Having browsed through the diary now, all hail Mildred, some impressions and quotes beyond what Mildred has already posted:
Definitely no Katte mention, but several times his harsh upbringing is adressed.
As the 1884 editor says in the preface, Henri de Catt massively rewrites his involvement when Fritz gets sibling death news. What is in the diary re: AW (who as in the memoirs has been edited out of Fritz' descriptions of his 1740 Straßburg trip when still alive), is, four days post Fritz getting the news, "spoke of his good heart", a quote I'll get to after Wilhelmine's death, and, much later, the "I totally would have retired from kingship after the war had he lived".
(All his siblings: get a coughing fit)
The actual passage:
21. Called at 7. We talked a lot moral. He often quotes these lines from Agamemnon:, Happy who 'etc. You see, it has been a long time since I thought of these sweet moments that I would find in retirement; I thought of retiring, my dead brother disturbs my plan, because I cannot do it in a time of minority. It is not necessary; my nephew is fourteen, in four years he will be of age. We must put an interval between these worries and death. I still have five years in my body. That is all. I'm losing my fire. Ah, if you had seen me a few years ago! If you saw me in fine weather, you would find me very different.
Bad AW, spoiling Fritz' retirement plans. Sigh.
Which means anything else in the memoirs about AW and his death - and there is a lot - was made up by Catt and/or taken from various other sources, as said in the preface.
Otoh, what I don't recall from the memoirs (though I might have missed it, it wasn't what I was looking for) but which is in the diary is Fritz still indulging in the love letter ghost writing business, even when no sibling and no Voltaire are involved:
I tell him that I had made a verse piece for a beauty. He read it, criticized it. "Oh, I'll make you another one. Have you fucked her?" "No," I said. He composed a page of it in my presence and showed me a dictionary he had made during the last wars.
Now here's a civilian job that, as opposed to flutist, no one has imagined for Fritz: love poetry ghost writer.
Lots and lots of "Voltaire is the WORST!" as per the memoirs, and he keeps coming back to the prediction that Voltaire will die as a repentant son of the church with priests at his side out of fear, he's obsessed with it. My current guess as to why he keeps harping on this is: the idea of being broken. He himself has given in, not out of fear for the afterlife but of his father, but still, he has submitted. So Voltaire, who is so similar and yet not, can't be unbroken to the end. He is, of course, also irked that Voltaire still is war-critical:
Catt quoting Fritz quoting Voltaire happens often, but this is the most interesting passage to me, because it's as good a reconstruction of an authentic Fritz and Voltaire conversation we're likely to get: Voltaire said to me: "But when you fight, are you not in rage?" - "No, that's when you need the most tranquility." - "But all your wars are the same." - "All the oxen appear as such; but to anyone who sees them up close, there is always a difference." - He (V) was attached to the Marquis de Villars, who, no doubt, had described to him a cavalry attack. - "But all these are heroic actions. You destroy the world and we enlighten it." - "But what is enlightenment? Whether the world is flat or round, what does it do for happiness?" - But you need moral principles, and follow them. However, in ten months I will have defeated the French, the Austrians and the Russians.
Err, not so much, Fritz, but okay. He's really irked that Voltaire doesn't appreciate the military genius enough:
I have had a lot of trouble since morning, so far it is not over. Gentlemen, the scholars laugh at our profession. Voltaire ridicules it. It is bad by the evils it causes: but it takes talent. Voltaire won't listen to anything. He says that reading battles annoys him, that he learns nothing there; but when I read the campaigns of Eugène, Montecuculi, Luxembourg, it gives me a thousand ideas.
The poem Fritz wrote to Wihelmine before her death shows up a lot.
"Come, I made a piece to my sister of Baireuth, on friendship." We talked about Voltaire, on the Henriade, which he found very beautiful, with this one flaw that he did not put his hero in the most touching situations. He said it to Voltaire, and he agreed to it. (...)
I was at 6 o'clock; he showed me the epistle to his Princess. Come, he said, see this epistle you're interested in. I worked on it a little, but I will let it rest for 5 or 6 days.
