cahn | Announcing Rheinsberg: Frederick the Great discussion post 10

From:

You know, I just realized that my own new fandom obsession is contemporaneous with yours! Mine is set during the 1745 Jacobite risings in Scotland. The book I just read for fic research (The Military Experience in the Age of Reason) had quite a bit of Frederick the Great in it. I might give your Yuletide fic a try eventually. : ) But honestly I'm probably much too obsessed with my own fandom right now to have the fannish bandwidth for something new...

From:

selenak

Carrying on from the last post:

cahn: Wait, a biographer says he didn't love her?? I mean, I could see if you only, like, read the letters where he was mad at her. But!!

Indeed. It's in Jürgen Luh's biography Der Große which is in general a "he didn't love anyone, except possibly Fredersdorf, he was too emotionally crippled for that and all those letters (not just to Wilhelmine but also to his friends) saying otherwise are just rethorical posing" takedown. Which strikes me as the reverse of the 19th century worship Preuss engages in, and just about as insightful in the complexity of human emotions.

Spreaking of Preuß, though: good grief. Every time I take a look, I'm thrown out again by the sheer mid 19th century nationalism of it all. Starting when after explaining with Fritz & family were raised with French as a primary language, he assures his 19th century readers that while Fritz may have loved French literature as a result, he despised "alles Welsche und die Welschen" - which term, as used in 19th century Germany, covers not just the French but also the Italians and any Latin-European people. Says the man who will soon list all those various Frederician friendships with Frenchmen and Italians.

And later on, he laments how the One King keeps getting maligned as an aggressor, when really, he never was the aggressor in a single war in his life. It was all either righting wrongs to Prussia (Silesia 1), defending his allies (Silesia 2) or defending German freedom (guess what). The later, btw, is a case in point of how attitudes had shifted from one century to the next. Fritz himself certainly sold the 7-Years-War as him defending German freedom of religion in his propaganda, among other things, i.e. himself as the champion of Protestantism which otherwise would be crushed under Habsburg tyranny. When triying to get the other German principalities on your side, that's the smartest argument to make, given that the 30 Years War is still just a century plus ago. But "freedom of religion" is no longer the selling argument in a century in which national feelings start to get increasingly more toxic all around, preparing the ground for the hell of the 20th century, which is why I find it hard to take the dispassionate attitude which is necesssary when such paragraphs keep coming up. Preuß is here ascribing ideas of nationalism to a mid 18th century mindset that just weren't there.

I was morbidly curious how invading Saxony is defending German freedom, but of ourse it's because the Saxons secretly are already yearning to become Prussian citizens and it's just the corrupt aristocracy, i.e. Saxon PM Brühl & Co., that's at fault for forcing Fritz to invade them. Bear in mind here what we've mentioned about the Saxon regiments forced into Prussian service who promptly deserted. At Prague, they even shot their Prussian officers while doing so. Mind you, Fritz won Prague regardless. But: Dead Prussians: 14 300 men. Dead Austrians: a thousand soldiers less. All of which was already well known at the time of Preuß' writing. Whereas, say, a contemporary loyal Prussian subject like Lehndorff who doesn't doubt the "the King was right, he had to attack first, the Saxons would have stabbed us in the back otherwise" and the "the King is a genius!" premise, is also able to later in the war (which of course he sees the results of first hand) go "so maybe the King shouldn't have insulted all the powerful women in Europe all the time?" and "the Austrian generals are called cowards by us, but can't help but notice they lose way less people and have provoked the King in some rash costly battles" . And of course when the dust is settled, Lehndorff, with all the relief and joy about the war ending and all the admiration for the the King and Dearest of All Princes he has, can make a diary entry (February 5th 1763) saying: Thus all our misery is over. But if one recalls the countless victims this war has cost, how many provinces were devastated, how many families have been ruined, and all just so that all the rulers can go back the status quo ante, one wants to scream. Now the question of the coinage has to be solved. If the King doesn't help with this as quickly as possible, we're all ruined. The prices for all goods have all risen so far that we're facing a permanent state of debt.

And when you compare this to one century later Preuß - and not just him - going on about how wonderful and heroic and necessary the war was, having learned all the wrong lessons from it, and you know, as a reader, it will just get worse, you want to scream, too.

Seriously, just one sentence or two wondering whether it was all worth it on Preuß' part would make this easier for me to stomach. He can still root for Fritz! (Lehndorff does, too.) Just - good lord, man, stop trying to sell this as having benefited the then non-existing German nation.

