cahn | Frederick the Great discussion post 9

...I leave you guys alone for one weekend and it's time for a new Fritz post, lol!

I'm gonna reply to the previous post comments but I guess new letter-reading, etc. should go in this one :)

Frederick the Great links

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From:

selenak

On to the war. The most important war letters you already know from other posts. Here's the one about AW's original offense:

My dearest sister,
I have had the pleasure of receiving two of your letters today, one of which is from the 16th. The bad behavior of my brother of Prussia forces me to leave Leitmeritz; I hope to straighten out his nonsense, if, humanly, this is possible. You judge very well, my dear sister, of our present situation and of what may result from it for the future. As I have no power over secondary causes, I do not pretend to regulate my destinies; I confine myself to behaving wisely, taking advantage of opportunities, if they present themselves to me, and I am resolved to brazenly confreont all the odds that may happen to me. When a horse has taken the bit to the teeth, it does not see, it knows no more danger. I am very angry, my dear sister, for the repercussions you feel from my misfortune; I dare to predict that it will not remain with you, but that the catastrophe will become general, if fortune is not changed soon. In the end, I laugh at the troops of the Empire, and the French, and the Swedes, and the Austrians, if they wanted to succeed one another; but if I had as many arms as Briarée, I could not be enough to dispatch the reborn hydra which presents itself to me, which multiplies every day, and which besieges me on all sides. I am in the case of a traveler attacked by a large troop of brigands who assassinate him, and who share his remains. When I am assassinated, it will not matter to me that two empresses, a Very Christian King, and I do not know how many great princes, all very just and very religious, have done me this honor. I bet for sure that France will sooner or later repent of the folly and the inconsistency of its present conduct; but all that hardly consoles. It sometimes happens that Madame Justice is seduced and allowed to be deceived; we have examples that she hastily hanged men, whose innocence she later recognized, and made very polite apologies to the widow and the children; but it did not restore life to the dead, and he did not only have the consolation of being informed of her regrets. They will not hang me precisely; but the treatment which is being prepared for me is, in truth, hardly much better. Finally, my dear sister, hanged or not, I will be until the last sigh of my life, with the most tender esteem, etc.

Good. Grief.
This is him after winning Roßbach:

My dearest sister,
Finally, my dear sister, I can tell you some good news. You no doubt knew that the coopers, with their circles, wanted to take Leipzig. I came running, and chased them beyond the Saale. The Duke of Richelieu sent them aid of twenty battalions and fourteen squadrons; they said they were sixty-three thousand strong. Yesterday I went to recognize them, and could not attack them in their post, which made them reckless. Today they marched with the intention of attacking me, but I warned them. It was a gentle battle. Thank God I didn't have a hundred men dead; the only badly injured general is Meinike. My brother Henri and General Seydlitz have slight bruises on their arms. We have the whole cannon of the enemy; their rout is total, and I am in full march to push them back beyond the Unstrut. After so many alarms, behold, thanks to heaven, a favorable event, and it will be said that twenty thousand Prussians have defeated fifty thousand French and Germans. Now I will descend peacefully to the grave, since the reputation and honor of my nation is saved. We may be unhappy, but we will not be dishonored. You, my dear sister, my good, divine and tender sister, who deign to take an interest in the fate of a brother who adores you, deign to participate in my joy. As soon as I have time, I will tell you more. I kiss you with all my heart.

And then AW dies. Here I must say the complete letter is actually better than the quote from it I was already familiar with, which was the "I was right, he was wrong" sentence. (It's still incredibly - err, Fritzian.) To recapitulate: The Margrave hadn't told Wilhelmine about AW's death for fear of what it would do to her, and Heinrich had held back for the same reason. Fritz, assuming she already knows, had written the following letter which the Margrave had withheld but eventually, when she worried about not hearing from Fritz and Fritz was freaking out about not hearing from her, gave her, which meant it was thus she found out:

My dearest sister,
I take advantage of a small moment of leisure to renew to you the assurances of my tenderest friendship. You will no doubt know the misfortune which has just taken my brother of Prussia from me. You can judge my affliction and my pain. He had, indeed, last year, acted very badly towards me; but it was rather at the instigation of wicked people than of himself. However, he is no more, and we lose him forever. O you, the dearest of my family! you who hold my heart most in this world, for the love of what is most precious to you, keep yourself, and may I at least have the consolation of being able to shed my tears in your bosom. Do not fear anything for us and for what perhaps will appear to you frightening; you will see that we will get out of this. As I haven't heard from you for a very long time, it makes me tremble for your days. For God, have a servant write: The Margravine is doing well, or: She was inconvenienced. It is better than the cruel uncertainty in which I find myself. Deign to send me a note, and be sure that my existence is inseparable from yours. I am with the most tender friendship and gratitude, my very dear sister, etc.