(I would say that Henri de Catt’s main job is admiring Fritz‘ poetry, but that’s unfair. Also, aw on the phrasing "his princess". Sa princesse indeed.)
So, in the memoirs, Catt gets dragged to Fritz at 2 am when the news of Wilhelmine's death arrives and they keep talking about her for hours three times during a single day. Meanwhile, diary:
18. I learned in the morning of the Princess's death. I wrote this letter to the King - His Majesty sent for me. I saw him sorry for this loss. We hardly talked (...).
To be fair, they do talk of Wilhelmine on other days. However, just because Wilhelmine is also dead doesn't mean AW is forgotten. Just...remembered in that special Fritzian way.
I was after dinner. The King was overwhelmed; his smile always came back to him. He ate nothing. He was just drinking, he was so heated. We reasoned on the price of friendship; how little he indulged. There was talk of his brother, who had caused him much sorrow, in pace ut and in bello. "What consoles me is - without it I would not live."
In peace and in war? Whatever is AW supposed to have done in peace as well as in war, Fritz? There's one upcoming visitor who surely would love to know.
20. I was there at 2. - „Ah, how grieved I am! I don't have time to mourn the loss of this sister. We must hold on. Prince Heinrich arrived, which caused general joy.
I dare say. So how did that meeting go, Henri de Catt?
21. Called at a quarter past five in the morning. His Majesty was very distressed. - »I cried well yesterday with my brother. Here, my dear, it is not the loss of a battle that moves a captain or a warrior, but the death of a sister is irreparable, and what a sweeter feeling than friendship! His Majesty went out at 8 . "I went for some recognaissance of the Austrian camp." I was there in the evening. His Majesty was fine. „Now here I am in force. We will see how it all ends. The massacre at Hochkirchen was terrible. Everything came out pell-mell from the cemetery. Some were slashing their teeth, others were going there with their butts. Marshal Keith, speaking on the eve of the battle to the Margrave, said how the Austrians should attack us and how he would do it himself; we made the rope, them the bow.
As you may recall, Marshall Keith died at that battle. (And is listed on the Rheinsberg Obelisk.)
Meanwhile, yay for Seydlitz, provider of comic relief:
22. I went with His Majesty to take a turn to the left wing. Called, I spoke of these three sentries from whom the guns had been taken. - »This is not surprising, if three sleep in an army. It is good, he said, "that kings are sometimes unhappy. Don't you think we are accurate enough? "- Yes. But I don't see how they surprised us. But these misfortunes happen every hundred years. - General Seydlitz, on the 14th, said to the King: Does not His Majesty want to withdraw the infantry? "But, Seydlitz, I will lose the battle!" Well, may Your Majesty win it, and go away. ------------------------------
The Émilie gossip, which according to the Memoirs was with D'Argens. It is, however, clear that Fritz is the one contributing the garbled suicide attempt tale which Cahn identified to a gossip story about Émilie predating her involvement with Voltaire.
2. Left at 7, arrived at 3:30 in Jauernick; pretty well with a good peasant, from where I had two men decamped. Dined at 7. His Majesty sent for me. She was very tired. They spoke of Madame the Marquise du Châtelet; that she got fucked, but only by mathematicians or poets; that she was tight with Maupertuis, and that this was the beginning of his feud with Voltaire, who was jealous of him. "Maupertuis' physiognomy, says His Majesty, "is the most gloomy I have ever seen, but he is brutally honest man, he never gives in." The Marquise wanting to make an experiment on fire, burned an entire forest and made to admit to her husband, she said that it was a gallantry that she created for him, so that he had a good view. "" She put herself in a very hot bath, to see how far she could sustain the heat. would have remained without her chambermaid, who ran in a timely fashion. "" She was waiting for Voltaire from Potsdam; as he was late, because he still had some scheme to earn money, "said the King," she came to meet him in Brussels. Not seeing him, believes him unfaithful, takes opium."
Ferdinand, once the most wicked child of FW, now gets a different assessment from Big Bro.
