical bio I flip through once in a while, but can't find quotes on demand) saying that he would go to Italy, but he's tethered like a goat (iirc?) to Prussia.

Okay, bed now, really. If you see me commenting again in the next 10 hours, tell me sternly to go away. :P

Munck appears to have been quite aware of how the triangle in neighbouring Denmark with Queen, Queen's lover and King who is friends with Queen's lover who is also his doctor had ended - badly for the Queen and the lover. (More here; the Queen in question, btw, was a Hannover cousin of Fritz and Wilhelmine's .)

I had no idea that Scandinavia was such a hotbed of... gossipy sensationalism... Although at least from the movie synopsis, it seems to be the case that a large part of the problem was that Struensee went after power, which doesn't seem to have been so much the case here?

He even had the chambermaid (aka the one Munck had originally been involved with) and one of Sophia Magdalena's ladies in waiting testify that he, Munck, had been required to touch both the King and the Queen as part of the "instructions", that it had been Gustav's idea and he, Munck, was only servicing the royal couple as had been asked.

!!This is amazing.

(Leopold to Joseph: Aren't you glad Mom didn't marry little Toni to Gustav instead of Louis?
Joseph: Not funny, Poldl.)

Well... I dunno... at least she would have gotten hands-on tutorials? And it seems like it would be less embarrassing to get instructions from well-known sex machine than from one's older brother, but maybe this is me having twenty-first century squicks :D

Queen Sophia Magdalena: *finds a naked hot page in Gustav's bed, though minus Gustav*

Traditional historians: Must have been lost for directions and passed out.

lol forever. Woooooow. That is some major major contortions there, that is hilarious.

And he's totally straight in the Verdi opera, too!

HAHAHAHA

:( Poor Wilhelmine, I bet she would have done a much better job at all of this.

~~though personally I am happy she built the opera house~~

Wow, this is all amazing.

literally was trained to become a royal mistress one day by her ambitious mother (despite not being of noble blood, which until then was a strict condition)

I gotta wonder how that even works. "This has never been possible before... but on the off chance that it is... you're going to do it, daughter!" No wait, on second thought, I've known a bunch of tiger moms, it just goes to show that some things transcend the ages, and one of them is over-ambitious moms who sometimes actually succeed.

When she married, she did warn her husband what she had in mind, but promised she would be loyal otherwise. (He became the father of her only daughter.)

That is suuuuper interesting.

In her most famous portrait, she's depicting holding a copy of the dictionary by Diderot and D'Alembert, which is a statement because that book was forbidden by censorship at the time.

So by the time I got to the end of htis paragraph, and before I even got to Austria, I was wondering if there is a decent biography of her I can look at. The first one that comes up at Amazon is by Nancy Mitford, which I'm discarding from consideration, of course. Do you happen to know any? I also came across the memoirs of one of her maids, which I've downloaded.

Pompadour: This country sure needs a new policy. We've been stuck in a rut since Louis XIV. Sign me on. But make it a strictly defense pact at first, that'll make it easier to sell it to Louis. To become a fighting alliance only if Fritz attacks first.

MT in Vienna: eh, he's bound to, being him. Okay, convey my thanks to the Marquise.

HEE.

Fritz: *hears about MT, Elizabeth and Pompadour ganging up on him* I'm the modern Orpheus, persecuted by a gang of women who want to tear me apart. Okay, time to pre-emptively invade Saxony.

As usual, all together: oh Fritz.

Pompadour: Dear mutual friend, tell the Margravine to tell her brother this is one whore he'll never be able to afford.

OMG she is awesome!

riiiiight of course! I should have realized that. Hee, I really like his answer.

Awwww, he sounds like a sweetie. Batty, of course! But also sweet.

Do you know what the song is called or what year it was? It looks like I can get into Horrible Histories on amazon prime.

Ahahaha, thank you for the link. Wikipedia was not very helpful on this point :)

Yeah, that's fair, and that's how I read it too (as good-looking in old-fashioned English), although it's also true no one would speak like this today.

I just did a search on amazon, and it's kind of amazing how little there is in the way of Casanova that isn't the bastardized version (and in particular, that none of it seems to be available in e-book).

ahahahaha, that is awesome! Hee for the data wrangling (which always seems much easier in theory/simulation than in practice!) but that is great.

omg great! I am looking forward to looking at these (though I won't be able to for a couple of days) :D

Hmm, interesting! I'm of course projecting my own experience as well, with one parent who veeeeeery much gave my sister and me the idea we needed to please other people (especially her). A lot. (Our other parent did not do it to as great an extent, but he certainly did not promulgate the idea that we didn't need to please them.)

Me: *learns how to slither out of situations, and worries some about pleasing people until I turn 30 or so (at which point I get too busy to care) but other than that doesn't really get all that good at pleasing people or at bonding*
Sister: *worries about pleasing people to an almost pathological degree and is only starting to hesitantly get over it with years of therapy*

I mean, there is definitely a case to be made that my sister and I had different early childhood experiences; I had a personality that was ~~really unlike Fritz~~ very conflict-adverse and also I was very good at many things my parents valued (academics, music, competitions), which meant I had less conflict with them. And also I'm certain our mom was less stressed out with one child than with two (now having lived that). But on the other hand I think a large part of what seems to have happened with the two of us is that I didn't need parental validation the same way that she did/does.

ahahahaaha wow. That's a pretty great description.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 5 of 16

Frederick the Great, discussion post 5: or: Yuletide requests are out!

Re: What the Prussian Ambassador Wrote

Re: Emotional isolation

Re: Chronicle of an undercover visit

Re: Casanova

Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love

Re: Algarotti

Re: Casanova

Re: Crackfic

Re: Emotional isolation

Re: Wilhelmine

Re: What the Prussian Ambassador Wrote

Re: What the Prussian Ambassador Wrote

Re: What the Prussian Ambassador Wrote

Re: Sibling Correspondance

Re: Meanwhile, in Sweden

Re: Sibling Correspondance

Re: Chronicle of a a failed foreign policy venture

Re: Chronicle of an undercover visit

Re: What the Prussian Ambassador Wrote

Field of Cloth of Gold

Re: Casanova

Re: Fritz chronological maps, or a labor of love

Re: Algarotti

Re: Emotional isolation

Re: What the Prussian Ambassador Wrote