I had already quoted from the following letter to you; here it is in full: <

My dearest sister,
I was more dead than alive when I received your letter, my dear sister. My God, your handwriting! You must have come back from the tomb, for surely you must have been a hundred times worse than I have been told. I bless heaven for not knowing, but I beg you in grace to borrow the hand of another to write to me, and not to tire yourself so that it could worsen your illness. What! As sick and infirm as you are, you think of all the embarrassments in which I find myself! In truth, this is too much. Rather think, think and persuade yourself well, that without you there is no longer happiness for me in life, that my days depend on yours, and that it depends on you to shorten or extend my career. Yes, my dear sister, it is not really a compliment that I write to you, but it is the bottom of my heart, it is my way of thinking true and constant, from which I cannot give up. Now see if you will take all possible care of your conservation; only on this condition will I judge your kindness for me and the friendship you have with me. I have a terrible task to accomplish; this is what prevents me from talking longer on a matter with which my heart is filled. You may well believe it, just as no one loves or adores you more than, my very dear sister, etc.

My dearest brother,
It is not the king, it is the friend and the dear brother that I dare to take the liberty of writing. My great weakness prevents me from forming characters and even from writing for a long time. I know, my dear brother, that you desire the heart; mine is all yours, for whom my attachment will only end with my life. I have been in hell so far, more spirit than body. To hide from me the loss we have just endured, the Margrave has kept all the letters that have come from you; I thought everything was lost. I have just received these dear letters, which have appeased the bitterness that the death of my brother caused me, to which I was extremely sensitive. You want, my dear brother, to know news of my condition. I have been, like a poor Lazarus, for six months in bed. I have been carried for eight days on a chair and on a chariot, to make me change my attitude a little. I have a dry cough which is very strong, and which we cannot control; my legs, as well as my hands and my face, are swollen like a bushel, which obliges me to reserve to write to you more interesting things by the following part. I am resigned to my fate; I will live and die happy, provided you are happy. My heart tells me that heaven will still work miracles for you. (...) Forgive, my dear brother, if I finish; my chest is so weak that I can barely speak. My heart would chatter from morning until evening, if it could speak and tell you everything it thinks for the dear brother of whom I will be all my life, with very deep respect, etc.

My dearest sister,
Your man wants to leave; I cannot push him out without giving him this letter again. I asked him about everything he knows and doesn't know; he told me he didn't see you. I beg you, please, if you send someone, ensure that he sees you before you leave; I would believe at least find in his eyes the image of the one my heart adores. Finally, my dear sister, I'm starting to flatter myself on your healing, and this idea puts at least a little balm in my blood. For God, don't deny my hopes; it would be a terrible leap, and those kinds of relapses in grief kill. I will go to dinner tomorrow at Dresden, at my brother Henri's. I'm telling you, my dear sister, a foolishness that has crossed my mind, to amuse you. You will say, while reading it: Ah! how crazy! And I will answer you that when one is not destined in the world to become wise, it is hard lost to claim it, and that since the seven wise men of Greece, there was none more. I kiss you a thousand times; my heart and soul are in Baireuth, at home, and my puny body vegetates here, on the highways and in the camps. (...) Deign to do justice to the feelings of an inviolable tenderness that I have vowed to you to the grave, being, my very dear sister, etc.

Wagner is Wilhelmine's doctor:

My dearest brother,
There is never joy without sorrow in this world; if I had followed my inclination, I would have first witnessed to you myself the joy which your last victory caused me; but two swollen arms and the redoubling of the cough prevented me from doing so. I shudder when I think of the unfortunate situation in which you were before this blow, and of which fortunately I only knew a part. (...) You shame, my dear brother, all those who embrace professions. Wagner was quite surprised to see you shine with the ranks of his colleagues. He had already had the good fortune to follow your ideas, but the illness is furiously tenacious; it must be, since you are interested in it, and it does not change, far from it, for I am weakening day by day more. However, the spirit still remains with me. I am with all the tenderness and respect imaginable, my very dear brother, etc.
P. S. My sister Amélie is happy to have had the pleasure of seeing you. If I were healthy, I would brave the Russians and the pandours. Not being able to prove my zeal for the State and for you in the essential things, as did my brothers, allow me to do it for your pleasures by offering trifles which the sky wants you to enjoy soon!