4. I was. at 5. He told me that he had mourned his sister, and when in these moments of rest he thought of her, he cried again. He spoke to me with the highest praise of Prince Ferdinand, his brother, of the kindness of his heart; Prince Wilhelm: quoted pieces of Iphigenia which had to do with his situation, the end of the first act: they don't have time to cry; he read some places. This led to the spectacle. He quoted pieces of opera from me.
------------------------------ The hunting passage, which is in the memoirs, though somewhat altered. Here with Latin and dissing of the Schwedt cousins. He asked me if I liked hunting. - ›Etiam.‹ »Quam delectionem invenis? My father believed that I was a paste which we poterat facere quid volebat. It was not. He wanted me to be a hunter. I was given all the proper education. You had to run: I stopped the dogs; and we had to be careful. If I had stepped on one, the King would have screamed. The stitcher was very comfortable as I stopped. I haven't danced once since turning fifty. I really liked dancing; now I don't like it anymore, but videre juventutem saltantom, hoc mihi arridet. "Mihi dixit from Margrave's father:" he drank in the morning, at noon, after dinner, beat up all his grooms, drank in the evening: was very orthodox ; said to everyone, even to his grooms: "I am the son of the Grand Elector."
The story of FW's return to Potsdam definitely is heard by de Catt when he's Heinrich's army while Fritz is elsewhere. And there's one thing in the diary version which didn't make it into the memoirs which makes me wonder whether, no matter how they got along later on, Heinrich might not have been the source after all. Or maybe not him directly but his sidekick and boyfriend du jour Kalkreuth, whom Catt later mentions talking to in another context. The detail in case: Heinrich himself, what he was doing on that occasion.
When the King was in Kustrin, the Queen mother told her children to throw themselves on the King's knee to beg for mercy. The Princess of Baireuth, as the older one, threw herself before him in the anteroom; she got beaten. Then the family got under the table. Prince Henry stuffed it. (That's the algorithm's translation. Original: " Le prince Henri s'y fourra" - which google has as "Prince Heinrich will get into it"; honestly, I'm a bit lost - I mean, I'd say "got under it, the table, but the family is there already?) The King had a stick, he wanted to beat them. Arrives the chief stewardess, the Countess of Kameke. She spoke. - ›Go away, carrion!‹ Dixit ei Rex. One argues. - ›The devil will take you away,‹ she said, ›if you don't let these children alone!‹ Which she put in a room. The next day the King saw her, thanked her for the madness she had made him avoid. - ›I will always be your good friend,‹ and he was. Grumbkow said to the late King: "You should send this rascal over there", speaking of His Majesty. What horror!
With you there, de Catt, but I wish you'd have clearly said who told you this particular version of the story. Wilhelmine's version in her memoirs, which Henri de Catt couldn't have known (and certainly not writing his diary in 1759) has the intervention by Madame de Kamecke as well, but it has the sibs pleading with their father for mercy after she herself got punched and is dizzy. The other difference is that here the beating threat is to all the children, and Kamecke tells FW to leave the children alone, wereas in Wilhelmine's memoirs she tells FW not to do a Peter I and Philip of Spain with his oldest son. Note the shift in focus, which usually says something about who tells the story and has the memory. Now when I read the Catt memoirs, where Fritz tells this story to Catt, I assumed Fritz had the story from Wilhelmine and it got garbled in retelling. But seeing as Fritz is not the teller in the diary, and Heinrich is the only sibling other than Wilhelmine namechecked (which is edited out in the later memoirs version with Fritz as the speaker), since this version emphasizes the threat to all the siblings (as opposed to the threat to Fritz), and since he's the one person currently near Catt who actually was there that day, I wonder. Though like I said: it's also possible he told his boyfriend, and his boyfriend told Catt. Since Heinrich's boyfriends aren't known for their tact and restraint in general. Because if it's neither Heinrich nor a boyfriend who heard the story from him - wouldn't some other Prussian who got the story through court gossip put the emphasis on the threat to Fritz, current living legend, as Wilhelmine does in her Version, instead of on the kids?