And speaking of historical attitudes, unsurprisingly, Preuß is also one for slut-shaming. With the Marquise de Pompadour and Elisaveta, naturally (he can't with MT and in general has a sort of begrudging Frederician respect for her, but SHE WAS WRONG and couldn't see Fritz' historic mission). When he's sneering about Louis XV along the lines of "and then that woman even became some de facto minister - and what kind of a man gives his commoner paramour he's not even sleeping with anymore important governing responsibilities, huh?", the, err, Prussian parallel does not seem to occur to him, but well, join the club, Preuß. He's also snide about Émilie. None of this is surprising in a 19th century historian, I know, I know, and I've often come across this before, but for some reason, this time around it just keeps throwing me out. In conclusion, it will be a long while till I properly read that multi volume biography.

From:

selenak

cahn: It's really hard for me to get a bead on EC; I like to think she was more interesting than Fritz let her be, but it's not super clear from what I've seen. Everything does point to her being really nice, though!

Gisela Langfeld, who wrote the preface to the 2007 reprint of Lehndorff's diaries, points out that on one of the occasions when he must have reread his diaries much later in life and scribbled little observations on the margins - like commenting his first "It's all over between Heinrich and me, woe!" entry with "nope, still friends now when we're in our mid 60s!" - , he also writes re: one of his harsher entries on EC's boringness that now that he's happily retired, he finds he was unfair towards her, simply because he felt miserable in his job, and that coloured his judgment.

This being said, I think nobody, including defenders like Thiébault who writes a lot of nice things about her, have ever made a case for EC having been a riveting conversationalist or blessed with great charm. Ziebura in her biography of the three wives distills it to: both EC and Louise suffered from the get go from various disadvantages aside from the fact their husbands didn't want them. They were shy, either stuttered or lisped - comments on this in various memoirs and diaries are ambiguous enough for it to even have been no more than dialect. For example, Lehndorff notes that when the Queen and her sisters (a younger one in addition to Louise) were together, they spoke "incomprehensibly; it is supposed to be German but I can't make out a single word of it" - which does sound to me as if they were talking Plattdeutsch, a northern German dialect sounding a lot like Dutch. When they first got introduced to the Hohenzollerns, they froze and weren't able to say anything, which came across as dumb, rude or both to this not collection of by and large not very kind people. And they evidently didn't get the kind of education that would allow them to make interesting or at least witty conversation. Now, EC tried to learn all this during the Rheinsberg years to please her husband, but the result can't have been that impressive, because one of the things Lehndorff complains about is that dinners with her tend to take really long because she talks a lot "without having anything interesting to say". (The poor woman evidently was a in a "damned if she does, damned if she doesn't" type of situation - at first she was dismissed as boring by her in-laws when she didn't make conversation, and then she was dismissed by her courtiers as boring when she tried, but without the gift for bonmots or interesting narration.) (And of course, as a courtier you had to stay for as long as the Queen wanted you there, until she officially ended the meal/party/ gathering. Cue resentful Lehndorff who'd rather be at home with a good book and/or alone with EC's brother-in-law.)

Ziebura thinks one reason why while pre AW's death both Braunschweig sisters were treated identically while post AW's death Louise's cedit with everyone starts to go upwards while EC still is stuck in the role of boring, and now also whiny queen as far as her in-laws and parts of her court are concerned, until the later 1760s, is that even with an unconventional court like the Prussian one where the King is only present intermittendly, everyone does take their cues from the King. Who is consistently kind to Louise post AW's death, and that allows her to gain in confidence and florish, and because she avoids becoming partisan for one particular family member, she becomes everyone's calm point and confidante. (Plus, as Lehndorff approvingly notes, her dinners tended to be short, not endlessly long.) Which EC couldn't be; EC, being human, resented, for example, that Amalie got so much more of Fritz' attention and thus relationships between them were somewhat terse, and she also felt somewhat outclassed by Mina, the one in-law whom all the Hohenzollerns had been instantly impressed by (because Mina was beautiful, gracious and witty when arriving) and thus avoided her when she could in their younger days. (Post mid 60s it became academic due to Heinrich's break-up with his wife.)

Another EC disadvantage in her particular role must have been that she didn't have a natural (or learned) "presence" and couldn't command attention in a room, which was expected from a Queen. It's this factor which Lehndorff in his "SD versus EC" compare and contrast after SD's death hones in on. Unfortunately, this wasn't something that could be helped. I mean, you can learn the social graces, but the ability to draw attention to yourself not in an irritating but in a impressing way is much, much harder to aquire.

