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We now have a community, rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D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

[mildred_of_midgard]

Hille to Grumbkow: LOL. Now we have the true reason why the Küstrin staff was ready to supply Fritz with Fredersdorf - at least this stopped him from reciting more poetry at them!

Ha! That's awesome. We need to write a sequel to Counterpoint. :P

Given that Preuss says Fritz spotted Fredersdorf first as part of a student performance for Fritz in Frankfurt, I thought it's good to have it confirmed such a performance did indeed take place.

Yeah, my impression is we know the performance took place, we don't know when he met Fredersdorf, but since he and Fredersdorf were in the same place at the same time in December 1731, it may have been there. (What our source is on Fredersdorf being stationed in the regiment at Frankfurt, if there is one, I do not know. I'm actually curious now, what our earliest documentary reference to Fredersdorf is.)

Now Fritz doesn not mention having noticed the flutist in particular, but he wouldn't, not being stupid and needing to continue to placate Dad and bff of Dad.

No, not in a letter where he's having to defend listening to the performance at all!

Fritz: Dear Dad, last night I listened to a musical performance. Don't worry, though, it was ONLY because the flutist was tall. I was so busy looking at him the whole time, I didn't hear a single note. If he were a little taller, I'd totally send him to you, but he doesn't quite make the cut. So...can I keep him?

That’s not what he says, though? (Err, is quoted saying by Fritz.)

Sorry, I was going from the memoirs, not the diary. In the memoirs, Fritz quotes Voltaire thusly:

"What! all this study to learn how to kill men; this is really piteous! Is war then so complicated a business that a wider intellect is needed to understand it than is required to draw up the plan of a poem?"

And then Fritz goes on:

You see that he did not understand in the least what he was chattering about. How, I beg you, would this scamp manage matters if, as so often happens to me, a crowd of reports, usually contradicting one another, were brought in to him, and if it were necessary for him to guess at the plans and tricks of an enemy and to decide promptly in an affair which would be of the utmost importance? M. de Voltaire, M. de Voltaire, you don’t know what you are talking about, and you chatter on this matter as your Lusignan chatters on the stage.

Now, maybe this is memoirist Catt putting words in Fritz's and Voltaire's mouth to refute other things Catt's heard people say about war not requiring intelligence or study (but like you point out, this is a minority opinion), *but*, in the diary, in the passage you quoted, we have Fritz saying, "It is bad by the evils it causes: but it takes talent." [Emphasis mine.] Which makes me think that Voltaire is indeed saying that it doesn't require study or talent, and is as easy as writing a poem. And perhaps, by implication, that it can be done by anyone who can write a poem, namely him. Especially if he thinks all wars are the same (you know, that would make fighting a war much easier).

Remember, Voltaire is a hundred times more fatigued than Émilie after giving birth, because he wrote a play!

I mean, lesser readers like myself naturally assume Wilhelmine means the youngest of the siblings present, but hey.

Lol, omg. I mean, maybe she is forgetting what month the baby was born, but yeah, I'm with you. The youngest sibling IN THIS SCENE. Not Sir-Not-Appearing-In-This-Film Ferdinand.

Anyway: so we're in agreement that Heinrich, either directly or indirectly (i.e. via boyfriend) is a likely source for this version of the story?

Yup.

that's not the same as having someone on call whom you can rely on to be there all the time you need him to be, and the longer the war takes, the stronger the need must have been.

Definitely. Remember, he even sent for Maupertuis to join him in Silesia in 1741 because he wanted a civilian friend to talk to. (And then Maupertuis got captured at Mollwitz and noped right out of working for Fritz until after the wars were over, lol.)

Granted, Fritz offered Catt the job before the war started, but I still get the impression, along with everyone else (Thiebault and the English translation's preface writer), that the lecteur/Vorleser job description was "someone to talk to," not "reader."