So I decided I would reread the Fritz bios that I read way back in July/August, before we started our lovely conversations here, back when none of us knew a fraction of what we know now.
It took me several weeks to get through MacDonogh, due to concentration difficulties, but I highlighted passages as I went (benefits of e-books), and now here they are!
This isn't a review or systematic write-up of the book, bu rather a collection of potentially interesting or entertaining things that we haven't already talked about. The caveat I've repeated ad nauseam: MacDonogh is exactly like Wikipedia, in that he contains a lot of good material, not one of bit of which is reliable until you've tracked it down somewhere else. In fact, when I realized Wikipedia relied heavily on him, I suddenly understood a lot about Wikipedia.
But some very good advice I got when starting graduate school was that it's easy to warn people away from this author and that author, but if you only read authors who have nothing wrong with them, you'll never read anything. Read widely and critically.
And with that caveat, here's MacDonogh!
Grandpa Friedrich I:
His second wife, Frederick William's mother Sophia-Charlotte of Hanover (the sister of King George I of Great Britain), seems to have preferred her wranglings with the court philosopher Leibniz to any form of congress with her extravagant husband. She is reported to have told a courtier 'That idiot Leibniz, who wants to teach me about the infinitesimally small! Has he therefore forgotten that I am the wife of Frederick the First, how can he imagine that I am unacquainted with my own husband?'
To understand the lavishness of the conception [of F1's palace], one has only to think that the famous Amber Room of Tsarskoe Selo was designed for the Schloss. Peter the Great went into raptures when he saw it, and Frederick's austere son promptly had it packed up and dispatched to Russia in exchange for a squad of the tall soldiers he loved so much.
Tiny terror FW:
His tutor, Jean-Philippe Rebeur, had no more luck than his parents. The only way he could instill even the three Rs into the boy was by constantly drawing his metaphors from a battery of military terms. The result, as one recent biographer has expressed it, was to put Frederick William 'on a life-long war-footing with Latin, grammar and spelling.'
Tiny terrorized FW?
Extraordinary as it may sound, George had bullied Frederick William as a child, and married Caroline of Ansbach, the woman Frederick William had his eyes on at the time.
I wonder if MacDonogh has got George and FW mixed up, since he likes to mix people up. Or maybe George started it, and FW finished it?
FW inaugurating his reign:
'Gentlemen, our good master is dead,' he told his father’s courtiers. 'The new king bids you all go to hell.'
Size IS everything, according to FW:
When a stag was sighted, there were hunts in the forest at Stern around the king’s modest lodge. The building [Jagdhaus Stern] still exists, its main room of the Tabakscollegium decorated with hunting scenes, the king in person administering the coup de grâce. A more unusual decorative feature are the antlers shed each year by the king's pet stag 'Big Hanss', a present from the Alte Dessauer. Given his royal owner, the beast was naturally also a giant: the king appreciated size above all else.
FW's A+ parenting toward his daughters:
In general he was not overly impressed with girl-children: he was concerned that they might not all find husbands. He even went so far as to describe them as weeds, and to suggest that they should be drowned at birth, like kittens.
And toward his son:
When the British court asked for a portrait of the crown prince to show to Amalia, Frederick William replied unkindly that she should be sent a picture of a 'big monkey, that's what he looks like.'
Voltaire might agree? He used to call his monkey Frederic II and call Fritz "Luc", after his monkey Luc, and say that Fritz was "like a monkey, he bites the hand that caresses him." (Fritz, as we recall, had Voltaire's rooms at Sanssouci decorated with monkeys when after their acrimonious parting.)
"Brother Voltaire" the honorary Hohenzollern indeed!
Fritz at Küstrin:
Frederick William was keen to wean him on to beer, Küstrin beer being apparently rather good. One does not get the impression that Frederick was utterly convinced, and he told his father that he had been drinking champagne, but only under doctors' orders.
Rare moment of frat boy fun at Küstrin:
At the end of September (1731), he received a visit from his mad, bad cousin Charles of Brandenburg-Schwedt. They drank the king’s health and, in a suitably hearty gesture, smashed all the glasses afterwards. To his new friend Frau von Wreech, Frederick confessed the extent of the damage: 'We didn't really drink that much, but we made a great deal of noise, we smashed a few windows and reduced a few ovens to rubble.'