On the plus side, EC had evidently the ability to be kind to her subordinates (usually; when she snaps at Lehndorff after SD's death in public, she apologizes to him a day later, which is another problem, because on the one hand, it shows she noticed she's hurt him, otoh, Queens don't apologize to courtiers), her investment into various charities was long term and doesn't seem to have been just out of boredom but because she really wanted to help people, her reply to the condolence letter from the Marquise d'Argens, formerly a dancer & actress, is without snobbery and very human instead, and she manages decades of life with the Hohenzollern without strangling a single one, starting with her husband. All of which is anything but given in the position she found herself in for decades. Just for comparison: two of Fritz' sisters responded to their miserable marriages and illnesses by sinking in non-stop depressions and stopped interacting with the outside world. Whereas EC never stopped reaching out to people; she must have had an optimistic core and a lot of resilience.

In summation: the ways in which she was remarkable were there, but they don't translate to something you could easily render in fiction, not least because they went in tandem to the ways she came across as dull.

Edited Date: 2020-01-25 12:43 pm (UTC)

From:

selenak

Mildred, you asked about which anonymous pamphlet Catt got his AW death intel from.

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.

Edited Date: 2020-01-26 06:28 am (UTC)

From:

selenak

cahn:
Me: ...I don't know about that, it seems to me that if you had a portrait of someone in your bedroom --
The ghost of Fritz, in the back: *raises hand*

selenak:
ROTFLOL. Ah, but him and MT were special.

mildred_of_midgard:

Also ROTFLOL. Don't forget Joseph! Joseph the Rational Fanboy, and Fritz the A+ Troll. (What do you think Peter III had in his bedroom?)

:) Well, firstly, Joseph having a Fritz portrait in his bedroom was something I've made up for the crack fic. I don't think he'd have gotten away with it in rl while Mom was alive. And afterwards he was out of his fanboy phase, though still impressed, of course. Mind you, he later did put up a portrait of Catherine there - after meeting her - so....

Secondly, you reposting the Casanova descriptions has reminded me that not only did Fritz have the MT portrait in his bedroom but that, according to Casanova, he had one of Barbarina as well as of D'Argens sister-in-law, who was also a dancer. The later two were Penses, so he might have had them for the artistic value and because Pense was the court painter whom he paid anyway. The MT portrait he actively asked for. So I maintain arch nemesis specialness!

Re: owner of the original "Sans Souci" trademark:

Per MacDonogh, "Sans Souci" was a childhood nickname of sister Charlotte, but for all I know, he's thinking of some other Charlotte. Would you happen to know, O Knowledgeable About the Siblings?

Nope, not mentioned in the bios I've read so far, at least not that I recall. However, I have not read...

Speaking of the siblings, having you read Pangels' Königskinder im Rokoko? He cites it a lot, but I have no idea if it's outdated (1976) or a good resource or what.

That. Though my local libraries probably have it. Aaaanyway, if Mantteuffel calls his country estate "Sorgenfrey", I doubt he did so after one of the Hohenzollern sisters who was already married off to Braunschweig by the time he started to hang out with Fritz. So my money is still on him for having come up with the name first, for now.

He could have Fritzplained so many things, Heinrich!

Well, he tried his best once Heinrich actually was in Russia. Probably while going via Suhm's old letters. ;)

(Can't help pointing out that Fritz's favorites were better, though. :P)

No contest if we're talking about his long term guys (minus Voltaire), but as we've seen, the witty pretties...

Incidentally, I should say that Heinrich's boyfriend disasters did have talents other than money wasting (and presumably sex); Mara really was a top musician (found an admiring reference in Lehndorff when Mara is still a teen in AW' s employ; Heinrich took over some of AW's staff that Louise wouldn't, including the artists, but since it was war didn't actually live with them until later; and then he financed Mara the musical studies in Paris, after which he did get involved with now grown up Mara, which, well, da capo al fine). Kalkreuth made a military career under FW2 and FW3 up to Field Marshal. (And, probably resentful because Heinrich had still dumped him for Kaphengst despite Kalkreuth having gone to the effort of compromising poor Mina, claimed he was the true genius of the Seven-Years-War and had devised all of Heinrich's strategies. Later historians, able to check who was when where and everyone's correspondance, didn't buy it, but Miraubeau did. So also did early historians offended at the Fritz criticism. "So he's claiming the Great King wasn't even that great, huh? Well, he certainly wasn't, it was all the boyfriend!") Tauentzien Jr., he of the teaching an actor to play Fritz at the Comedie Francaise, also made a military career under FW2 and FW3, though not as impressive as his Dad's under Fritz. Kaphengst seems to have been not just a party animal in the obvious sense but, before it got out of control someone with a gift to cheer up any society. (Early on, Lehndorff likes him way more than Kalkreuth, but that, err, changes later. Somehow I do not think it was solely because Kaphengst spent more and more of Heinrich's money...) Which wasn't to be underestimated because Heinrich in the mid 1760s comes across as permanently depressed and in a bad mood, lashing out at people (poor Mina). Not that surprising when you consider the war was over, the post of post traumatic stress had arrived, and essentially he was suddenly without an occupation again. I mean, living the country life in Rheinsberg is lovely, but he wasn't even forty, and going from basically co-commander of the army to gentleman of leisure with no government responsibilities at that age? Equally unsurprisingly, this starts to turn around when by the end of the 1760s he gets to travel abroad for the first time (the Netherlands, Sweden, Russia) and gets to work as a diplomat and negotiator. Cue end of Heinrich the melancholic and bad tempered and return of Heinrich the charming and endearing in Lehndorff's journals.

