Frederick the Great discussion post 9
Jan. 13th, 2020 09:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahn...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
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
The case of the indiscreet reader (the other one)
Date: 2020-01-22 11:45 am (UTC)I had forgotten to mention that the Abbé Prades, whom his majesty always kept with him in the field, has fallen out of favour. He stands accused of having handed over secrets of his master; others say he's simply been indiscreet with the King's works. In short, the King had him arrested after the battle of Roßbach in Leipzig, and some time later he was sent to Magdeburg Fortress, where he still remains. His Majesty took in his place a certain Catt, a Swissman, whom the King has met in a strange manner. When the King was incognito in the Netherlands and was bored on the boat going from Amsterdamm to the Hagues, he found on this ship this Herr Catt with his young pupil. He adressed him and found him to be a man of wit. When now Prades fell out of favour with him, he wrote to Catt that he should come and take Prades' place. The man answered modestly that his Majesty might not find him so much worthy of applause in such a position as he had done on the boat back then. His Majesty, however, insisted. Now he's with the King, and the King is satisfied with him.
Now, German Wiki tells me a bit more about Prades than English wiki does, including this bit: As a lecturer and private secretary to Frederick II, de Prades had a very close relationship with the Prussian king. In his pride on this influence, 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".
At the beginning of the Seven Years' War, de Prades was convicted of espionage for France and imprisoned in Magdeburg in 1757. Diderot and Voltaire were dismayed by de Prade's betrayal of Frederick. Diderot said to his mistress Sophie Volland, "What a reprehensible person!" and Voltaire concluded a reflection on the case in a letter to Frederick II with the words "Oh, best of all possible worlds, where are you!"
(German wiki, you should know that if Voltaire uses this particular quote, he's being sarcastic, not dismayed, but apparantly you don't.)
After the end of the war, de Prades was exiled by Frederick II to Silesia. With more than 30,000 livres, which he had taken from his fellow prisoners during his time in Prison in Magdeburg via gambling and with his church income, he led a comfortable life with his own servants. In 1782 he died in Glogau.
Okay. Several points.
1) Wow, Magdeburg is really getting crowded during the 7 Years War. I guess Prades didn't meet up with Trenck?
2) Just how many people fired/arrested for spying, indiscretion or both do we have now?
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)?
*sideeyes Catt again*
ETA: In case you're wondering how Prades got his job in the first place,
Re: The case of the indiscreet reader (the other one)
Date: 2020-01-22 05:15 pm (UTC)Heeee!
Voltaire concluded a reflection on the case in a letter to Frederick II with the words "Oh, best of all possible worlds, where are you!"
(German wiki, you should know that if Voltaire uses this particular quote, he's being sarcastic, not dismayed, but apparantly you don't.)
Wait, do we have this letter from Trier? If so, what's the context of the reflection?
Re: The case of the indiscreet reader (the other one)
Date: 2020-01-22 06:56 pm (UTC)Fritz had written, in May: "You wanted to know to know the adventures of the Abbbé de Prades; these would make a big volume. To satisfy your curiosity, it will suffice to know that the Abbé let himself be seduced, during my stay in Dresden, by a secretary whom Brühl had left there when he departed. (...) He played this beautiful trick on me at the same time I had secured him a big profit in the Cathedral of Breslau."
Voltaire replies in June 1759. The remark in context. Good old Voltaire starts out his letter with poetry:
"I know you, you seem difficult,
But you like a bit of impurity,
When you add the purity of style,
for Maupertuis, coated pitch-resin.(...)
Ah! It was he who deprived me of the day,
Since it was he who took your sight away from me.
That is all I can answer, me slender and decked out in a sweating to the eyes, to the cleverest of kings, and to the loveliest of men, who constantly scares me, and who cries that he is scratched. Slash MM Daun - the Austrian Field Marshal - and Fermor, but spare your old, skinny victim. (...)
You are a legislator, a warrior, a historian, a poet; but you are also a philosopher. After having dabbled all your life in heroism and in the arts, what do you take to the tomb? An empty name that no longer belongs to us. Everything is vanity, as the other Solomon said, the one not from the North. To Sans-Souci, to Sans-Souci, as soon as you can.