*Not*, note, the mad, bad (and dangerous to know? Or at least to be married to) Margrave Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg-Schwedt that Wilhelmine didn't marry and poor other sister Sophia Dorothea did.
Wikipedia doesn't give me any hints that Charles was actually mad or bad, this one window-smashing episode aside, so I wonder if MacDonogh is getting them confused. Or perhaps that branch of the family could give the main Hohenzollern line a run for their money too!
Fritz getting married:
It was Seckendorff who sent the gossip back to Vienna about the wedding night, 'That the king had to parley and threaten the crown prince to get him into the bridal bed, but that he didn't stay there more than an hour and afterwards was clearly to be seen walking in the valley…'
EC getting married:
The linchpin of Elisabeth's suite was a massive ceremonial bed, a present from the king (she actually slept in a smaller one alongside). Questions were being raised once again as to whether there was any sexual congress between the couple.
Fritz at Rheinsberg nicknaming his friends:
Ernst-Christoph von Manteuffel, for example, was 'Quinze-vingts' because he claimed he was 'too blind to illuminate the prince', or sometimes he was 'the Devil', which played on the diabolic part of his name. There was 'Caesarion', an allusion to the diminutive emperor in 'Keyserlingk', who was also the 'Swan of Mitau', in a reference both to his gracefulness and to the Baltic port near his birthplace. Algarotti was another swan, sometimes of Padua, occasionally Mantua, once or twice Venice. His architect was 'Apollodore' or 'le chevalier Bernin'. Jordan was 'Hephaestion' or 'Tindal'. Grumbkow was referred to as 'Biberius' or 'the Cassubian': he came from Pomerania, like the Slavic tribes of that name. Fouqué was 'Chastity'. The military man was reputed one of the best actors of the court. Lastly, the Saxon envoy Suhm was 'Diaphanes'.
Note on "Quinze-vingts": "After the hospital for the blind in Paris. Saint I Louis’s foundation offered beds for 300 blind men and women: fifteen times twenty. The number was associated with the blind ever after."
I'm not entirely sure Caesarion counts as an emperor, but that's not nearly as bad as not recognizing Hephaestion and struggling to come up with a connection to Hephaestus. I promise you, MacDonogh, Fritz knew who Hephaestion was. (I believe he later acquired a painting of Alexander and Hephaestion for his picture gallery.)
Speculates that "Tindal" may be an allusion to William Tyndale.
He doesn't say anything about Bernin, but I'm guessing Bernini.
Apollodorus is probably Trajan's architect, not the more famous ones that immediately came to my mind when I saw this name.
The architect in question is Knobelsdorff, btw.
Diaphanes is a bit of a mystery, different biographers have different explanations. MacDonogh attributes it to Suhm's open-heartedness. If I ever write my Suhm fic, you'll see my own headcanon.
Fritz with his friends at Rheinsberg:
This circle formed the basis for Frederick's 'Bayard Order', commemorating the famous French knight. No joke was intended. The order existed for the serious study of the arts of war. It had twelve members, including Frederick’s brothers William and Henry and, uncharacteristically, his sister Charlotte. The remainder were close friends. The Grand Master was Fouqué. Deliberations were held in archaic French.
EC can get favors out of FW for Fritz, but doesn't quite pass the broccoli test:
At the beginning of 1736, for example, Frederick William asked her just what was missing at Rheinsberg: 'I wasn’t aware of anything other than mirrors and chairs … I forgot to mention the ticking for the tableware.' A few days later the king plundered his father’s uninhabited palaces and 150 English chairs arrived at Rheinsberg. Frederick, however, had a rather more grandiose conception for his new home, and he put them straight into storage. He did not want any old junk which his father found lying around the royal palaces.
Bielfeld reports on life at Rheinsberg:
Keyserlingk entered the halls like a whirlwind, 'or like Boreas in the Ballet of the Rose'. Bielfeld later encountered the Balt returning from hunting dressed in a nightshirt. 'While he changed, he recited passages from the Henriade to me and long chunks of German poetry, he spoke to me about horses and hunting, performed a few pirouettes … and discoursed all the while on politics, mathematics, architecture and tactics.'
