Frederick the Great, discussion post 6

[cahn]

...I think we need another one (seriously, you guys, this is THE BEST) and I'd better make it now before I disappear into the wilds of music performance.

(also, as of this week there are two Frederician fics in the yuletide archive and eeeeeeeeeee)
(huh, only one of them is actually tagged with Frederick the Great even though two with Maria Theresia and Wilhelmine, eeeeeee this is awesome I CAN'T WAIT)

Frederick the Great masterpost

Comments

Re: Passionate Minds: Émilie and Voltaire

[mildred_of_midgard]

Card counting: First, a disclaimer. I'm going from memory of things I read in Wikipedia a million years ago (or at least more than 10), not from any actual experience.

But my understanding is that card counting is very much a real thing, it just doesn't work like it's portrayed in the movies. The real thing doesn't require any savant-like abilities, just having a strategy and sticking to it. *Coming up* with the strategy might require Émilie-level intelligence, but following it doesn't. The MIT Blackjack Team was very much a real group that ran for years and made money off casinos, even if the movie based on it was not an accurate portrayal.

So I absolutely believe Émilie made some money off a bunch of French nobles this way.

So, if Maupertuis was only up for sex but not for an intellectual relationship, what was the attraction?

Oh, he was up for an intellectual *relationship*, just not an equal partnership. He was willing to talk science with her in private, but he wouldn't let her accompany him to the old boys' clubs he went to, that sort of thing.

What became of Émilie's submission once the competition was over, i.e. was it ever adapted and taught later?

Good question. I haven't been able to find any evidence that it was (which doesn't meant it wasn't), just that it took seventy years before anyone performed the experiments she proposed in it. It earned her a lot of personal fame, but I'm not sure how immediately influential it was. As noted, there was the problem that the Academy was still dominated by Cartesians. (Scientific influence also generally takes at least a generation, which is cynically but perhaps accurately described as: the people who learned one thing have to die off so the next generation can be more open to the ideas that were proposed in the past.)

Much more influential was her opus magnum: her translation and commentary of Newton's Principia. 300 years later, it's still the definitive French translation, because she did such a good job and it's such a difficult text. I didn't mention that in this write-up because I thought we had discussed it already--ah, yes, I mentioned it in an aside here.

Émilie's Fritz scepticism: realistic estimation of royals, or of Voltaire?

Can't tell from the information I have, but I'd like to propose a third possibility: she treated Fritz the same way she'd treat any romantic rival who was trying to take Voltaire away from her.

It's also worth remembering that Fritz did not treat her the way he treated Voltaire, so she's naturally going to have a different perspective on him. Voltaire had stars in his eyes because Fritz wrote to him first, metaphorically kissing his feet, and Voltaire *wanted* to believe he'd be able to influence a great monarch into implementing all the ideas he wanted to see put into practice. Émilie knew that was never going to be a possibility for her. So she had every reason not to trust Fritz.