cahn | 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,

rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only | Expand All

From:

selenak

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.

Edited Date: 2020-01-27 10:06 am (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

he didn't have them yet when he was crown prince.

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!

From:

cahn

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.

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

rheinsberg, omg this is making finding things SO much easier.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

In Catt's defense, Fritz has changed his mind twice before, and people do, and he also represents Fritz as being motivated to question his convictions by the desire to see his recently deceased mother and sister again. Which is the kind of emotional thinking that many people do.

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

rheinsberg! and also your continuing education that is making you more and more able to be an active participant in these discussions! \o/

From:

cahn

Huh. Interesting. When did he change his mind?

(Yay Rheinsberg! :D )

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Much earlier, when he was in his mid twenties (the younger people are, of course, the more fluid their religious/spiritual beliefs). As we saw in the Suhm write-up, he went from not being sure he had an immortal soul, to being convinced by Wolff via Suhm's translation in 1736 that he did, and then just a couple years later, after reading more widely of skeptical philosophy, switching to definitely not believing in an immortal soul.

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.

From:

selenak

And then I died. Laughing. What year is this quote from? I'm going to guess post 1753, but you tell me.

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.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I knew it! Thanks for reminding me (and you can tell I was seriously distracted by Heinrich when I read that post the first time).

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??

From:

selenak

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??

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.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

*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.

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 word~~ come in!

Edited Date: 2020-01-30 05:23 am (UTC)

From:

selenak

I stand in unlimited awe of your coding skills. Seeing as I use my computer still as a gloryfied typing machine and can't do much more. Henri de Catt, soon we will know just which of your quotes we can keep for the Fritz characterisation!

From:

cahn

Wow, you are amazing! <3 Ugh, that's really frustrating that the margins are not all the same size. Picture-takers, you should have realized someone was going to want to automate this eventually! :P

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Haha, that's what I was thinking, except about the publishers! (It's at least their fault as much as the picture-takers, especially the extremely small gap between the content in the margins and the main body of the text.)

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!

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I've just hit the halfway point on my Catt proofreading/reading, and I had to share some fun findings.

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.)

From:

cahn

That is all *wild.*

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.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Ahhh, thank you! Also, look at you being the one to provide additional context and clarification. :DDDD

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Had to stop proofreading to report this.

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

selenak's original translation of this letter, which had "dog" rather than "Doëg".

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.

From:

selenak

So noted, makes sense that both are biblical allusions. (From Voltaire the student of a Jesuit run school to Fritz the son of Calvinist FW.) I see both comparisons cast Fritz as David, one as young and one as old David.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Liveblogging Henri de Catt's diary! MAN I wish my French were better, I'm sure I'm missing a lot of good stuff. But this little gem jumped out at me.

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.

From:

selenak

mildred_of_midgard

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?

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.

Edited Date: 2020-02-08 05:42 am (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

80% of the way through, hoping to finish tomorrow. Only a couple minor passages worth passing on that I haven't already:

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.

From:

selenak

Aww, I'm really glad to hear 2), I was hoping that had a real horses mouth Basis!

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

From:

mildred_of_midgard - Date: 2020-02-04 05:04 am (UTC) - Expand

From:

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.

Edited Date: 2020-02-03 11:51 pm (UTC)