'We see the prince and princess only at table, at play, at the ball, the concert, or other common pleasures of which they participate.' Despite the restricted size of the house, Frederick could elude his courtiers, and concerts were by invitation only. He was generally closeted in his seven-room empire upstairs, but he was occasionally sighted, wearing the uniform of his regiment, Bielfeld regretted his inaccessibility: 'I would freely go some leagues barefooted, at least once a week, to enjoy the delicious pleasure of supping in his company.' There was still a chance to see him amusing himself at the ball: 'The prince dances in a noble and graceful manner. In a word, he loves all rational pleasures, except the chase, the exercise of which he thinks as troublesome, and scarce more useful than chimney-sweeping.'
One day Frederick came down from his ivory tower (it was indeed a tower) and joined in the debauch. Champagne was served and everyone got drunk. Bielfeld had to go out to empty his bladder. When he returned, the crown princess had changed his water for celery wine, which he then, in turn, poured into his wine to dilute it. 'I became joyous.' Frederick made him drink bumper after bumper of Lunel muscat. When Elisabeth broke a glass, it became the signal for a rout: 'in an instant all the glasses flew to the several corners of the room; and all the cristals, porcelain, piers, branches, bowls, vases, etc. were broke into a thousand pieces. In the midst of this universal destruction the prince stood, like the man in Horace, who contemplates the crash of worlds with a look of perfect tranquillity.'
The evening ended badly for Bielfeld: he fell down the grand staircase and passed out. A servant woman mistook him for a dog and kicked him in the guts, calling him by 'an appellation somewhat dishonourable'. The rest of the party had taken to their beds and remained there all day. Such larks were rare at Rheinsberg: 'the prince is very far from being a toper, he sacrifices only to Apollo and the Muses; one day, however, he may perhaps raise an altar to Mars'.
That all sounds lovely, but I hope the "made him drink" wasn't the kind of "made him drink" that FW had done to him. However, in his letter (which I checked), aside from the falling down the stairs incident, he seems to find the entire evening enjoyable, rather than something he later said he didn't want to do (as Fritz did), and even the accident he said he later laughed at, after he recovered. And apparently Fritz came and visited him at his sickbed every day until he did recover. So I'm going to go with "not roleplaying Dad for once."
Early Voltaire letters:
Voltaire was getting to grips with the prince's phonetic spelling, which characterised his French as much as his German: 'auser' rather than 'oser', 'tres' instead of ‘trait’, 'matein' for 'matin', etc. More important, perhaps, his inability to pronounce certain words made it impossible for him to scan his lines: 'amitié' had four syllables instead of three, 'nourricier' three and not four; 'aient' one and not two.
Keyserlingk visits Cirey and has the hots for Émilie:
'when she spoke, I was in love with her mind; and when she didn’t, I was [obsessed with] her body'.
Haven't found the letter for this yet, but haven't looked systematically. Am curious about those brackets.
FW to Pöllnitz in the twilight years of his life:
I am not that worried about living, for I leave behind me a son who possesses all the gifts [necessary] for a good ruler. I should not have said that five years ago: he was still too young then; but, thanks be to God, he has changed and I am satisfied. He has promised me to maintain the army and I am reassured that he'll keep his word. I know he loves the soldiers, he has understanding and everything will go well.
Citation: Carl Hinrichs, Der allgegenwärtige König: Friedrich der Grosse im Kabinett und auf Inspektionsreisen 3rd ed, Berlin, 1943, 41; Jessen, 80.
Have not been able to check this citation.
MacDonogh thinks FW is a big fan of future Frederick the Great:
Austria's ingratitude towards him riled the king at the end. He must have felt a fool to have placed so much trust in Charles VI. He had not even been informed of the marriage of the Archduchess Maria Theresa to the duke of Lorraine, and despite his willingness to fight for them, they had shown no serious inclination to win him Jülich and Berg. On 2 May 1736 he pointed to the crown prince, that Fritzchen who had caused him so much heart- and belly-ache in the past, and with a rare gift of prophecy he said: 'Here stands someone who will avenge me.'
