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Announcing Rheinsberg: Frederick the Great discussion post 10
So for anyone who is reading this and would like to learn more about Frederick the Great and his contemporaries, but who doesn't want to wade through 500k (600k?) words worth of comments and an increasingly sprawling comment section:
We now have a community,![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D
We now have a community,
rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D
Henri de Catt
So I went back to the German preface to the edition of Catt's original diary you uploaded in the Fritzian library, which was where I had the "anonymous pamphlet" bit from. And because the preface is quite extensive on how Catt beefed up the diaries to the more twice the size memoirs, I thought I'd transcribe & translate the most interesting passages. 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.
Now, as to De Catt' use of his source material - both hish own diary and other source material - and his rearranging. The preface says, referring to Henri de Catt as "the author":
Moreover, the author has, where his diaries testified the subject of conversation to him, given said subject a liberal treatment; he has grown out of already existent crystals entire sparkling creations. Where the diaries render the words of the King verbatim, the memoirs stick to them faithfully; but it happenes in a chonological reordering, so that statements which belong to different days and different conversations get thrown together, i.e. get connected through an always aptly invented transition.
The author also put certain statements, especially the flood of characteristic traits, witty ideas and anecdotes which he had jotted down in his exercise books from a variety of sources, in the memoirs into the mouth of the King, even if the diaries did not give him the right for this. Especially in the time before and after the battle of Kunersdorf when Catt had been left with Prince Heinrich's army by the King, the diaries (p. 394 ff.) are rich with stories of the type mentioned, which our author thus has heard from others, not from the King. At one point, the diaries name explicitly someone else, Secretary Eichel, as the source for a story (p.417), which in the memoirs is ascribed to the King.
(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.)
(...) The memoirs are more than twice the size of the diaries. As much as the original material was stretched via rearrangement, the difference in size isn't explainable by this alone. The author has used other material in addition to his Diary.
Something that surprises in the military lessons he has the King give him is the incredibly accuracy of numbers. Are we supposed to believe that the King, when he after lunch talks to his companion about military matters of the morning (...) already has the exact numbers at hand when the report by troops involved usually took longer than that? 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. (...)
A comparison between the work which at the current state of research is still the basis for all studies of the 7-Years-War proves an great equivalance between Tempelhof's depiction of the 1758 campaign and that in Catt's memoirs. The second volume of Tempelhof's history was published in 1785; thus there was the chance for Catt to draw his military wisdom from this source. If his description of the battle of Zorndorf has an impressive similarity to the description given by Tielcke in 1776 in the second volume of his "Beyträge zur Kriegs-Kunst und Geschichte des Krieges von 1756 - 1763", one could further suspect that our author borrowed from the Saxon Colonel as he had done from the Prussian Major. But Catt did not speak German, he would have to get the works of Tempelhof and Tieclke translated for himself. He was, however, not in need of this; he was the owner of a French written journal about the campaign of 1758 which is still among the material in his archive and this very extensive manuscript has proved, in a German version, the source for both these military writers. (Footnote says where Tielcke and Tempelhof got it from; from a collection of 7 Wars Material made by the secretary of the late von Wobersnow and from a partial publication in a miltary journal named "Bellona" in Dresden, 1781 ff, respectively.)
Catt isn't above borrowing literal phrases from this material and rendering it as the King's military expertise in his memoirs. Not enough that Friedrich has to narrate the facts evening for evening, even his strategic judgment is that of the military Anonymous. A fleeting mistake of Catt's in the use of his source then has the consequence that the King in the memoirs mourns for a General on June 17th, 1758, who in real life on that day simply got a strong reproof. (...)
With the year 1759, this oracle (the anonymous military journal) ceases to be available. But the author of the memoirs knew how to help himself. When Glatz fell on July 1760, the war files of Fouque and thus also the letters of Frederick the Great to this general had been captured by the enemy. In various printings fragments of this correspondance got in print and thus known to the public soon after the ending of the war. One of these editions was owned by Catt; he used them for 1759 in a similar way as the military journal for 1758. Whatever the King writes to Fouque in confidence, he tells in the same confidence to his reader. In the "Recuiel" of the letters to Fouque Catt also found a copy of the memorandum the Prince of Prussia had written as a justification of his behavior in the Bohemia campaign of 1757; it gave Catt the possibility to describe the argument between the Prince and his royal brother.
