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We now have a community, rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D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

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.

Re: Henri de Catt

[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.