No citation! From the same guy who said the 1722 political testament specifies his heir should try to get Silesia.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
MacDonogh Reread I
Date: 2020-01-29 01:31 am (UTC)It took me several weeks to get through MacDonogh, due to concentration difficulties, but I highlighted passages as I went (benefits of e-books), and now here they are!
This isn't a review or systematic write-up of the book, bu rather a collection of potentially interesting or entertaining things that we haven't already talked about. The caveat I've repeated ad nauseam: MacDonogh is exactly like Wikipedia, in that he contains a lot of good material, not one of bit of which is reliable until you've tracked it down somewhere else. In fact, when I realized Wikipedia relied heavily on him, I suddenly understood a lot about Wikipedia.
But some very good advice I got when starting graduate school was that it's easy to warn people away from this author and that author, but if you only read authors who have nothing wrong with them, you'll never read anything. Read widely and critically.
And with that caveat, here's MacDonogh!
Grandpa Friedrich I:
His second wife, Frederick William's mother Sophia-Charlotte of Hanover (the sister of King George I of Great Britain), seems to have preferred her wranglings with the court philosopher Leibniz to any form of congress with her extravagant husband. She is reported to have told a courtier 'That idiot Leibniz, who wants to teach me about the infinitesimally small! Has he therefore forgotten that I am the wife of Frederick the First, how can he imagine that I am unacquainted with my own husband?'
To understand the lavishness of the conception [of F1's palace], one has only to think that the famous Amber Room of Tsarskoe Selo was designed for the Schloss. Peter the Great went into raptures when he saw it, and Frederick's austere son promptly had it packed up and dispatched to Russia in exchange for a squad of the tall soldiers he loved so much.
Tiny terror FW:
His tutor, Jean-Philippe Rebeur, had no more luck than his parents. The only way he could instill even the three Rs into the boy was by constantly drawing his metaphors from a battery of military terms. The result, as one recent biographer has expressed it, was to put Frederick William 'on a life-long war-footing with Latin, grammar and spelling.'
Tiny terrorized FW?
Extraordinary as it may sound, George had bullied Frederick William as a child, and married Caroline of Ansbach, the woman Frederick William had his eyes on at the time.
I wonder if MacDonogh has got George and FW mixed up, since he likes to mix people up. Or maybe George started it, and FW finished it?
FW inaugurating his reign:
'Gentlemen, our good master is dead,' he told his father’s courtiers. 'The new king bids you all go to hell.'
Size IS everything, according to FW:
When a stag was sighted, there were hunts in the forest at Stern around the king’s modest lodge. The building [Jagdhaus Stern] still exists, its main room of the Tabakscollegium decorated with hunting scenes, the king in person administering the coup de grâce. A more unusual decorative feature are the antlers shed each year by the king's pet stag 'Big Hanss', a present from the Alte Dessauer. Given his royal owner, the beast was naturally also a giant: the king appreciated size above all else.
FW's A+ parenting toward his daughters:
In general he was not overly impressed with girl-children: he was concerned that they might not all find husbands. He even went so far as to describe them as weeds, and to suggest that they should be drowned at birth, like kittens.
And toward his son:
When the British court asked for a portrait of the crown prince to show to Amalia, Frederick William replied unkindly that she should be sent a picture of a 'big monkey, that's what he looks like.'
Voltaire might agree? He used to call his monkey Frederic II and call Fritz "Luc", after his monkey Luc, and say that Fritz was "like a monkey, he bites the hand that caresses him." (Fritz, as we recall, had Voltaire's rooms at Sanssouci decorated with monkeys when after their acrimonious parting.)
"Brother Voltaire" the honorary Hohenzollern indeed!
Fritz at Küstrin:
Frederick William was keen to wean him on to beer, Küstrin beer being apparently rather good. One does not get the impression that Frederick was utterly convinced, and he told his father that he had been drinking champagne, but only under doctors' orders.
Rare moment of frat boy fun at Küstrin:
At the end of September (1731), he received a visit from his mad, bad cousin Charles of Brandenburg-Schwedt. They drank the king’s health and, in a suitably hearty gesture, smashed all the glasses afterwards. To his new friend Frau von Wreech, Frederick confessed the extent of the damage: 'We didn't really drink that much, but we made a great deal of noise, we smashed a few windows and reduced a few ovens to rubble.'