When the letters to Fouque end, Catt helps himsef for the second half of 1759 with the King's "Histoire de la guerre des sept ans", which he seems to have known before its publication in the "ouevres posthumes". Finally, he used the correspondance between the King and the Marquis d'Argens for the third and fourth part of his memoirs in a similar thorough way as he did the letters to Fouque. He seems to have had a copy of this correspondance at his disposal; at least there have been letters to the Marquis used which are missing in the edition "Ouevres Posthumes".
Catt took the stones and pebbles for the mosaic forming his memoirs thus from this series of recognizable quarries. (...) Thus when the memoirs let the King describe the history of the Prince of Prussia's sickness exactly with the words used in an anonmously published biography of the Prince. (Footnote here says "See p. 104, p. 170" which I take it is a reference to Catt's memoirs. But doesn't say which anonymous biography.) In other cases, you can see he used the official military dispatches as they had been given out from Berlin and later collected in anthologies. (....)
Catt repeatedly shows the weakness of memoir writesrs to put their own person in a beaming light. Thus inevitably the author knows the King basically much better and can judge him much better than he knows himself. (p. 128, 233) (...) Whenever there is an important moment happening in Friedrich's life, Catt is there as a witness and confidant. When the news of the death of the Prince of Prussia arrives, Catt is according to his memoirs the first to whom the brother speaks of his pain; whereas the diaries proof that the reader wasn't even received by the King in the first four days after the arrival of the mournful news. When three months later the sister, the Margravine of Bayreuth dies, according to the Memoirs the King immediately must speak to Catt, who gets woken up for this at 2 am; once the King dismisses him three hours later, he sends immediately a letter of condolence, which after all the verbal condolences given in the previous pages seems somewhat redundant, but which makes the recepient send for him again only fifteen minutes later, only to receive him in the evening for the third time and this time for four hours. Whereas the diaries prove that Catt had first written the condolence letter before the King ever talked to him, which makes sense, and then showed up in the afternoon at the regular hour (p. 195).
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.
Also: while Henri de Catt's memoirs and diaries - along with his other papers and Collection of 7 Years War material - weren't published yet, 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.
Re: Henri de Catt
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.
Re: Henri de Catt
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.
*nods* Yes, it seems unless any given Fritz statement can be counterchecked with also being in the diary, we have to put it into double quotes.
For a compare and contrast: my guy Boswell of course in his biography of Samuel Johnson drew heavily on the diaries he kept while knowing Johnson. Which is why the first sixty Boswell-less years of Johnson's life form about a third of the book, and the next fifteen or so years the rest. But Boswell didn't put something in Johnson's mouth he hadn't actually said. For the first sixty years, he did his research and names his sources. And Henri de Catt could have easily have written something like "Memoirs of Frederick the Great in the 7-Years-War) where he used all the additional information he'd gathered but not in added, invented conversations, just in the narrative, saying "I also learned from Eichel that..." or "later, I read in a military report that...". It would still have made for an incredibly interesting book for historians!
To quote Voltaire, "Vanity, as the other Solomon, the one not from the North, said, all is vanity".
ETA: So is Fritz's elegant French prose that the Voltaire correspondence translator praises actually his?
My thoughts precisely. Now, on the one hand, I suspect it deserves to be credited to Prades, Catt, Thiebault et al, but on the other - he didn't have them yet when he was crown prince. And his French then was good enough that Voltaire remarked on it approvingly to third parties. (Okay, this was when they did the mutual admiration hyperbole thing, but still.) For what it's worth, in the German translation, the writer of the Fritz letters does have a distinct voice, so to speak, it doesn't sound like several people writing. But if he always gives them an outline and then when copying the elegant version in his own hand presumably adds or leaves out, the ultimate voice is still his.
Re: Henri de Catt
Was thinking of that, but I'm pretty sure I've read somewhere that he already had people helping him with his French, and if you think about who he had with him at Rheinsberg, it's plausible.
That said, *everyone* agrees he was an entertaining and witty conversationalist, even people who don't approve of his politics, so there's that in his favor.
For what it's worth, in the German translation, the writer of the Fritz letters does have a distinct voice, so to speak, it doesn't sound like several people writing.
That's one thing I was wondering about. I'm still not sure how strong a conclusion we could draw based on that even if it's true of the French original, but it is good to know. I'm just going to leave a mental question mark around the question of how much of Fritz's style is his own.
To quote Voltaire, "Vanity, as the other Solomon, the one not from the North, said, all is vanity".
