he dropped the remark "le roi m'a dit" ("the king told me") so often that he was finally called at the court only "l'abbé le roi m'a dit".
HAHAHA.
1) Wow, Magdeburg is really getting crowded during the 7 Years War. I guess Prades didn't meet up with Trenck?
So I knew about Prades being in Magdeburg for treason, but not much else. It did occur to me that Trenck was there! And he must not have been a good cautionary tale, if people were still spying on Fritz four years after he was locked up.
2) Just how many people fired/arrested for spying, indiscretion or both do we have now?
Good question. Voltaire spied on Fritz in 1743 and got arrested in 1753, but those only kind of count. Marwitz is in and out of favor. Glasow dies in prison. Trenck we know about. Prades (1757-1763) overlaps with Trenck (1753-1763) in Magdeburg. Manteuffel got dismissed pronto. Catt is apparently dismissed in 1782 for financial irregularities. Fredersdorf we hope not.
Who am I missing? From motive alone, Darget is a major suspect in an Agatha Christie novel, but hasn't been convicted of anything yet... :P
3) So Fritz has one lector he was previously very close to imprisoned in Magdeburg for spying & indiscretion....and then, just one month later, he tells the next lector all about the most horrible time of his life (so far)?
HMMMM. *side-eyes Catt*
If he pulled AW's cashiering out of a recognizable pamphlet, there's a decent chance he pulled Katte's death out of Voltaire's memoirs. Wilhelmine, Pöllnitz, and Thiébault's hadn't been published yet, remember. (I'm still kind of amazed he couldn't find a better source, but maybe he had grabbed Voltaire's memoirs for the popcorn-munching value, and then decided he should stick in a passage about the Holy Grail into his own memoirs.)
Which incidentally would imply Thiébault had access to Wilhelmine's memoirs, probably via all those exiled intellectuals at Fritz's court, and Catt didn't.
Oh, by the way, you said "de Catt replies with an only slight paraphrasing of a pamphlet making the rounds at the time." Do you know what time that pamphlet was making the rounds? Because that could be useful for anchoring the composition and revision of the memoirs.
On the other hand! Fritz has Voltaire arrested for possessing poetry that Fritz wrote that he doesn't want the rest of Europe to see; sends Voltaire more potentially damning poetry almost immediately after getting back in touch with Voltaire*. I know Voltaire is special, but sometimes Fritz's judgment...
* It occurs to me that Voltaire's memoirs complain about receiving this poem, so if V and C aren't independent sources, it's not impossible that Catt lifted this episode too, and inserted himself as the hero who tried to talk Fritz out of it.
So Katte aside, Fritz also tells Catt about opening the archives to read up on his trial after becoming king, then destroying a few papers, and sealing them up again. You were discussing the history of these papers in another comment. Do you have a sense of how likely Catt is to have gotten *this* part from the horse's mouth? Because even if he moved up the date, it makes a big difference to me if Catt and Voltaire are independent reporters of Fritz's words on Katte's execution, vs. if Catt is ripping off Voltaire and writing historical fiction.
There's also another tidbit Catt and Voltaire have that agrees with W/P/T, to which they don't have access: Fritz thought *he* was about to be executed. So either this comes from Fritz's mouth separately to W and to V, and maybe C (if C isn't copying V), or else this was a rumor making the rounds in Berlin in the 1730s and/or 40s, and also in the 50s and 60s. Since this was a mental state of Fritz to which there were very few witnesses (Münchow and a few officers, at best), not something objectively true like "Katte walked past Fritz's window" or "Katte was executed on the 6th", or even an order like "Fritz had to watch the execution" that FW gave and many people know about...either Fritz talked, Münchow talked, or else people speculated that Fritz thought he was to be executed. And if Fritz talked and V got it from Fritz, then V's account is at least indirectly from the horse's mouth (nonsense about FW being present notwithstanding).
I'm going to have to see if Catt's diary lends itself to OCRing.