*Not*, note, the mad, bad (and dangerous to know? Or at least to be married to) Margrave Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg-Schwedt that Wilhelmine didn't marry and poor other sister Sophia Dorothea did.
Wikipedia doesn't give me any hints that Charles was actually mad or bad, this one window-smashing episode aside, so I wonder if MacDonogh is getting them confused. Or perhaps that branch of the family could give the main Hohenzollern line a run for their money too!
Fritz getting married:
It was Seckendorff who sent the gossip back to Vienna about the wedding night, 'That the king had to parley and threaten the crown prince to get him into the bridal bed, but that he didn't stay there more than an hour and afterwards was clearly to be seen walking in the valley…'
EC getting married:
The linchpin of Elisabeth's suite was a massive ceremonial bed, a present from the king (she actually slept in a smaller one alongside). Questions were being raised once again as to whether there was any sexual congress between the couple.
Fritz at Rheinsberg nicknaming his friends:
Ernst-Christoph von Manteuffel, for example, was 'Quinze-vingts' because he claimed he was 'too blind to illuminate the prince', or sometimes he was 'the Devil', which played on the diabolic part of his name. There was 'Caesarion', an allusion to the diminutive emperor in 'Keyserlingk', who was also the 'Swan of Mitau', in a reference both to his gracefulness and to the Baltic port near his birthplace. Algarotti was another swan, sometimes of Padua, occasionally Mantua, once or twice Venice. His architect was 'Apollodore' or 'le chevalier Bernin'. Jordan was 'Hephaestion' or 'Tindal'. Grumbkow was referred to as 'Biberius' or 'the Cassubian': he came from Pomerania, like the Slavic tribes of that name. Fouqué was 'Chastity'. The military man was reputed one of the best actors of the court. Lastly, the Saxon envoy Suhm was 'Diaphanes'.
Note on "Quinze-vingts": "After the hospital for the blind in Paris. Saint I Louis’s foundation offered beds for 300 blind men and women: fifteen times twenty. The number was associated with the blind ever after."
I'm not entirely sure Caesarion counts as an emperor, but that's not nearly as bad as not recognizing Hephaestion and struggling to come up with a connection to Hephaestus. I promise you, MacDonogh, Fritz knew who Hephaestion was. (I believe he later acquired a painting of Alexander and Hephaestion for his picture gallery.)
Speculates that "Tindal" may be an allusion to William Tyndale.
He doesn't say anything about Bernin, but I'm guessing Bernini.
Apollodorus is probably Trajan's architect, not the more famous ones that immediately came to my mind when I saw this name.
The architect in question is Knobelsdorff, btw.
Diaphanes is a bit of a mystery, different biographers have different explanations. MacDonogh attributes it to Suhm's open-heartedness. If I ever write my Suhm fic, you'll see my own headcanon.
Fritz with his friends at Rheinsberg:
This circle formed the basis for Frederick's 'Bayard Order', commemorating the famous French knight. No joke was intended. The order existed for the serious study of the arts of war. It had twelve members, including Frederick’s brothers William and Henry and, uncharacteristically, his sister Charlotte. The remainder were close friends. The Grand Master was Fouqué. Deliberations were held in archaic French.
EC can get favors out of FW for Fritz, but doesn't quite pass the broccoli test:
At the beginning of 1736, for example, Frederick William asked her just what was missing at Rheinsberg: 'I wasn’t aware of anything other than mirrors and chairs … I forgot to mention the ticking for the tableware.' A few days later the king plundered his father’s uninhabited palaces and 150 English chairs arrived at Rheinsberg. Frederick, however, had a rather more grandiose conception for his new home, and he put them straight into storage. He did not want any old junk which his father found lying around the royal palaces.
Bielfeld reports on life at Rheinsberg:
Keyserlingk entered the halls like a whirlwind, 'or like Boreas in the Ballet of the Rose'. Bielfeld later encountered the Balt returning from hunting dressed in a nightshirt. 'While he changed, he recited passages from the Henriade to me and long chunks of German poetry, he spoke to me about horses and hunting, performed a few pirouettes … and discoursed all the while on politics, mathematics, architecture and tactics.'