Which incidentally would imply Thiébault had access to Wilhelmine's memoirs, probably via all those exiled intellectuals at Fritz's court, and Catt didn't.

I noticed Hamilton and Preuß both have it in for Thiébault and call him "unreliable". Possibly because of the similarities to W & P? Anyway, preface editor quotes him snarking about Catt a bit (not in terms of reliability, just that he, T, had to do the actual reading as in reading out loud when Fritz didn't do it himself because Catt's voice wasn't even that pleasant) but cautions that he considers T as somewhat unreliable, too. What the diary editor with all the listing of Catt's alternate sources which I quoted in my comment above never mentions are W's memoirs, or even the possibility of them. Maybe potentially chatty Bayreuth artists just thought Catt would blab to Fritz and Thiebault would not?

On the other hand! Fritz has Voltaire arrested for possessing poetry that Fritz wrote that he doesn't want the rest of Europe to see; sends Voltaire more potentially damning poetry almost immediately after getting back in touch with Voltaire*. I know Voltaire is special, but sometimes Fritz's judgment...

Very true. And Preface writer quotes a couple of non-Catt sources on him being a very likeable fellow when he starts out with Fritz, among them D'Argens (who also assures Fritz he can absolutely trust Catt. Then again, D'Argens had also reccommended de Prades.)

There's also another tidbit Catt and Voltaire have that agrees with W/P/T, to which they don't have access: Fritz thought *he* was about to be executed.

Now this can't have come from Eichel - which, see other comment, preface writer says proded Catt with other information - and thus sounds like a genuine Fritz information.

Oof. Well, my Peter has strong feelings of insecurity around Hans Hermann, the romantic hero who was everything Peter isn't, so while Lehndorff might be able to vent about the Katte clan and feel better, because his beef with them is all events outside Lehndorff's control, Peter's going to be silently dying inside during this part of the convo. If the Kattes are that unworthy, and they *still* have more favor than he does...

Aw, I wouldn't want to cause him further angst. It's just that between Lehndorff coming across in the diaries as liking and admiring him and considering him the true hero of 1730, Lehndorff's general irritation at the Kattes (minus My Amiable Cousin), and Lehndorff's own issues with Fritz not promoting him (or at least transferring him to another job), well...

Edited Date: 2020-01-26 11:09 am (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

As expected, it took less than half the time to redo the manual cleanup as it did to do it in the first place. It was still incredibly tedious, and I'm going to take a break before doing any more correspondents, as well as possibly request book bribes for the next set. ;)

I would like to get Ulrike (there's more than I initially reported, because the form of address changes from "queen of Sweden" to "dowager queen of Sweden") and possibly Catherine the Great, especially because of the overlap with Heinrich and the Polish partition. Also because we should just have the two greats. :D

On to the text itself. It's definitely lower quality than the ones where I didn't have to OCR before translating. I did what I could in terms of cleanup, but it's about a thousand pages, and no way did I check everything. It's still better than what we had, which was hundreds of pages of French.

I had to delete the footnotes, which were mostly in German, and I tried to catch all the references to the footnotes in the text, but if you see a stray number 3 or whatever that doesn't make sense, it's probably a footnote I missed. If something doesn't make sense and you want to see if there's a footnote, or if the text got OCRed wrong, I tried to include the urls for each letter, so you can inspect the original page.

However, because of letters that run to multiple pages, and also overlap of different letters on the same page, and also the inevitable bugs, there are probably missing urls. Fortunately, the urls have a predictable format: http://friedrich.uni-trier.de/de/politKorr/21/265/image, where 21 is the volume number and 265 the page number, so you can manually navigate at will.

Numbers in general the OCR struggled with, so if you see that Fritz had 'go' of something, he might have had 90 of them.

The division into paragraphs may also not exactly match the original.