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Re: The case of the indiscreet reader (the other one)
Date: 2020-01-25 11:51 pm (UTC)HAHAHA.
1) Wow, Magdeburg is really getting crowded during the 7 Years War. I guess Prades didn't meet up with Trenck?
So I knew about Prades being in Magdeburg for treason, but not much else. It did occur to me that Trenck was there! And he must not have been a good cautionary tale, if people were still spying on Fritz four years after he was locked up.
2) Just how many people fired/arrested for spying, indiscretion or both do we have now?
Good question. Voltaire spied on Fritz in 1743 and got arrested in 1753, but those only kind of count. Marwitz is in and out of favor. Glasow dies in prison. Trenck we know about. Prades (1757-1763) overlaps with Trenck (1753-1763) in Magdeburg. Manteuffel got dismissed pronto. Catt is apparently dismissed in 1782 for financial irregularities. Fredersdorf we hope not.
Who am I missing? From motive alone, Darget is a major suspect in an Agatha Christie novel, but hasn't been convicted of anything yet... :P
3) So Fritz has one lector he was previously very close to imprisoned in Magdeburg for spying & indiscretion....and then, just one month later, he tells the next lector all about the most horrible time of his life (so far)?
HMMMM. *side-eyes Catt*
If he pulled AW's cashiering out of a recognizable pamphlet, there's a decent chance he pulled Katte's death out of Voltaire's memoirs. Wilhelmine, Pöllnitz, and Thiébault's hadn't been published yet, remember. (I'm still kind of amazed he couldn't find a better source, but maybe he had grabbed Voltaire's memoirs for the popcorn-munching value, and then decided he should stick in a passage about the Holy Grail into his own memoirs.)
Which incidentally would imply Thiébault had access to Wilhelmine's memoirs, probably via all those exiled intellectuals at Fritz's court, and Catt didn't.
Oh, by the way, you said "de Catt replies with an only slight paraphrasing of a pamphlet making the rounds at the time." Do you know what time that pamphlet was making the rounds? Because that could be useful for anchoring the composition and revision of the memoirs.
On the other hand! Fritz has Voltaire arrested for possessing poetry that Fritz wrote that he doesn't want the rest of Europe to see; sends Voltaire more potentially damning poetry almost immediately after getting back in touch with Voltaire*. I know Voltaire is special, but sometimes Fritz's judgment...
* It occurs to me that Voltaire's memoirs complain about receiving this poem, so if V and C aren't independent sources, it's not impossible that Catt lifted this episode too, and inserted himself as the hero who tried to talk Fritz out of it.
So Katte aside, Fritz also tells Catt about opening the archives to read up on his trial after becoming king, then destroying a few papers, and sealing them up again. You were discussing the history of these papers in another comment. Do you have a sense of how likely Catt is to have gotten *this* part from the horse's mouth? Because even if he moved up the date, it makes a big difference to me if Catt and Voltaire are independent reporters of Fritz's words on Katte's execution, vs. if Catt is ripping off Voltaire and writing historical fiction.
There's also another tidbit Catt and Voltaire have that agrees with W/P/T, to which they don't have access: Fritz thought *he* was about to be executed. So either this comes from Fritz's mouth separately to W and to V, and maybe C (if C isn't copying V), or else this was a rumor making the rounds in Berlin in the 1730s and/or 40s, and also in the 50s and 60s. Since this was a mental state of Fritz to which there were very few witnesses (Münchow and a few officers, at best), not something objectively true like "Katte walked past Fritz's window" or "Katte was executed on the 6th", or even an order like "Fritz had to watch the execution" that FW gave and many people know about...either Fritz talked, Münchow talked, or else people speculated that Fritz thought he was to be executed. And if Fritz talked and V got it from Fritz, then V's account is at least indirectly from the horse's mouth (nonsense about FW being present notwithstanding).
I'm going to have to see if Catt's diary lends itself to OCRing.