Announcing Rheinsberg: Frederick the Great discussion post 10

[cahn]

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We now have a community, rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D

Comments

Re: Henri de Catt

[mildred_of_midgard]

Voilà! A translated diary in the Fritzian library. You're on your own with the Latin and Greek. (Catt didn't want to make this too easy on Google, clearly.)

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.