Happy Fritzmas! (*) / Frederician discussion post 7

[cahn]

Frederician fandom is the best! 3 stories in main archive and 2 stories in Madness, eeeeeeee and I have only managed to read my own gifts so far (well, I guess Madness isn't open yet either, but even if it had been I wouldn't have managed to have read them) but they are so goooooood

Also, I would like to apologize on behalf of the fandom that none of us apparently managed any Fritz/Voltaire. Some of us, uh, didn't know enough about Voltaire, and we are Taking Steps to attempt to rectify this in the future if anyone requests it, say, next year. Just saying.

I'm making this post because the last one has an insane number of comments, but I still owe SO many comments on the last post and I kiiiinda would like to read and comment on Yuletide stories for the next week as time permits so I almost hope this post doesn't get much action and then we resume in the new year? (Especially since there is a limited amount of discussion we can do on the fics right now!) :D I was thinking of making another post anyway for reveals.

(*) My husband D came up with this :P :)

Comments

Re: Glasow

[mildred_of_midgard]

Ah, Lehndorff! So consistent, so endearing. *hugs* It's true that Voltaire made his cow eyes before getting hired, but Voltaire is exceptional in many ways. You're no Voltaire, Lehndorff, in good ways or bad.

Glasow: All I have is this. No primary sources. "He was seized, judicially interrogated in the presence of the king, and dispatched the following day in chains to Spandau, where he was immured in a dungeon in solitary confinement, and in a short time after ended his days. It appeared so necessary to the king, to keep secret the names of all the persons connected with this crime, that he would not allow him even to be attended by a physician, in his last moments."

Um, hi, Trenck-lite? I guess Fritz does this from time to time. No mention of being chained to a wall or made to sit on his own gravestone, though.

I don't remember Catt mentioning him, but my memory is Swiss cheese for things I wasn't looking for when I read something. Will keep an eye out whenever I revisit Catt, now that Glasow is of interest to us. (That's how I've been picking out the Voltaire quotes. "Oh, yeah, Catt said that too!")

Re: Glasow

[selenak]

Unexpectedly, Voltaire, or rather, Pleschinski comes through for us, via footnote to a Fritz letter from the year 1757, one of the earliest post-fallout. Fritz - currently involved in a three front war he started - compares himself to "a decent citizen against whom Brinviilliers, Cartouches and the Prince of Darkness have conspired". Pleschinski's footnote points out that a) Brinvilliers = la Marquise the Brinvilliers, poisoner whose discovery kicked off the infamous Affaire des Poissons during the age of Louis XIV, and b) adds "in 1757, an attempt to poison Friedrich had failed; the party blamed was the Saxonian Resistance Circle around the Countess Brühl, who was accused to have bribed Friedrich's batman Glasow to poison his drinking chocolate".

(Brühl, male = Prime Minister of Saxony. Which Fritz had invaded and occupied as a preemptive strategy, thereby kicking off the war. The Countess was his wife, I guess.)

Re: Glasow

[mildred_of_midgard]

Interesting, thanks! My secondary sources indicate that the poisoning attempt is possible but not believed by everyone, i.e. may be gossipy sensationalism. I did wonder, when you translated the Münchow Jr. letter, if the poisoning attempt he was referring to was the one by Glasow, in which case we'd have external corroborating evidence. But Münchow is very vague, at least in the passage you gave.