cahn | Frederick the Great discussion post 9

Maupertuis: given he had every reason to be incensed at Voltaire and to be grateful to Fritz for the support, I think it's entirely possible he might at least have heavily hinted

*nod* I could see that.

OMG you did a side-by-side comparison! I wasn't expecting that, but it's brilliant!

Do you mind if I post your write-ups in the same

rheinsberg post with mine (with credit, of course)?

One of her cites for this is mom and Émilie arguing over a Biblical point, which is supposed to show that mom was encouraging of Émilie expressing her own opinion. I dunno, though, it could just be that mom was being resentful and trying to prove Émilie wrong? Unsuccessfully, as it turns out. Anyway, I'm not totally convinced by her here

Omg. As someone whose mother used to argue Biblical points with me as a teenager when I wanted to be a physicist, and threaten to take things away from me if I didn't back down and stop believing in non-literal interpretations of the Bible...I do not find this argument very convincing. Maybe Mom was very supportive and liked a good debate! But mine, who was actually very encouraging of my education by the standards of any 18th century female, felt horribly threatened by any debate.

More evidence required, is what I'm saying.

No sensationalistic gossip here!

Awww. :( :P

Does mention that Voltaire had a whole pile of money (mentions veeeery briefly his government bonds thing, but does not go into detail, which, I guess, this is not a Voltaire bio)

Whereas Bodanis, who's writing a dual biography, gives the episode in great detail to demonstrate how superior Voltaire's intellect is to everyone else, and how taking advantage of other people is heroic. I got a huge Odyssean vibe from his portrayal of Voltaire, like it felt like I was reading Homer fanfic.

she was 'altogether remarkable,' while he could not even make the other understand what mathematics was."

Bodanis gives me the same impression.

I found that Zinsser says Voltaire also calls him a swan, "Mi caro cignio di Padova."

Yes! This was easy to miss, but when I was explaining the swan thing, I mentioned that Voltaire and Fritz both called him a swan. Voltaire started it (he and Algarotti knew each other before Fritz was in the picture), and Fritz picked it up.

Me: Wow!! Wouldn't it be great if I had a place like that where I could talk with people about things I'm interested in ~~or other people have totally gotten me interested in~~, like history and opera and reading pedagogy, and geek out about things -- oh. :D ~~totally calling DW The Earthly Paradise from now on~~

It's been my earthly paradise! And a total sanity-saver.

Zinsser: Probably because he wasn't part of the Académie française because he kept making people angry at him, and was thinking he could slide into it sideways from the Academy of Sciences. Not because he actually liked science.

Oooh. That is some interesting context.

And Émilie is all, "My dude, you really suck at drawing conclusions from experiments."

Yeah, Bodanis gets into the whole mass thing, and all the things that were wrong with Voltaire's experimental methods.

Émilie: Thanks, but I'd way rather be a physicist than a goddess.

You can be both, Émilie. You can be both. \o/ (Though as someone who started out as a physics major before switching to math and computers, I'm with you on the whole wanting to be a physicist thing. :D)

By the way she used a French translation of Wolff that Frederick of Prussia sent to Voltaire "made for him by one of his closest intimates at court." [Suhm?? :D]

Suhm! Look at you knowing things. You know about Lehndorff and Suhm and all sorts of things that you need to be very well informed to know about. (Seriously, two months ago, did even

selenak and I know about Lehndorff or Suhm as anything more than names? We did not!)

Voltaire: I am too old for sexual relationships, being 47 and all, "the twilight of my days." [He lived to be 83.]

Yeah, Voltaire was notoriously pulling the "one foot in the grave" line on people for decades. Fritz, the other one-foot-in-the-grave-for-decades guy, rolled his eyes and said Voltaire would write his (Fritz's) epitaph. He didn't, but he almost did, and he did live to be almost ten years older than Fritz (it's just that he was born almost twenty years before Fritz).

Fritz and Voltaire really don't like what they see in the mirror of each other's eyes, do they?

(Admittedly, I've known since I was a teenager that I would never get along with myself, and during my early twenties realized I needed to start hanging out with people who are approximately one million times more low key than I am, if I want us to not drive each other crazy.)

Voltaire: *has affair with niece*

So this came up in conversation in another corner of the Fritz fandom (mob-boss-fic-writing fan) the day before you posted it, and we were wondering: how shocking or normal was it that Voltaire was having an affair with his niece? Was this something that like, royals could get away with because royals were expected to do a certain amount of inbreeding, or was it like, "Well, it's technically consanguinity, but they're not getting married, and who cares, anyway?"?

Even today, it depends on what country you live in.

Zinsser: *does not quote Fritz about Voltaire's grieving but clearly kinda agrees with him*

What IS it with people insisting there's One True Way to grieve? It's like if you ever move on, people will conclude you never cared in the first place. Let people grieve their own way and rebuild their lives, FFS!

