Was waiting on Voltaire to come back from Prussia, he was late because he had a scheme to make money (sounds plausible so far), went to Brussels to meet him, didn't see him, assumed he was unfaithful, took opium. She was stopped? "On l'arrêta."
OK, so, this sounds like a mashup of stories to me -- Zinsser talks about the story that I alluded to in my writeup, where she had a fling (~1728) with this older military guy the Comte de Goesbriand (this was before Voltaire), he broke up with her (possibly for another girl), she said she wanted to die, and Goesbriand told a story of how she had taken opium but he saved her. Zinsser is very skeptical of whether that last part actually happened (as opposed to Goesbriand making it up), but she says that the story was retold as late as 1748. Anyway, I would not be at all surprised if Fritz had heard that story and was recounting it to Catt, and that it got garbled at some point in transmission, though whether at the point of Fritz or at Catt I couldn't say.
Re: Henri de Catt
Was waiting on Voltaire to come back from Prussia, he was late because he had a scheme to make money (sounds plausible so far), went to Brussels to meet him, didn't see him, assumed he was unfaithful, took opium. She was stopped? "On l'arrêta."
OK, so, this sounds like a mashup of stories to me -- Zinsser talks about the story that I alluded to in my writeup, where she had a fling (~1728) with this older military guy the Comte de Goesbriand (this was before Voltaire), he broke up with her (possibly for another girl), she said she wanted to die, and Goesbriand told a story of how she had taken opium but he saved her. Zinsser is very skeptical of whether that last part actually happened (as opposed to Goesbriand making it up), but she says that the story was retold as late as 1748. Anyway, I would not be at all surprised if Fritz had heard that story and was recounting it to Catt, and that it got garbled at some point in transmission, though whether at the point of Fritz or at Catt I couldn't say.