'We see the prince and princess only at table, at play, at the ball, the concert, or other common pleasures of which they participate.' Despite the restricted size of the house, Frederick could elude his courtiers, and concerts were by invitation only. He was generally closeted in his seven-room empire upstairs, but he was occasionally sighted, wearing the uniform of his regiment, Bielfeld regretted his inaccessibility: 'I would freely go some leagues barefooted, at least once a week, to enjoy the delicious pleasure of supping in his company.' There was still a chance to see him amusing himself at the ball: 'The prince dances in a noble and graceful manner. In a word, he loves all rational pleasures, except the chase, the exercise of which he thinks as troublesome, and scarce more useful than chimney-sweeping.'
One day Frederick came down from his ivory tower (it was indeed a tower) and joined in the debauch. Champagne was served and everyone got drunk. Bielfeld had to go out to empty his bladder. When he returned, the crown princess had changed his water for celery wine, which he then, in turn, poured into his wine to dilute it. 'I became joyous.' Frederick made him drink bumper after bumper of Lunel muscat. When Elisabeth broke a glass, it became the signal for a rout: 'in an instant all the glasses flew to the several corners of the room; and all the cristals, porcelain, piers, branches, bowls, vases, etc. were broke into a thousand pieces. In the midst of this universal destruction the prince stood, like the man in Horace, who contemplates the crash of worlds with a look of perfect tranquillity.'
The evening ended badly for Bielfeld: he fell down the grand staircase and passed out. A servant woman mistook him for a dog and kicked him in the guts, calling him by 'an appellation somewhat dishonourable'. The rest of the party had taken to their beds and remained there all day. Such larks were rare at Rheinsberg: 'the prince is very far from being a toper, he sacrifices only to Apollo and the Muses; one day, however, he may perhaps raise an altar to Mars'.
That all sounds lovely, but I hope the "made him drink" wasn't the kind of "made him drink" that FW had done to him. However, in his letter (which I checked), aside from the falling down the stairs incident, he seems to find the entire evening enjoyable, rather than something he later said he didn't want to do (as Fritz did), and even the accident he said he later laughed at, after he recovered. And apparently Fritz came and visited him at his sickbed every day until he did recover. So I'm going to go with "not roleplaying Dad
for once."Early Voltaire letters:
Voltaire was getting to grips with the prince's phonetic spelling, which characterised his French as much as his German: 'auser' rather than 'oser', 'tres' instead of ‘trait’, 'matein' for 'matin', etc. More important, perhaps, his inability to pronounce certain words made it impossible for him to scan his lines: 'amitié' had four syllables instead of three, 'nourricier' three and not four; 'aient' one and not two.
Keyserlingk visits Cirey and has the hots for Émilie:
'when she spoke, I was in love with her mind; and when she didn’t, I was [obsessed with] her body'.
Haven't found the letter for this yet, but haven't looked systematically. Am curious about those brackets.
FW to Pöllnitz in the twilight years of his life:
I am not that worried about living, for I leave behind me a son who possesses all the gifts [necessary] for a good ruler. I should not have said that five years ago: he was still too young then; but, thanks be to God, he has changed and I am satisfied. He has promised me to maintain the army and I am reassured that he'll keep his word. I know he loves the soldiers, he has understanding and everything will go well.
Citation: Carl Hinrichs, Der allgegenwärtige König: Friedrich der Grosse im Kabinett und auf Inspektionsreisen 3rd ed, Berlin, 1943, 41; Jessen, 80.
Have not been able to check this citation.
MacDonogh thinks FW is a big fan of future Frederick the Great:
Austria's ingratitude towards him riled the king at the end. He must have felt a fool to have placed so much trust in Charles VI. He had not even been informed of the marriage of the Archduchess Maria Theresa to the duke of Lorraine, and despite his willingness to fight for them, they had shown no serious inclination to win him Jülich and Berg. On 2 May 1736 he pointed to the crown prince, that Fritzchen who had caused him so much heart- and belly-ache in the past, and with a rare gift of prophecy he said: 'Here stands someone who will avenge me.'
No citation! From the same guy who said the 1722 political testament specifies his heir should try to get Silesia.