If you see any truncated, missing, or otherwise buggy letters (like the French is in the translation section), please don't hesitate to draw this to my attention! No bribes required for fixing bugs. :D

Finally, another random thing that cropped up in my reading: Seydlitz dies, and guess what? It's his fault for not listening to his doctors! According to the man who notoriously never listened to a doctor and always said he regretted it when he did. But only der einzige is allowed to know better than the doctors, I suppose.

At least he's writing this to Heinrich and not Seydlitz's widow, although god knows he probably wrote that to her too. :P She was just his NURSE anyway.

Okay, uploading, and off to catch up on the rest of this glorious fast-paced fandom! :D

Edited Date: 2020-01-27 05:17 am (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

who doesn't want to wade through 500k (600k?) words worth of comments

Nearly 700k! 690,791.

selenak and I have over 300k each, and you're up to a respectable 60k, not counting your actual post (as opposed to comments) content.

I should cobble together some code to count

rheinsberg words. We're compiling a book!

Okay, off to 1) read the new Heinrich fic, 2) put together more Rheinsberg posts. No rest for the gossipy sensationalists with scholarly instincts!

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Detective work continues!

First, a request for subdetective

selenak. Remember when we were wondering where Jägerhof was, but it was ungoogleable? You bringing to my attention that it was converted to a bank in 1765 suddenly gave me two search terms that were extreeemely helpful in narrowing down the possibilities. I've uploaded a volume called Daheim to our library. Can you check the first paragraph on page 472 and tell us if you manage to extract any relevant info?

Is it in fact the site on the corner of Jäger- and Oberwallstrasse where there used to be a royal hunting lodge? (My German skimming abilities, /o\. I haven't Google translated any of this, as I don't feel like retyping it manually.) Per Google Maps, that street corner is pretty close to the Tiergarten, which used to be a royal hunting ground (as I think that article may be trying to tell me in its German words).

Second!

The editor of the Lehndorff diaries is kind enough to provide names and family relations in the index to the third volume, which means much of our work on the Katte family was redundant, lol. :P But it still ended up being useful that we did the legwork ourselves, because it was a key part of me putting together the Katte family trees, which contain far more than the index provides.

So! Guess what Peter's two sons' names are. (I had already decided what I was going to name them if they made it into the fic, and I was spot on to 18th century naming practices.)

Clues: Peter's full name is Peter Karl Christoph, and his father-in-law's name is Friedrich Ernst.

Well, I had decided that the firstborn, born in the early 1740s, absolutely had to be a Friedrich, for two reasons, and also that there was going to be a Karl or Christoph, and one of the kids was going to have Ernst as a second name.

Btw, it does not escape me that Hans Heinrich von Katte's first son to be born after FW becomes king is a Friedrich Wilhelm, and the next one is a Friedrich Albrecht Wilhelm. And that whole family does the mixing of family names on the father's and mother's sides: Hans is a Katte name and Hermann a Wartensleben name, for example. So that's partly where I was getting my naming practices from.

So, first index entry for the von Keith sons: Friedrich; second: Karl Ernst.

Called it! (I admit I was thinking of making the one a Friedrich Ernst so the other could be a Karl Emil, but only as an inside joke that exactly two people would get. ;) )

I don't actually have dates on birth order, but the only one with details on his life in the index is Friedrich. He may simply have been the more intelligent and/or ambitious one, but he may actually have been the firstborn.

The possible older son, Friedrich v. Keith, son of Peter Karl Christoph and Louisa Origana (now the third spelling of that name I've seen), is listed as "preuss. Leg.-Rat 1768, Gesandter am sardin. Hof 1774." Envoy to the Sardinian court, then, and Google tells me the former is Legationsrat, which is some kind of foreign service position.

But anyway,

selenak, check out the index in volume 3 if you're ever wondering who someone Lehndorff mentions is. It's much better than the index to volume 1. (I wonder if that was by reader request too.) It's practically cheating by our existing standards, but it's such efficient cheating. :D

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Okay, this is my first draft. I tried to keep it concise. It went against the grain. :P Tell me what you think I should put in and take out. Thanks to the fact that it will go up in a post, not a comment, it will remain editable in the future (thank goodness!).