Haha, omg, I was reading your line just above about how Catt could have just named his sources, and I thought, "But it wouldn't have suited his vanity nearly as much!" Then I saw you were quoting Voltaire on vanity and nodded approvingly, and then...
the other Solomon, the one not from the North
And then I died. Laughing. What year is this quote from? I'm going to guess post 1753, but you tell me.
On Catt's vanity: "Thus inevitably the author knows the King basically much better and can judge him much better than he knows himself," is extremely true, and I now have to reevaluate my sense of Fritz's self-awareness, which is partly based on Catt patting-self-on-back quotes.
I even started to question whether his account of the Voltaire letters is accurate. Now, we know from Fritz's actions and his correspondence that Fritz definitely trash-talked Voltaire's personality and was hopelessly smitten with him anyway. I'm betting Catt both heard Fritz trash-talk Voltaire, and saw him passionately read letters from and write letters to Voltaire. But how much do you want to bet Catt moved up the timing to make it more dramatic? "No sooner had the king finished telling me that Voltaire was absolute scum, than he got a letter and I watched him devour it with his eyes." Especially since the context here is Catt patting himself on the back for knowing the King better than he knew himself.
One thing I have to say I've *always* been highly skeptical of is Catt's reports of Fritz's uncertainty around the idea of immortality of the soul, prophecy, etc. This is coming from a diehard Protestant who would *love* to believe Fritz wasn't *really* convinced of his materialism.
So I can see I'm going to be doing some extensive historical revisionism now that Catt's shortcomings as a source have come to light. I'm glad we stuck around in this fandom long enough to be turning up all these things we had no idea about back in August, or even November!
Re: Henri de Catt
But, but!! Selenak just posted us that lovely set of Fritz-Wilhelmine letters where he seems pretty certain that he doesn't have an immortal soul. Like, certain enough that he doesn't even need to be particularly vehement about it, which to me is a pretty big indicator.
That is to say, (a) yup yup Catt seems to be an incredibly unreliable source, and (b) all hail
Re: Henri de Catt
That said, no, I didn't believe Catt before (partly, I admit, because of my own biases which run counter to his, but partly because he was my only source on this and his wishful thinking motivations were writ large in red ink), and I don't believe him more now (with even better reason).
In any case, all hail
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(Yay Rheinsberg! :D )
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I don't see any evidence that he changed his mind or even had uncertainty after 1740; that reads like 100% wishful thinking on Catt's part. Especially since so much of his argument is "Well, *I* think he sounded uncertain, mostly because he sounded so extremely certain and vehement that I don't think he'd keep arguing with me unless he wanted to be convinced."
Riiiight. Works both ways, Catt. Maybe you're uncertain, did you think of that? No, of course you didn't.
Re: Henri de Catt
It's from this letter which I unearthed when looking for context re: Voltaire's reaction re: de Prades. Voltaire is writing in June 1759, among other things:
You are a legislator, a warrior, a historian, a poet; but you are also a philosopher. After having dabbled all your life in heroism and in the arts, what do you take to the tomb? An empty name that no longer belongs to us. Everything is vanity, as the other Solomon said, the one not from the North. To Sans-Souci, to Sans-Souci, as soon as you can.
Re: Henri de Catt
Fritz, for the sake of a man who can knock out one one-liner after another like this, I will forgive you all the boyfriend bad judgment in the world. 5 out of 6 is not bad, and the 6th had serious redeeming qualities.
(Please work on your readers and batmen, though, seriously.)
Speaking of readers, I'm now questioning everything. "If they had raised me instead of humiliating me, I would be a better person"--is that Fritz's self-awareness or Catt's commentary?
CAAAATTTT! Why you do this to me??
Re: Henri de Catt
CAAAATTTT! Why you do this to me??
I know. It's such a good quote. But it could almost be too good, and the result of Catt having had 20 years to contemplate Fritz. Otoh, this is the kind of thing which should be counter check-able with the diary.
One thing that argues for it being authentic, imo, is the use of "They". If Catt had invented the quote, writing after Fritz' death, he would have let him say "my father". FW is dead for many decades, his fame has long since been eclipsed by his son's, who is everyone's One And Only King, so no trouble to be expected there. Otoh, Fritz to young new reader Henri de Catt would say they, despite it being clear whom he meant.
Re: Henri de Catt
Well, good news: I've done a proof of concept, and OCR + translate on the diary is going to be perfectly doable. The really tedious part is going to be cropping the images to remove all that stuff in the margins (like dates) that would confuse OCR + translate. Fortunately, unlike the correspondence, there's only about a hundred pages.