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Henri de Catt Unplugged - I
Date: 2020-02-04 05:39 pm (UTC)Definitely no Katte mention, but several times his harsh upbringing is adressed.
As the 1884 editor says in the preface, Henri de Catt massively rewrites his involvement when Fritz gets sibling death news. What is in the diary re: AW (who as in the memoirs has been edited out of Fritz' descriptions of his 1740 Straßburg trip when still alive), is, four days post Fritz getting the news, "spoke of his good heart", a quote I'll get to after Wilhelmine's death, and, much later, the "I totally would have retired from kingship after the war had he lived".
(All his siblings: get a coughing fit)
The actual passage:
21. Called at 7. We talked a lot moral. He often quotes these lines from Agamemnon:, Happy who 'etc. You see, it has been a long time since I thought of these sweet moments that I would find in retirement; I thought of retiring, my dead brother disturbs my plan, because I cannot do it in a time of minority. It is not necessary; my nephew is fourteen, in four years he will be of age. We must put an interval between these worries and death. I still have five years in my body. That is all. I'm losing my fire. Ah, if you had seen me a few years ago! If you saw me in fine weather, you would find me very different.
Bad AW, spoiling Fritz' retirement plans. Sigh.
Which means anything else in the memoirs about AW and his death - and there is a lot - was made up by Catt and/or taken from various other sources, as said in the preface.
Otoh, what I don't recall from the memoirs (though I might have missed it, it wasn't what I was looking for) but which is in the diary is Fritz still indulging in the love letter ghost writing business, even when no sibling and no Voltaire are involved:
I tell him that I had made a verse piece for a beauty. He read it, criticized it. "Oh, I'll make you another one. Have you fucked her?" "No," I said. He composed a page of it in my presence and showed me a dictionary he had made during the last wars.
Now here's a civilian job that, as opposed to flutist, no one has imagined for Fritz: love poetry ghost writer.
Lots and lots of "Voltaire is the WORST!" as per the memoirs, and he keeps coming back to the prediction that Voltaire will die as a repentant son of the church with priests at his side out of fear, he's obsessed with it. My current guess as to why he keeps harping on this is: the idea of being broken. He himself has given in, not out of fear for the afterlife but of his father, but still, he has submitted. So Voltaire, who is so similar and yet not, can't be unbroken to the end. He is, of course, also irked that Voltaire still is war-critical:
Catt quoting Fritz quoting Voltaire happens often, but this is the most interesting passage to me, because it's as good a reconstruction of an authentic Fritz and Voltaire conversation we're likely to get:
Voltaire said to me: "But when you fight, are you not in rage?" - "No, that's when you need the most tranquility." - "But all your wars are the same." - "All the oxen appear as such; but to anyone who sees them up close, there is always a difference." - He (V) was attached to the Marquis de Villars, who, no doubt, had described to him a cavalry attack. - "But all these are heroic actions. You destroy the world and we enlighten it." - "But what is enlightenment? Whether the world is flat or round, what does it do for happiness?" - But you need moral principles, and follow them. However, in ten months I will have defeated the French, the Austrians and the Russians.
Err, not so much, Fritz, but okay. He's really irked that Voltaire doesn't appreciate the military genius enough:
I have had a lot of trouble since morning, so far it is not over. Gentlemen, the scholars laugh at our profession. Voltaire ridicules it. It is bad by the evils it causes: but it takes talent. Voltaire won't listen to anything. He says that reading battles annoys him, that he learns nothing there; but when I read the campaigns of Eugène, Montecuculi, Luxembourg, it gives me a thousand ideas.
The poem Fritz wrote to Wihelmine before her death shows up a lot.
"Come, I made a piece to my sister of Baireuth, on friendship." We talked about Voltaire, on the Henriade, which he found very beautiful, with this one flaw that he did not put his hero in the most touching situations. He said it to Voltaire, and he agreed to it. (...)
I was at 6 o'clock; he showed me the epistle to his Princess. Come, he said, see this epistle you're interested in. I worked on it a little, but I will let it rest for 5 or 6 days.