So De Prades is a dog, an Achitophel? What? He betrayed you, when you overwhelmed him with goods. Oh best of all possible worlds, where are you? I am a Manichaean like Martin.
Your Majesty reproaches me with his very pretty lines for sometimes caressing the infamous. Eh! My God, no; I only work to root infamy out, and I succeed a lot among honest people. I will have the honor of sending you, shortly, a little piece that won't leave you indifferent.
Ah! Believe me, Sire, I was all made for you; I am ashamed to be happier than you, for I live with philosophers, and you are only surrounding yourself with murderers in shortened clothing. To Sans-Souci, Sire, to Sans-Souci! But what will your devil of an imagination do with it? Can it live with retirement? Yes, you are made for everything."
(That is the end of the letter as given in Trier.
Achitophel: Ahitophel or Ahithophel was a counselor of King David and a man greatly renowned for his sagacity. During Absalom's revolt he deserted David (Psalm 41:9; 55:12–14) and supported Absalom.
Manichaean: I'm assuming he's refering to Manichaeism, but the context here beats me. No idea who Martin is supposed to be. St Martin the former Roman soldier who parted his cloak to help a beggar? That makes no sense.
Re: The case of the indiscreet reader (the other one)
Date: 2020-01-22 09:58 pm (UTC)Found it! I'm so proud.
Well done! We too are proud of you. :D
Re: The case of the indiscreet reader (the other one)
Date: 2020-01-23 03:53 am (UTC)"Best of all possible worlds," as I'm sure you know, refers to the question of "how can bad things happen if God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent?" and ends with the answer "well, this must be the best of all possible worlds!" But of course you could instead postulate that Good and Evil are dualistic and so therefore the answer to the question in this case would be, "well, Evil exists and does Evil Things, and Good is no more powerful than Evil, so that's why bad things happen."
(My very vague understanding/partial reading of Candide leads me to believe that this is also the context in which Martin appears.)
So Voltaire is saying here that omg, De Prades has betraaaaaayed Fritz, how could this possibly be the best of all possible worlds?? No, it can't be; Voltaire must therefore be a Manichaean and believe that evil is indeed a power in the world, that such things could happen.
I mean, it's all very tongue-in-cheek and rather mocking of Fritz for being upset about it (for two people who reacted to things pretty much the same way, they sure do both make fun of each other a lot for their reactions, geez), but I suppose you could stretch and say "dismayed" if you had to; I do think there is a kernel of dismay in there :)
Re: The case of the indiscreet reader (the other one)
Date: 2020-01-26 12:50 am (UTC)Part of reacting to things pretty much the same way is reacting to the way other people react to things. ;)
I.e. they both had some emotional stunting going on. Thanks, Dad(s)!
What little I know of Manichaeism comes from two sources: my very casual interest in the development of early Christianity (St. Augustine as one of the more famous Manichaeans, before his conversion, for example), and, of all places, Tolkien scholarship, in which I have a much less casual interest (it's one of the few things I come close to being a specialist in). The whole problem of good and evil comes up a *lot* in work on Tolkien, as you can imagine.
But Candide I haven't read and can't promise to read by Yuletide, so good thing you've got that down! (How do you feel about Peter Keith, btw? I have a whole plot that just needs converting into scenes, which I hear is the easy part! ;) We can even work Lehndorff in!)
Re: The case of the indiscreet reader (the other one)
Date: 2020-01-31 05:12 am (UTC)Re: The case of the indiscreet reader (the other one)
Date: 2020-01-31 02:48 pm (UTC)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.
Re: The case of the indiscreet reader (the other one)
Date: 2020-01-26 12:53 am (UTC)I see your tone-deaf German wiki and raise you English wiki:
In the spring of 1730 Frederick revealed to Katte that he had a plan to flee to Great Britain as a way to leave his harsh and despotic father, who he affectionately called "My Dear Papa."
Affectionately. I ask you.