If the margins were all the same size [ETA: I mean from one image to the other, even if the top, bottom, left, and right margins were different from each other], I could do it with a single line of code, but alas, the margins are different on each page. Soooo, I either learn how to do something mathy that sounds fascinating but beyond my cognitive capacity at this time (but not at a normal time, dammit, but at a normal time I wouldn't be doing techy stuff in my spare time; I like my hobbies to be different from my day job), or I manually crop images.
In my current state, 100 manual image crops it will be! Hopefully I don't also have to manually set the permissions on each image, but I will if I have to. [ETA: do not have to manually set permissions! Got the one line of code approach to work.]
Oh, the downside will be that if you want to know the date for a given entry, you'll have to look it up in the original file. But I'll leave in the page numbers so it's at least easy to find.
Hoping this won't take more than a couple days, although it partly depends on how many images I can bring myself to crop in one session before I wander off and do something else. ;) And also how many comments
with the magic K wordcome in!Re: Henri de Catt
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Image-cropping is done, though, as is OCR, and manual cleanup is underway. After that, translation should be very quick. I'm trying to go line-by-line with the manual cleanup, 1) since it's much shorter than the correspondence, 2) since we care much more about the details. I may end up taking a few days just for the sake of doing small sessions of higher quality cleanup without my eyes glazing over.
In cropping, I spotted a very exciting-looking paragraph in which Fritz is at Küstrin and SD is having the kids line up, Dad is whaling on them, the governess is intervening, etc., but my poor French couldn't tell if this was from Fritz's mouth or a story Catt heard around camp. It's definitely not in direct discourse, though. I may be able to tell once I get to line-by-line cleanup. If not, the translation will tell us!
Re: Henri de Catt
Remember in another comment I mentioned Catt's sudden code-switching?
Partway through, he decides he's going to start switching between French and Latin in the same sentence.
It gets even wilder. He quotes Fritz uttering a sentence that goes, word by word, French, Latin, Latin, Latin, French, French, Latin, and then in the very next sentence, which is Catt's, Catt decides to one-up Fritz and go French, French, French, Latin, Latin, Greek, with the last in the Greek alphabet, no less (p. 374).
Look:
»Mais possum finire tragoediam quand je volam.« Je le vis in parvula δόξᾳ.
"But I can end the tragedy when I want." I saw it in a small [...]
I assume this is Fritz showing Catt the little box of opium. Is this like sensitive information that we have to put in code? In case some French speaker happens to come along and not be able to figure out Latin? But just in case they can figure out Latin based on their French, let's make absolutely sure they don't know where the opium is kept?
The problem with this: δόξᾳ doesn't mean box. In all the dictionaries I've checked, I've not been able to find any definitions other than the ones I was familiar with: judgment, opinion, vision, glory. How on earth does that make sense in context? It should mean box or other type of container. Another layer of code here?
Help?
Anyway, now Catt's just decided that...what's the French + Latin equivalent of Franglais?...is the way to go. Look: "Vidi regem. Mihi dit quod multum pro Keith, et sa résolution etc." Latin, Latin, Latin, French, Latin, Latin, Latin, proper name, French (probably), French, French (p. 375).
Oh, wow, the Émilie gossip entry is amazing and ridiculous. It's November 2, 1758. Fritz is "très fatiguée" and they gossip instead of talking about important things. Good distraction, I guess?
She wanted to do an experiment on fire, burned a whole forest, told her husband it was a demonstration in his honor (like fireworks, I guess), so he had a good view. Uh uh. Took a hot bath to see at what point she couldn't tolerate the heat any more. Okay, maybe. 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." Entry ends there.
WTF.
Now it's November 8 and things have just gotten interesting again. I wish I were more confident in my French. I can tell what's being said but not who's saying it. *Fritz* (???) just said laws were unfair to women, that men get to force women to put up with stuff they won't put up with themselves, and that if a man is unfaithful, that exempts a woman from being faithful? Catt disagrees? This would all make sense, especially given Fritz's attitude toward nephew FW's wife, except for the part where he prefaces it with, "I know I will never make laws, but." What do you mean, you'll never make laws? You mean you'll never make *this* the law, that women can be unfaithful if their husbands are? (But not vice versa, which is still a double standard.) If not for that line, I'd be sure it's Fritz taking the side of women and Catt disagreeing, but what is Fritz doing saying he'll never make laws?