(I would say that Henri de Catt’s main job is admiring Fritz‘ poetry, but that’s unfair. Also, aw on the phrasing "his princess". Sa princesse indeed.)
So, in the memoirs, Catt gets dragged to Fritz at 2 am when the news of Wilhelmine's death arrives and they keep talking about her for hours three times during a single day. Meanwhile, diary:
18. I learned in the morning of the Princess's death. I wrote this letter to the King - His Majesty sent for me. I saw him sorry for this loss. We hardly talked (...).
To be fair, they do talk of Wilhelmine on other days. However, just because Wilhelmine is also dead doesn't mean AW is forgotten. Just...remembered in that special Fritzian way.
I was after dinner. The King was overwhelmed; his smile always came back to him. He ate nothing. He was just drinking, he was so heated. We reasoned on the price of friendship; how little he indulged. There was talk of his brother, who had caused him much sorrow, in pace ut and in bello. "What consoles me is - without it I would not live."
In peace and in war? Whatever is AW supposed to have done in peace as well as in war, Fritz? There's one upcoming visitor who surely would love to know.
20. I was there at 2. - „Ah, how grieved I am! I don't have time to mourn the loss of this sister. We must hold on. Prince Heinrich arrived, which caused general joy.
I dare say. So how did that meeting go, Henri de Catt?
21. Called at a quarter past five in the morning. His Majesty was very distressed. - »I cried well yesterday with my brother. Here, my dear, it is not the loss of a battle that moves a captain or a warrior, but the death of a sister is irreparable, and what a sweeter feeling than friendship! His Majesty went out at 8 . "I went for some recognaissance of the Austrian camp." I was there in the evening. His Majesty was fine. „Now here I am in force. We will see how it all ends. The massacre at Hochkirchen was terrible. Everything came out pell-mell from the cemetery. Some were slashing their teeth, others were going there with their butts. Marshal Keith, speaking on the eve of the battle to the Margrave, said how the Austrians should attack us and how he would do it himself; we made the rope, them the bow.
As you may recall, Marshall Keith died at that battle. (And is listed on the Rheinsberg Obelisk.)
Meanwhile, yay for Seydlitz, provider of comic relief:
22. I went with His Majesty to take a turn to the left wing. Called, I spoke of these three sentries from whom the guns had been taken. - »This is not surprising, if three sleep in an army. It is good, he said, "that kings are sometimes unhappy. Don't you think we are accurate enough? "- Yes. But I don't see how they surprised us. But these misfortunes happen every hundred years. - General Seydlitz, on the 14th, said to the King: Does not His Majesty want to withdraw the infantry? "But, Seydlitz, I will lose the battle!" Well, may Your Majesty win it, and go away.
------------------------------
The Émilie gossip, which according to the Memoirs was with D'Argens. It is, however, clear that Fritz is the one contributing the garbled suicide attempt tale which Cahn identified to a gossip story about Émilie predating her involvement with Voltaire.
2. Left at 7, arrived at 3:30 in Jauernick; pretty well with a good peasant, from where I had two men decamped. Dined at 7. His Majesty sent for me. She was very tired. They spoke of Madame the Marquise du Châtelet; that she got fucked, but only by mathematicians or poets; that she was tight with Maupertuis, and that this was the beginning of his feud with Voltaire, who was jealous of him. "Maupertuis' physiognomy, says His Majesty, "is the most gloomy I have ever seen, but he is brutally honest man, he never gives in." The Marquise wanting to make an experiment on fire, burned an entire forest and made to admit to her husband, she said that it was a gallantry that she created for him, so that he had a good view. "" She put herself in a very hot bath, to see how far she could sustain the heat. would have remained without her chambermaid, who ran in a timely fashion. "" She was waiting for Voltaire from Potsdam; as he was late, because he still had some scheme to earn money, "said the King," she came to meet him in Brussels. Not seeing him, believes him unfaithful, takes opium."
Ferdinand, once the most wicked child of FW, now gets a different assessment from Big Bro.