1709: Wilhelmine, older and most beloved sister of Friedrich, born July 3.
1710: Future Louis XV of France born February 15.
1712: Friedrich born January 24.
1713: Friedrich I of Prussia dies February 25. Friedrich Wilhelm I becomes king.
1715: Louis XIV of France dies September 1. His great-grandson becomes Louis XV.
1722: Augustus Wilhelm, second son of Friedrich Wilhelm I, born August 9.
1726: Heinrich, third son of Friedrich Wilhelm, born January 18.
1727: George I dies June 11.
1730: Crown Prince Friedrich tries to escape his abusive father August 5, is caught and imprisoned at Küstrin. He is required to watch his friend and probable lover Katte executed as an accomplice November 6. Friedrich is pardoned later in the month, but kept under house arrest at Küstrin.
1731: Friedrich remains imprisoned all year. He meets Fredersdorf, future valet and unofficial first minister of Prussia, some time during this year. Wilhelmine marries the son of the Margrave of Bayreuth November 20.
1732: Friedrich is released from Küstrin in February and given his own regiment at Neuruppin.
1733: Under duress, Friedrich marries Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick.
1736: Friedrich moves to Rheinsberg. He begins corresponding with Voltaire.
1740: Friedrich Wilhelm dies May 31. Friedrich becomes Friedrich II. He invites a number of musicians, intellectuals, and artists to his court, including Francesco Algarotti, whom he makes a count. He meets Voltaire in person but does not yet offer him a permanent place at court. Voltaire pays a brief visit to the Prussian court. The Anti-Machiavel, Friedrich's pamphlet on being an honorable ruler, is published by Voltaire in the fall. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI dies October 20. Due to the Pragmatic Sanction, his daughter Maria Theresia is supposed to be recognized as heir to the kingdom and her husband Franz supposed to be elected Holy Roman Emperor. However their rule is immediately challenged. Friedrich invades Silesia December 16, beginning the War of the Austrian Succession. It will be over 7 years before all the powers of Europe recognize the Pragmatic Sanction.
1741: Algarotti leaves Prussia for the first time. Joseph, the son of Maria Theresia and future Joseph II, is born March 13. Elizabeth I seizes power in Russia in a coup December 6.
1742: The First Silesian War ends June 11, leaving Prussia in control of Silesia.
1743: Voltaire visits the Prussian court briefly.
1744-1745: The Second Silesian War begins August 15. Friedrich's younger sister Ulrike marries the Crown Prince and future King of Sweden. Future Friedrich Wilhelm II, son of Augustus Wilhelm and nephew of Friedrich, born September 25.
1745: End of the Second Silesian War December 25. Prussian control of Silesia is recognized. Franz is elected Holy Roman Emperor Franz I September 13. Wilhelmine has lunch with Maria Theresia in Bayreuth, thus deepening an already existing rift between her and her brother Friedrich.
1746: Friedrich begins building Sanssouci. Reconciliation with Wilhelmine.
1747: Algarotti returns to Prussia.
1748: War of the Austrian Succession ends with the Pragmatic Sanction recognized.
1750: Voltaire joins the Prussian court.
1752: Heinrich forced to marry.
1753: Voltaire and Friedrich have fought so much for three years that Voltaire leaves Prussia, never to see Friedrich again. Briefly detained in Frankfurt on Friedrich's orders. Algarotti returns to Italy, never to see Friedrich again.
1755: Friedrich makes an incognito trip to Netherlands. There, he meets Henri de Catt, his future reader for 25 years.
1756: Start of the Seven Years' War: Austria, Russia, France, and Sweden against Prussia and a loosely allied Great Britain. Prussia instigates the war by invading and occupying Saxony in August.
1757: Fredersdorf retires due to bad health. Major Prussian defeat at Kolin June 18. Queen Mother Sophia Dorothea dies June 28. Augustus Wilhelm disgraced July 29 over his military decisions and cashiered. Major Prussian victory at Rossbach November 5. Major Prussian victory at Leuthen December 5.
1758: Fredersdorf dies January 12. Augustus Wilhelm dies June 12. Wilhelmine dies October 14. Major Prussian defeat at Hochkirch October 14.
1760: Major Prussian defeat at Kunersdorf August 12. George II dies October 25. His grandson becomes George III.
1762: Elizabeth of Russia dies January 5. Her nephew becomes Peter III. Under Peter III, Russia switches sides in the war and joins Prussia. A coup overthrows Peter III July 9. His wife becomes Catherine II, future Catherine the Great. Peter III dies in captivity July 17. Russia withdraws from the war.
1763: The Seven Years' War ends February 15 in a status quo ante bellum. Prussia remains in control of Silesia.
1764: Algarotti dies May 3.
1765: Franz I dies August 18. His son becomes Joseph II.
1769: First meeting between Joseph II and Friedrich, at Neisse, August 25.
1772: The First Partition of Poland divides part of Poland among Russia, Prussia, and Austria.
1774: Louis XV dies May 10. His son becomes Louis XVI.
1778: Voltaire dies May 30.
1778 - 1779: Joseph attempts to claim Bavaria. Friedrich opposes him. The largely desultory and bloodless War of the Bavarian Succession is eventually concluded by diplomacy.
1780: Maria Theresia dies November 29.
1782: Catt is dismissed from service as Friedrich's reader for financial irregularities.
1786: Friedrich dies August 17. His nephew becomes Friedrich Wilhelm II.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

So I'm fascinated by that letter from a liar to a liar. Particularly this line:

you are my witness to what I have done for Katte. You know: I did offer my life not once but a thousand times to save his.