I'm glad she asked! This was fascinating.

but mainly this was my trying to find something to get the social media equivalant of „De La Literature Allemande“ out of Alcibiades

I could just see Alcibiades quipping: What do I think of German literature? I think it would be a good idea. :P

Elegy X actually has a Fritz and Heinrich allusion:

Heinrich as in our Heinrich? Brother of Fritz? Or Heinrich der Große as in Henri IV of France? Wait, I just checked Goethe's dates, and the elegies were written 1788-1790, when our Heinrich was still alive. So you must have meant the other Heinrich, which makes more sense anyway if the line is going in chronological order.

cahn, you may know this from your long-ago French historical fiction reading, but Henri IV of France is best known to English speakers as Henry of Navarre, was the first Bourbon king, famously said "Paris is worth a mass" and converted from being a Huguenot to Catholicism, was called "Henry the Great/Henri le Grand" had a shall we say interesting relationship with his wife Margot (FW and SD had metaphorical marital warfare; Henri and Margot had more martial marital warfare), and was assassinated in his carriage. Voltaire wrote a Henriade about him, which Fritz of course loved. (And iirc, Voltaire loved comparing Fritz favoriably to him.)

I don't know whether he actually said he wanted every peasant to have a chicken in the pot on Sunday (i.e. financial stability for everyone during his reign), but it's one of those lines that always gets associated with him. It may be apocryphal, though, and I'm way too behind on posts to look that up. :P

ETA: Another note for

cahn. The chronology, at least according to German wiki, goes like this:
1786: Fritz dies.
1786-1788: Goethe goes to Italy.
1788-1790: Goethe writes the Roman Elegies.
1795: Elegies published (most of them, including X).

So when Goethe is writing about Fritz being dead, Fritz has just recently gone from being der einzige König, celebrity of Europe, to just another shade.

(I'm also, now that I've had a chance to think about it, confused why you would mention "Fritz and Heinrich" in the same phrase like that if you meant Henri IV, so maybe I'm wrong and you *did* mean he was talking about our Heinrich,

selenak. Please clarify?)

Edited 2020-01-26 03:05 (UTC)

Headcanon!

hard to keep all these mouthy guys straight

Oblique attack tactics ain't exactly straight. :P

Wooooow. The shade, it is thick!

That's not even shade, that's fact!

Somebody on the internet put together an impressive pilot project on "best generals of all time", and I saw that Mollwitz was listed as a Fritz victory, and I was like, "Look."

Did even *Fritz* take credit for winning that battle? I'm not saying he didn't shortchange Schwerin, or gloss over leaving the field in his memoirs, but at any point did he ever try to say he won it?

You can see why she might have thought he'd fit right in with the Hohenzollern family.

Mistaking Voltaire for a Hohenzollern has been done by others, starting with Marwitz. P

Okay, I'm calling it a night. Translation is done; I found 3 truncated letters that I will fix manually in the morning; then if I don't find any more bugs, I will upload it and you can tell me about all the bugs you find. ;)

More or less caught up on post 9 comments, so tomorrow after finishing Heinrich, the plan is to catch up on post 10, selenak's no doubt awesome fic, Rheinsberg posts, and any new comments that come in while I'm asleep! This order of events subject to being interrupted by any incoming comments with the word "Katte" in the subject. :P

Soooooo, um:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/22408975

OMG

you must have posted this literally MINUTES after I had to leave go do a bunch of family stuff (and in particular was not checking my AO3 notifications)

brb

Yes, please do! I do want to change that last bit slightly to convey better what Zinsser actually said:

Voltaire: It's so saaaaad she was so greeeeeeat I'm the saaaaaddest it's all about meeeeee OK gonna go hang out with Fritz now
Saint-Lambert: *quietly has a breakdown and possibly was permanently affected by her death, and seems like he really loved her*
Zinsser: I like Saint-Lambert a lot more than Voltaire, okay?

(Man, she totally acknowledges Voltaire was a genius and yet... I got the distinct feeling that if she had a time machine she would go back and say, "Émilie. Girlfriend. I know he's the top intellect in Europe and being with him is a ~~dysfunctional~~ rush. But you are too good for him, can't you see that?")

Omg. As someone whose mother used to argue Biblical points with me as a teenager when I wanted to be a physicist, and threaten to take things away from me if I didn't back down and stop believing in non-literal interpretations of the Bible...I do not find this argument very convincing. Maybe Mom was very supportive and liked a good debate! But mine, who was actually very encouraging of my education by the standards of any 18th century female, felt horribly threatened by any debate.

It was a factual point (I forget exactly but something on the order of "was X present at this bit or not?") so not quite the same, but... yeah, I'm sitting there going "maybe she just wanted to prove her daughter wrong?" Because I definitely know people like that!