4. I was. at 5. He told me that he had mourned his sister, and when in these moments of rest he thought of her, he cried again. He spoke to me with the highest praise of Prince Ferdinand, his brother, of the kindness of his heart; Prince Wilhelm: quoted pieces of Iphigenia which had to do with his situation, the end of the first act: they don't have time to cry; he read some places. This led to the spectacle. He quoted pieces of opera from me.
------------------------------
The hunting passage, which is in the memoirs, though somewhat altered. Here with Latin and dissing of the Schwedt cousins.
He asked me if I liked hunting. - ›Etiam.‹ »Quam delectionem invenis? My father believed that I was a paste which we poterat facere quid volebat. It was not. He wanted me to be a hunter. I was given all the proper education. You had to run: I stopped the dogs; and we had to be careful. If I had stepped on one, the King would have screamed. The stitcher was very comfortable as I stopped. I haven't danced once since turning fifty. I really liked dancing; now I don't like it anymore, but videre juventutem saltantom, hoc mihi arridet. "Mihi dixit from Margrave's father:" he drank in the morning, at noon, after dinner, beat up all his grooms, drank in the evening: was very orthodox ; said to everyone, even to his grooms: "I am the son of the Grand Elector."
The story of FW's return to Potsdam definitely is heard by de Catt when he's Heinrich's army while Fritz is elsewhere. And there's one thing in the diary version which didn't make it into the memoirs which makes me wonder whether, no matter how they got along later on, Heinrich might not have been the source after all. Or maybe not him directly but his sidekick and boyfriend du jour Kalkreuth, whom Catt later mentions talking to in another context. The detail in case: Heinrich himself, what he was doing on that occasion.
When the King was in Kustrin, the Queen mother told her children to throw themselves on the King's knee to beg for mercy. The Princess of Baireuth, as the older one, threw herself before him in the anteroom; she got beaten. Then the family got under the table. Prince Henry stuffed it. (That's the algorithm's translation. Original: " Le prince Henri s'y fourra" - which google has as "Prince Heinrich will get into it"; honestly, I'm a bit lost - I mean, I'd say "got under it, the table, but the family is there already?) The King had a stick, he wanted to beat them. Arrives the chief stewardess, the Countess of Kameke. She spoke. - ›Go away, carrion!‹ Dixit ei Rex. One argues. - ›The devil will take you away,‹ she said, ›if you don't let these children alone!‹ Which she put in a room. The next day the King saw her, thanked her for the madness she had made him avoid. - ›I will always be your good friend,‹ and he was. Grumbkow said to the late King: "You should send this rascal over there", speaking of His Majesty. What horror!
With you there, de Catt, but I wish you'd have clearly said who told you this particular version of the story. Wilhelmine's version in her memoirs, which Henri de Catt couldn't have known (and certainly not writing his diary in 1759) has the intervention by Madame de Kamecke as well, but it has the sibs pleading with their father for mercy after she herself got punched and is dizzy. The other difference is that here the beating threat is to all the children, and Kamecke tells FW to leave the children alone, wereas in Wilhelmine's memoirs she tells FW not to do a Peter I and Philip of Spain with his oldest son. Note the shift in focus, which usually says something about who tells the story and has the memory. Now when I read the Catt memoirs, where Fritz tells this story to Catt, I assumed Fritz had the story from Wilhelmine and it got garbled in retelling. But seeing as Fritz is not the teller in the diary, and Heinrich is the only sibling other than Wilhelmine namechecked (which is edited out in the later memoirs version with Fritz as the speaker), since this version emphasizes the threat to all the siblings (as opposed to the threat to Fritz), and since he's the one person currently near Catt who actually was there that day, I wonder. Though like I said: it's also possible he told his boyfriend, and his boyfriend told Catt. Since Heinrich's boyfriends aren't known for their tact and restraint in general. Because if it's neither Heinrich nor a boyfriend who heard the story from him - wouldn't some other Prussian who got the story through court gossip put the emphasis on the threat to Fritz, current living legend, as Wilhelmine does in her Version, instead of on the kids?