Anyway, now we follow the proto-feminism up with a comment from our Fritz on how this one woman is really hideous. End of entry.
Gold star, you tried?
Anyway, tiny possibility that when Fritz, before he got married, said "she can do what she wants and I'll do what I want," he actually meant he would have let her produce an heir with some discreet Prussian noble from an appropriately old family (Katte cousin? :P), and it was EC who noped right out of that?
Honestly, as long as it was Fritz's idea, I think he'd be fine with it. It's EC doing it of her own accord that he'd flip out about, especially if he could argue that he was being faithful in the sense of not having mistresses. (Remember, we had this convo about the MT marriage.)
Also, worth mentioning that Catt feels the need to comment on the pretty girls in practically every village he stays at.
Okay, more cleanup tomorrow! Soon I'll have the translation up so you can see all for yourselves. (For now, you can check the French, I mean French-Latin-Greek, if you want.)
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.
Re: Henri de Catt
Re: Henri de Catt
Now Catt's decided to throw English into the mix! French, Latin, Latin, English, French, French, French, Latin, Latin, Latin, Latin.
j'étais factus pro you, mais sum honteux quod sim felicior Te
Even wilder, he's quoting Voltaire's "best of all possible worlds" letter. At some length. In a mishmash of languages. OMGWTFBBQ.
›Vous êtes le plus malin des rois; vous me déchirez et vous vous plaignez que je vous égratigne. Vous êtes roi, vous êtes poète, musicien; mais vous êtes philosophe. Comment pouvez-vous vous plaire au carnage! Allons à Sans-Souci, à Sans-Souci! L'Abbé était donc un Doëg, un Achitophel que Votre Majesté comblait de bien? Oh, voilà le meilleur des mondes possibles ! Croyez-moi, Sire, j'étais factus pro you, mais sum honteux quod sim felicior Te. Quel plaisir pouvez-vous goûter, entouré toujours de nobles meurtriers en habit écourté? A Sans-Souci, à Sans(-Souci)! Mais que fera là votre diablesse d'imagination? Vous êtes philosophe.‹ Signé:
›Votre grammairien de Potsdam.‹
I mean, when I was in sixth grade, I used to render individual words in the middle of a sentence in my diary into dwarvish runes in case my sisters decided to go through my diary. But this is special.
Also, this is interesting: both Catt and (I checked) the letter in the Fritzian library have "Doëg", whom Wikipedia tells me is an Old Testament figure who informed on David to Saul. Ah, Trier footnotes Doëg as a reference to 1 Samuel 22. And Achitophel to 2 Samuel 15. So I think a small correction needs to be made to
I feel like we can more or less keep up with these people in the Classics, but we need far more French literature and Biblical acumen than I for one have. Thank goodness for Google and Wikipedia.
Re: Henri de Catt
Re: Henri de Catt
You know Fritz had a totally paternal love for Fredersdorf, three years his elder? He's now being paternal toward Voltaire, seventeen years his elder!
Voltaire: *writes whiny letter about how Fritz doesn't love him*
Fritz: *responds like a tender father who wants to lead his son back onto the right path*
That's Fritz for you, always the tender father and chill older brother.
Re: Henri de Catt
Re: Henri de Catt
Re: Henri de Catt - or rather, Voltaire
Re: Henri de Catt - or rather, Voltaire
Re: Henri de Catt
Yeeeeaaaahhh, I'm gonna go with Fritz never talked about Katte to Catt or Voltaire. And now I'm really leaning toward Catt reading Voltaire's memoirs (he must have! regardless of whether he borrowed from them), and expanding and correcting the Katte passage a little, and putting it in Fritz's mouth. Since we now know, thanks to our wonderful reader's summary of the Catt preface, that Catt pulled from multiple sources and had no shame about putting things in Fritz's mouth.
Which means now we're down to one 1737 letter, where Fritz has complaints about Katte, as his sole communication that we've turned up so far.
40 more pages of Catt to go, plus some passages from the first 60 that I didn't really read, but I'm not expecting any surprise Katte confidences at this point.
What a downer.
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Re: Henri de Catt
Re: Henri de Catt
Re: Henri de Catt
Re: Henri de Catt
You know, it did occur to me that it's suspiciously like the English word "box", especially if you flip the delta around. But I immediately decided that was me being Anglocentric, why on earth would Henri de Catt use English-Greek code, etc.
