Wow, this whole write-up is amazing and I no longer believe Fritz told Catt anything about the Katte episode at all. Unless we find an allusive reference to it in the diary, I'm side-eyeing so hard my eyes are about to fall out.
This in turn makes it much less likely that Fritz was Voltaire's source. If we could believe Catt, then I was willing to conclude that Fritz had an account that he ran through with people he wanted to confide in, and given the strength of his feelings for Voltaire and the fact that they lived together for over two years, I was willing to believe Voltaire was one.
But now I think the Katte episode in Voltaire's memoirs is just more of Voltaire's vague outsider perspective on Prussian history, and Catt is using Voltaire. I'm also much more willing to place real weight on the one or two linguistic similarities between the passages, especially the description of Keith and Katte as "aimable."
Certainly not, and thus it is no surprise that the "military crash course" has only been given to the Catt of the memoirs, not to the Catt of the diaries. (...)
Yeah, I admit I was deeply surprised to see the military course when I first read the memoirs. I think this is another Holy Grail: being instructed in tactics and strategy by Frederick the Great!
Damn. This whole preface just blows Catt's reliability out of the water. We need to read that diary. *moves OCR higher on priority list*
Also, I'm now treating him like a 20th century biographer whenever I cite him saying Fritz said something. Maybe this is from a primary source, maybe it's historical fiction.
BTW, the preface also explains the "nach Ausfertigung eigenhändig" from the letters - part of Henri de Catt's and Prades and all the lectors before and after job was that if Fritz wanted a letter on a literary, non-political matter, he gave them the rough outlines, they wrote a concept for the letter in perfect French, he wrote down the final version in his own hand.
So is Fritz's elegant French prose that the Voltaire correspondence translator praises actually his? Because my impression was always exactly this, that Fritz needed a lot of help with his prose French, not just his poetry, and while I know he could be witty on his own, the "worthy of him getting listed as a great French writing author" that you quoted surprised me. Content: sure; style: ? Of course, I've never been sure and am still not sure how much of the prose help was just spelling vs. actual word choices.
Also, lol, much of your Yuletide treat went like that. I provided the rough outlines, cahn rendered it into perfect English! :D
(Sidenote by me: if Catt talked to Eichel, who of course knew that Fritz had the Catte trial files ordered up upon becoming King and resealed, and also knew a lot about Küstrin, that gives him another valid source.)
Valid but not Fritz-original, interesting.
Also, "Catte trial", lol. I see I'm not the only one who mixes up the names! (I can't count the number of times I've had to delete and retype one of their names, and I've probably missed at least one instance.)
You know, Fritz, for such a dog person, your cat collection is surprisingly large. ;) (At least one German documentary creator thinks Fritz was drawn to Catt because of the similarity of his name to Katte, which I'm skeptical of, but it is an interesting coincidence.)
Preface writer gives some more examples, none of which are related to Küstrin and Katte. Which, incidentally, is curious; you'd think if Catt added that without a basis in his diaries, it would be much more worth mentioning than his letting Fritz give him a military crash course. But maybe that's our gossipy sensationalist priority speaking.
Preface writer may also not have had a specific source he could point to. The only one I can point to is Voltaire, but if Wilhelmine was using that pamphlet, I would love to see a copy of that pamphlet to see if Catt could have been drawing on it at all.
Preuß did have access to them because at that point they had ended up in the Prussian state archive, and he was allowed to use them for his biography. Which explains why he quotes from them in a biography published in the mid 19th century when you told me the memoirs themselves weren't published until a few decades later.
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Re: Henri de Catt
Date: 2020-01-26 05:15 pm (UTC)This in turn makes it much less likely that Fritz was Voltaire's source. If we could believe Catt, then I was willing to conclude that Fritz had an account that he ran through with people he wanted to confide in, and given the strength of his feelings for Voltaire and the fact that they lived together for over two years, I was willing to believe Voltaire was one.
But now I think the Katte episode in Voltaire's memoirs is just more of Voltaire's vague outsider perspective on Prussian history, and Catt is using Voltaire. I'm also much more willing to place real weight on the one or two linguistic similarities between the passages, especially the description of Keith and Katte as "aimable."
Certainly not, and thus it is no surprise that the "military crash course" has only been given to the Catt of the memoirs, not to the Catt of the diaries. (...)
Yeah, I admit I was deeply surprised to see the military course when I first read the memoirs. I think this is another Holy Grail: being instructed in tactics and strategy by Frederick the Great!
Damn. This whole preface just blows Catt's reliability out of the water. We need to read that diary. *moves OCR higher on priority list*
Also, I'm now treating him like a 20th century biographer whenever I cite him saying Fritz said something. Maybe this is from a primary source, maybe it's historical fiction.
BTW, the preface also explains the "nach Ausfertigung eigenhändig" from the letters - part of Henri de Catt's and Prades and all the lectors before and after job was that if Fritz wanted a letter on a literary, non-political matter, he gave them the rough outlines, they wrote a concept for the letter in perfect French, he wrote down the final version in his own hand.
So is Fritz's elegant French prose that the Voltaire correspondence translator praises actually his? Because my impression was always exactly this, that Fritz needed a lot of help with his prose French, not just his poetry, and while I know he could be witty on his own, the "worthy of him getting listed as a great French writing author" that you quoted surprised me. Content: sure; style: ? Of course, I've never been sure and am still not sure how much of the prose help was just spelling vs. actual word choices.
Also, lol, much of your Yuletide treat went like that. I provided the rough outlines,
(Sidenote by me: if Catt talked to Eichel, who of course knew that Fritz had the Catte trial files ordered up upon becoming King and resealed, and also knew a lot about Küstrin, that gives him another valid source.)
Valid but not Fritz-original, interesting.
Also, "Catte trial", lol. I see I'm not the only one who mixes up the names! (I can't count the number of times I've had to delete and retype one of their names, and I've probably missed at least one instance.)
You know, Fritz, for such a dog person, your cat collection is surprisingly large. ;) (At least one German documentary creator thinks Fritz was drawn to Catt because of the similarity of his name to Katte, which I'm skeptical of, but it is an interesting coincidence.)
Preface writer gives some more examples, none of which are related to Küstrin and Katte. Which, incidentally, is curious; you'd think if Catt added that without a basis in his diaries, it would be much more worth mentioning than his letting Fritz give him a military crash course. But maybe that's our gossipy sensationalist priority speaking.
Preface writer may also not have had a specific source he could point to. The only one I can point to is Voltaire, but if Wilhelmine was using that pamphlet, I would love to see a copy of that pamphlet to see if Catt could have been drawing on it at all.
Preuß did have access to them because at that point they had ended up in the Prussian state archive, and he was allowed to use them for his biography. Which explains why he quotes from them in a biography published in the mid 19th century when you told me the memoirs themselves weren't published until a few decades later.
That makes sense, yes.