[will reply to the rest later]

Okay, done! Original post updated. (It's so nice to be able to do that. Rheinsberg is the best!)

(Man, she totally acknowledges Voltaire was a genius and yet... I got the distinct feeling that if she had a time machine she would go back and say, "Émilie. Girlfriend. I know he's the top intellect in Europe and being with him is a ~~dysfunctional~~ rush. But you are too good for him, can't you see that?")

She's not wrong! Unfortunately, in a society as misogynistic as Émilie's, finding a guy whose intellect is a match for yours (in another domain) and is willing to treat you roughly like an equal, often means settling. I get you, Émilie. I've been there, even without the misogyny.

It was a factual point...so not quite the same

Still. Arguing with your daughter about either fact or interpretation doesn't necessarily mean encouraging her!

Yeah, I think Zinsser would be happy with Émilie finding someone who maybe wasn't quite up to her intellect but was willing to treat her better than Voltaire :P That is how she looks at Saint-Lambert, I'm pretty sure. Though as I've said, I do kind of wonder if she is too invested in this "I'm going to overturn what everyone thinks" narrative and gives Saint-Lambert more awesomeness than was perhaps his actual due. As here:

Still. Arguing with your daughter about either fact or interpretation doesn't necessarily mean encouraging her!

Right?! I appreciate that she gave us her evidence, that puts her higher than many biographers, but I'm sitting here going "...I don't know that this shows what you claim it shows..."

(After reading this bio, my personal ship is Émilie/Clairaut -- it sounds like they both passionately enjoyed working on math together -- but the lack of anyone ever commenting about this makes it look to me like both of them were only interested in each other for math. Which is probably what I like about it, lol.)

Hee! Give me some time to think about Peter Keith, lol. But let's do it sometime! Just probably not in the next couple of months :)

I mocked him anonymously in my no homo write-up.

Ha, I remembered that! :) Mostly because it was so WTF.

Heh. This is one of those things I did read about in long-ago French historical fiction, mostly forgot, and then learned again through opera (Les Huguenots), what else :P

Agreed; I got the impression from my reading that she took Newton's Principia and converted the geometric proofs into calculus proofs, which is a super impressive achievement and definitely creative and original work, but it wasn't breaking new ground, like inventing physics or discovering new laws of physics.

Yep, same for me.

Also, if Bodanis is correct, if she'd hadn't had her hands tied by not being able to carry out her theoretical physics experiments because Voltaire's EGO, maybe she could have discovered more new things. He claims that she had the equipment and the know-how to do a number of optical experiments and astronomical observations that weren't done until decades after her death, by people who got famous.

I don't know about this. I mean, it's probably true she had the equipment and know-how, but that doesn't always translate to doing the right experiment for the right reasons. I mean, maybe? But we'll never know what she would have been like without Voltaire around. (Time-traveling Zinsser: I'm telling you, dump him!)

Yay! First we have to do some broccoli crackfic, though! I'm having some ideas I think you're going to love. (Spoiler: Wilhelmine/MT.)

Book burning: agree, and I feel like I've read somewhere, I don't remember where or if it was reliable, that Fritz later regretted his impulsive action

Found it: Catt, memoirs, v.1, p. 29. I don't see it in the account of this episode in the diary, although it may be elsewhere, or Catt may be writing down something he remembered in the memoirs, or Catt may be making things up, either because he believed Fritz was sorry or thought that he should be.

Only slightly less of a betrayal than book-burning: book falsification. Curse you, Catt!

Frederick the Great discussion post 9

Re: Maupertuis, or: Gossipy Sensationalist of Prussia

Re: Émilie du Châtelet: (Judith P. Zinsser) - synopsis

Re: The Very Secret Chat Transcripts: The Sequel - the literary footnotes

Re: Toppings of all types, continued - the Curious Case of the Recurring Favourite

Re: Happy Birthday, Heinrich!

Re: Fritz and Wilhelmine Correspondance, Trier Version II - OMG Voltaire!

Re: Fritzian library

Re: Brotherly Conduct III: The Aftermath

Re: Brotherly Conduct III: The Aftermath

Re: Émilie du Châtelet: (Judith P. Zinsser) - synopsis

Re: Émilie du Châtelet: (Judith P. Zinsser) - synopsis

Re: Émilie du Châtelet: (Judith P. Zinsser) - synopsis

Re: The case of the indiscreet reader (the other one)

Re: Andrew Hamilton: Rheinsberg

Re: The Very Secret Chat Transcripts: The Sequel - the literary footnotes

Re: Émilie du Châtelet: Daring Genius of the Enlightenment (Judith P. Zinsser) - general thoughts

Re: The case of the indiscreet reader (the other one)

Re: Toppings of all types, continued