But now that I know he has no problem throwing random English words into his diary, that's totally what I think it is! And I do think it's code, because he doesn't want everyone knowing where Fritz keeps his suicide device.
And it occurs to me that one thing I used to do in my own very secret diary was throw *random* words into dwarven runes, just so potential snoops wouldn't home in on the secret words and only the secret words.
And this *is* the first time he starts code-switching. I now think maybe he's covering his tracks with random languages, so his diary doesn't have exactly one sentence in other languages in the midst of all-French diary. Because the very next entry is one sentence of code-switching.
Against this idea is that it then takes him another month or so to start code-switching again, at least from my skimming. But then he starts doing it regularly.
So I wonder if it just gave him the idea, or if he was covering his tracks by trying to sprinkle other languages through a mostly all-French diary?
The further you get into the diary, though, the wilder he gets, I can tell you that. Whatever else was going on, I think he started having fun.
ETA: No, I'm wrong. Just three days later, he's code-switching again. Yeah, he might be covering his tracks.
Re: Henri de Catt
1) A variation on Fritz's Pöllnitz line:
"Voltaire is like a bird or parrot that should be put in its cage when you're tired of it; but you have to be careful, when you speak, that he doesn't repeat your last words."
Ahahaha, well, Fritz, maybe if all your words weren't things you didn't want repeated... :P
2) Aww, look, direct discourse account of how Wilhelmine taught bb!Fritz to love reading! <3 Even the sneaking out at night to read episode is there.
Re: Henri de Catt
re: 1), and that, right there, is why Voltaire/Fritz probably wouldn't have worked out even if they had been a bit less similar in their flaws. For all of Voltaire's many many character deficits, he was a genuine free spirit - we do have that as an expression in German, "Freigeist" -, and remind one till his dying day. (Not giving in to psychological terror by church officials is a good demonstration of that.) Sure, he was vain as well and loved to be flattered, but you couldn't cage him or own him, no matter how much money or accolades were involved. And Fritz, however enlightened a monarch he was, was at his core a despot who needed to control people. And Voltaire was the ultimate uncontrollable person of his age.
Now that I've read a bit more about the FW and Gundling relationship: it seems like a counterpart/caricature/nightmare version of this. Martin Stade, the GDR author on whose novel the film "Der König und sein Narr" is based, seems to have the tale to get around GDR censorship and make a point on why intellectuals even if they tell themselves they can influence powerful people for good and can't resist the attraction of power, of getting close to power, inevitably end up debased, humiliated, corrupted or any version thereof. But even Stade's fictional interpretation aside, looks like people did of course wonder why Gundling didn't make more than the two escape attempts. (Though this strikes me like asking an abused wife "so why did you only run away twice, never mind the beatings afterwards got worse?") And one explanation named is that Seckendorff does actually name him as someone FW listens to (in between abusing him), and that Gundling might have kidded himself that by staying, he could change FW and the country for the better. Stade has the "no wars of aggression, they are evil!" in the 1722 Political Testament be a direct Gundling quote, but whether that's invention or based on a source, I don't know.
Re: Henri de Catt
Re: Henri de Catt
A couple final observations:
1) It's 1760, and Fritz has just dreamed that he's about to be carted off to Magdeburg for not loving his father enough.
Iiiinterestingly, in the diary it's not his sister of Bayreuth, but his "sisters", plural, that he asks why.
He also has another dream, where there's a flowerbed full of so much porcelain that he doesn't dare walk on it.
2) Oooh, it's Fritz grudgingly giving MT her due: » Il faut avouer que la reine de Hongrie a des talens, qu'elle est capable, qu'elle s'applique; on ne peut lui refuser «, disait-il, » cette justice.«
Nothing about whores.
3) Fritz on how terrible war is: you have to admit the obstinacy of the Queen and me cause a great deal of "mal" (evil, trouble, however you want to translate that).
What I like about this quote is that instead of going on about how it's harder to make nasty women back down than brave men, he's putting himself and her on the same level.
Enjoy!
ETA: In order to not pass Google Translate sentence fragments, I had to make sure page breaks aligned with sentence breaks. This means I had to move some page breaks around and sometimes create new paragraph breaks. So if something appears on the top of page 400 in the document in the library, and you need to look it up in the original pdf, it may actually appear on the bottom of page 399, and vice versa.
Oh, and the page numbers given are the page numbers of the pdf, not the book. Subtract 44 to get the page number of the book.