"you are my witness"

"not once but a thousand times"

How is Grumbkow a witness? Even allowing for hyperbole, how did Fritz have the opportunity to offer his life on more than one occasion? Every single version of the story we have, he finds out about Katte's execution on the same morning it happened, and though I'm sure he repeatedly begged for Katte's life on that occasion, the only witnesses reported were Münchow and whoever was with him. That isn't the kind of thing I would describe as "not once," but rather "only once, in the heat of the moment, even if in several sentences, one right after another."

But given what we've talked about with Catt, I now think *none* of these stories comes from Fritz's mouth, and even if he talked to Wilhelmine, she obviously has a very skewed picture of what happened. So is the timing way off?

There were only a few days between Katte's sentence and his execution. Five? Okay, FW's decision is dated November 1, execution is 7:45 am November 6. Less than five days. There wasn't a lot of time for Fritz to offer his life more than once. But did he find out before Katte showed up? Did he have time to maybe write a letter? That Grumbkow saw?

Or did he start bargaining before there was a death sentence? It didn't seem like he thought there was that much danger of death, in his letters to Wilhelmine, but maybe there was some bravado.

Was Grumbkow at Küstrin on November 6? I have unreliable secondary sources saying he showed up later in November, when Fritz was pardoned, but I've seen no one say he was there that early in the month.

Or is Fritz just bluffing Grumbkow and rewriting history in hopes Grumbkow goes along with it?

What's going on here?

From:

selenak

I did this once for another fandom of mine, years and years ago, and now couldn't resist. So: mes amies, The Broccoli Test, as applied to Frederician pairings.

Fritz/Voltaire: Again, the easiest answer. They fail, they blame each other for not understanding the other guy wants broccoli, not to mention that Voltaire tries to swindle the casheer and Fritz tries to take the broccoli without paying altogether. But: once the security staff tries to throw them out, they unite in making fun of said security so efficiently that all the disgruntled customers can't help laughing. In the ensueing hilarity, they escape, and promptly start arguing in the car park.

Fritz/Fredersdorf: Well, Fredersdorf passes with flying colours. He has the broccoli ready before Fritz has finished mouthing the "B". Their true problem is that when Fredersdorf wants broccoli and for some reason can't get it himself, Fritz understands Fredersdorf wants broccoli, alright, but he also thinks the gesturing means Fredersdorf has fallen sick and in a panic shouts down the entire store, ordering everyone to get his boyfriend some BROCCOLI.

Fritz/Algarotti: Algarotti understands Fritz wants broccoli, sure, but he thinks broccoli is boring and brings home some dishy alternate vegetable. He's persuasive enough to make Fritz eat it, but that's the reason why Fritz never sends Algarotti out shopping agian.

Fritz/Suhm: Poor young Fritz never got enough pocket money to buy broccoli, so Suhm used to buy it for him as a gift. That way, he's learned all about Fritz' broccoli taste and favourite flavours. Unfortunately, they never make it into the supermarket at the same time to test whether Fritz has any idea what Suhm wants when gesturing; death intervenes.

Fritz/Peter: Talk about getting your signals mixed. Peter thinks Fritz' handsigns mean Fritz wants him to go away and not embarrass him in the supermarket, Fritz thinks Peter just doesn't care about his eagerness for broccoli. It's tragic.

Fritz/Katte: I wouldn't dare. Over to you, Mildred.

Extra bonus: The siblings.

Fritz/Wilhelmine: Wilhelmine of course understands Fritz wants broccoli. The problem is: so does MT, who arrives at the stall at just the same time Wilhelmine does. Instead of scratching MT's eyes out, Wilhelmine starts chatting to her, which an observing Fritz takes as a reason to shout "TRAITOR" across all aisles.