(Meaning: fruit, which she knew he loved. His next letter, the last one, she didn't receive anymore.)

My dearest sister,
Deign to receive kindly the verses I send you. I am so full of you, of your dangers and of my gratitude, that, awake as in a dream, in prose as in poetry, your image also reigns in my mind, and fixes all my thoughts. May the sky grant the wishes that I address to it every day for your convalescence! Cothenius is on the way; I will deify him, if he saves the person in the world who is most dear to my heart, whom I respect and venerate, and whose I am until I return my body to the elements, my dearest sister, etc.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Oh, Fritz. <3 :-(

It's always sad when he writes a letter that's never received. The same happened with his last letter to Algarotti. (Which I have reuploaded to our library, having just realized that the epitaph Fritz wrote got truncated by the script.)

From:

cahn

Good. Grief.

…yeah.

Here I must say the complete letter is actually better than the quote from it I was already familiar with, which was the "I was right, he was wrong" sentence. (It's still incredibly - err, Fritzian.)

Yeah, I mean, my reaction was, "It's… better than the letter to Heinrich?" But yeah, his pain really comes through in this.

And the rest of the letters are just heartbreaking :(((((((( Oh Fritz, oh Wilhelmine :(

(Also, Margrave! Like, I can see you had good intentions. But ouch!)

From:

selenak

Truly, it was a lose-lose position. I mean, there's a bloody war going on, of course if Wilhelmine doesn't hear anything from her beloved brother, she's going to assume the worst. Otoh, if your doctors explicitly tell you one more bad news/loss will finish her off, and you know she's also become close to brother AW, keeping her from finding this out for as long as possible is also something you'd want to do. (Especially since it's completely unexpected.Yes, Wilhelmine knew about AW having health troubles, starting in late 1757, see Heinrich enlisting her in the effort to cajole Fritz into allowing Dr. Cothenius to see AW when AW was in Leipzig. And she was sending AW her own suggestions for what might help, based on all the stuff she'd had to take through the last decade or several. But that entire family is always having health troubles, and he'd been among the healthiest members and was only 35. There was no reason for her to believe he'd die and prepare herself for news like that.

...I wouldn't have wanted to make that call, is what I'm saying, but I think in the end I'd have gone with not letting her imagine Fritz dead, because "first, indissolluble attachments" and all.

BTW, I remember in one of the earliest posts Mildred had asked me whether Fritz was ever known to visit Wilhelmine's grave (to get comparative data for him not visiting Katte's grave), and I couldn't say. That was before I had a clearer idea about the chronology. Given that the war doesn't end until 1763 and the Margrave dies early in that very year, succeeded by crazy uncle Christian who kicks out all the artists and scholars and cuts down contact to the main Hohenzollerns to the absolute mininum, I'm 100% sure he didn't.

(Wilhelmine's daugther the Duchess of Würtemberg who'd been living with her parents moves to Erlangen at this point and also takes up travelling - that's when she meets Voltaire - and visiting Berlin a lot.)

But yes, the letters are heartbreaking, and I'm frowning at Deconstructing Fritz biographer who claims he didn't love her (or any other family member), it was all rethorical posing.

From:

cahn

Yeah, that makes sense. Although yeah, once she started thinking Fritz was dead (which does seem like a reasonable assumption) the Margrave should have given them to her... which I guess he did eventually.

Wait, a biographer says he didn't love her?? I mean, I could see if you only, like, read the letters where he was mad at her. But!!

From:

mildred_of_midgard

BTW, I remember in one of the earliest posts Mildred had asked me whether Fritz was ever known to visit Wilhelmine's grave (to get comparative data for him not visiting Katte's grave), and I couldn't say. That was before I had a clearer idea about the chronology. Given that the war doesn't end until 1763 and the Margrave dies early in that very year, succeeded by crazy uncle Christian who kicks out all the artists and scholars and cuts down contact to the main Hohenzollerns to the absolute mininum, I'm 100% sure he didn't.

That is useful information! Thank you. I also didn't know anything about the chronology, or uncle Christian, or anyone at all.

Now, I don't *know* that the Antinous statue is the parallel to the Temple of Friendship, but I like to imagine that it was his way of grieving, and that's perfectly valid. There is no One True Way to grieve, pace fans and biographers and Fritz when needling Voltaire, argh.