But Mildred, that's the point! Of course he likes people who pay better. He always did! The ones who get paid surely are the competition!
ROTFLOL.
Remember this?
Fritz: Suhm, please read Seneca's chapter on indifference to wealth. Fritz: Great! Now that you don't care about money, can I have yours?
:DDD
More seriously, in a lifetime of hypocrisy, there is little that Fritz was more hypocritical about than money. If you ask me, he's trying to compensate for a deprived childhood. Anyone trying to take money that could be his is a trigger that emotionally puts him back in a place where he has to live without books and music and adequate food.
I think his obsession with good food, what he described as "disorderly cravings, like a pregnant woman," and his apparent inability to keep from bolting it (even when he had no trouble skipping meals or living on tight rations) stems from the same source.
Oh, sheesh, I think that quote may be from Catt's memoirs. ANYWAY, it's probably something Catt observed, even if Fritz wasn't as self-aware as he's made out to be. (In addition to possibly revise my opinion about his slut-shaming, I'm having to revisit the evidence for his self-awareness. Also, one wonders if Catt the devoted fan would have put "like a pregnant woman" in his hero's mouth, even after the breakup.)
And that, oddly enough, is one of the reasons I think Fritz may actually have had a low sex drive. Because once Dad was dead, and even at Rhinesberg, he should have been all over the boyfriends in an incontrovertible way.
And maybe he was, and we're viewing it through a lens of 250 years of homophobia on the part of people determined to preserve their hero's reputation. Maybe he was bedding down left and right with Marwitz and Glasow and Claus and Darget and Fredersdorf and Algarotti, and he just had to preserve some plausible deniability, by claiming his relationship with Algarotti was purely intellectual, Marwitz wasn't anything to write home about, etc.
But the fact that it remained so deniable, and the fact that he spent that much time denying it, and the fact that people like Heinrich or Algarotti leave us in no doubt about their sexual activity, and the fact that there are so few candidates and he spent relatively little time with them (even Fredersdorf and he are frequently separated after 1740), and the fact that Trenck absolutely would have talked...it kind of makes me think he'd figured out that he liked the idea of sex better than the act.
But I may revise this opinion after rereading Blanning, who spends a lot of time arguing that Fritz was homosexually active into the 1750s. I'll see how convincing his arguments are.
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Re: But what is really going on here?: The Austrian Dossier (Seckendorff III)
Date: 2020-02-05 08:11 pm (UTC)ROTFLOL.
Remember this?
Fritz: Suhm, please read Seneca's chapter on indifference to wealth.
Fritz: Great! Now that you don't care about money, can I have yours?
:DDD
More seriously, in a lifetime of hypocrisy, there is little that Fritz was more hypocritical about than money. If you ask me, he's trying to compensate for a deprived childhood. Anyone trying to take money that could be his is a trigger that emotionally puts him back in a place where he has to live without books and music and adequate food.
I think his obsession with good food, what he described as "disorderly cravings, like a pregnant woman," and his apparent inability to keep from bolting it (even when he had no trouble skipping meals or living on tight rations) stems from the same source.
Oh, sheesh, I think that quote may be from Catt's memoirs. ANYWAY, it's probably something Catt observed, even if Fritz wasn't as self-aware as he's made out to be. (In addition to possibly revise my opinion about his slut-shaming, I'm having to revisit the evidence for his self-awareness. Also, one wonders if Catt the devoted fan would have put "like a pregnant woman" in his hero's mouth, even after the breakup.)
And that, oddly enough, is one of the reasons I think Fritz may actually have had a low sex drive. Because once Dad was dead, and even at Rhinesberg, he should have been all over the boyfriends in an incontrovertible way.
And maybe he was, and we're viewing it through a lens of 250 years of homophobia on the part of people determined to preserve their hero's reputation. Maybe he was bedding down left and right with Marwitz and Glasow and Claus and Darget and Fredersdorf and Algarotti, and he just had to preserve some plausible deniability, by claiming his relationship with Algarotti was purely intellectual, Marwitz wasn't anything to write home about, etc.
But the fact that it remained so deniable, and the fact that he spent that much time denying it, and the fact that people like Heinrich or Algarotti leave us in no doubt about their sexual activity, and the fact that there are so few candidates and he spent relatively little time with them (even Fredersdorf and he are frequently separated after 1740), and the fact that Trenck absolutely would have talked...it kind of makes me think he'd figured out that he liked the idea of sex better than the act.
But I may revise this opinion after rereading Blanning, who spends a lot of time arguing that Fritz was homosexually active into the 1750s. I'll see how convincing his arguments are.