Fritz/Heinrich: Of course Heinrich knows Fritz wants broccoli, it's not like Fritz is in any way subtle about it, what with the ellbowing all other customers in line to the lone open cash register, who are so pissed off that they're ganging up on him. Meanwhile, Heinrich grabs another supermarket employee and persuades them to open another register, emerging with an armful of nicely filled and packaged broccoli bags. However, by then Fritz has managed to make it to the other register with a lone bedraggled broccoli bag, looking like a walking punching bag, but walking, which impresses a passerby so much that he makes a photo which promptly gets tweeted everywhere with the punchline "Hero of the Broccoli War".

Edited Date: 2020-01-28 03:15 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

So I decided I would reread the Fritz bios that I read way back in July/August, before we started our lovely conversations here, back when none of us knew a fraction of what we know now.

It took me several weeks to get through MacDonogh, due to concentration difficulties, but I highlighted passages as I went (benefits of e-books), and now here they are!

This isn't a review or systematic write-up of the book, bu rather a collection of potentially interesting or entertaining things that we haven't already talked about. The caveat I've repeated ad nauseam: MacDonogh is exactly like Wikipedia, in that he contains a lot of good material, not one of bit of which is reliable until you've tracked it down somewhere else. In fact, when I realized Wikipedia relied heavily on him, I suddenly understood a lot about Wikipedia.

But some very good advice I got when starting graduate school was that it's easy to warn people away from this author and that author, but if you only read authors who have nothing wrong with them, you'll never read anything. Read widely and critically.

And with that caveat, here's MacDonogh!

Grandpa Friedrich I:

His second wife, Frederick William's mother Sophia-Charlotte of Hanover (the sister of King George I of Great Britain), seems to have preferred her wranglings with the court philosopher Leibniz to any form of congress with her extravagant husband. She is reported to have told a courtier 'That idiot Leibniz, who wants to teach me about the infinitesimally small! Has he therefore forgotten that I am the wife of Frederick the First, how can he imagine that I am unacquainted with my own husband?'

To understand the lavishness of the conception [of F1's palace], one has only to think that the famous Amber Room of Tsarskoe Selo was designed for the Schloss. Peter the Great went into raptures when he saw it, and Frederick's austere son promptly had it packed up and dispatched to Russia in exchange for a squad of the tall soldiers he loved so much.

Tiny terror FW:

His tutor, Jean-Philippe Rebeur, had no more luck than his parents. The only way he could instill even the three Rs into the boy was by constantly drawing his metaphors from a battery of military terms. The result, as one recent biographer has expressed it, was to put Frederick William 'on a life-long war-footing with Latin, grammar and spelling.'

Tiny terrorized FW?

Extraordinary as it may sound, George had bullied Frederick William as a child, and married Caroline of Ansbach, the woman Frederick William had his eyes on at the time.

I wonder if MacDonogh has got George and FW mixed up, since he likes to mix people up. Or maybe George started it, and FW finished it?

FW inaugurating his reign:

'Gentlemen, our good master is dead,' he told his father’s courtiers. 'The new king bids you all go to hell.'

Size IS everything, according to FW:

When a stag was sighted, there were hunts in the forest at Stern around the king’s modest lodge. The building [Jagdhaus Stern] still exists, its main room of the Tabakscollegium decorated with hunting scenes, the king in person administering the coup de grâce. A more unusual decorative feature are the antlers shed each year by the king's pet stag 'Big Hanss', a present from the Alte Dessauer. Given his royal owner, the beast was naturally also a giant: the king appreciated size above all else.

FW's A+ parenting toward his daughters:

In general he was not overly impressed with girl-children: he was concerned that they might not all find husbands. He even went so far as to describe them as weeds, and to suggest that they should be drowned at birth, like kittens.

And toward his son:

When the British court asked for a portrait of the crown prince to show to Amalia, Frederick William replied unkindly that she should be sent a picture of a 'big monkey, that's what he looks like.'

Voltaire might agree? He used to call his monkey Frederic II and call Fritz "Luc", after his monkey Luc, and say that Fritz was "like a monkey, he bites the hand that caresses him." (Fritz, as we recall, had Voltaire's rooms at Sanssouci decorated with monkeys when after their acrimonious parting.)

"Brother Voltaire" the honorary Hohenzollern indeed!

Fritz at Küstrin:

Frederick William was keen to wean him on to beer, Küstrin beer being apparently rather good. One does not get the impression that Frederick was utterly convinced, and he told his father that he had been drinking champagne, but only under doctors' orders.

Rare moment of frat boy fun at Küstrin:

At the end of September (1731), he received a visit from his mad, bad cousin Charles of Brandenburg-Schwedt. They drank the king’s health and, in a suitably hearty gesture, smashed all the glasses afterwards. To his new friend Frau von Wreech, Frederick confessed the extent of the damage: 'We didn't really drink that much, but we made a great deal of noise, we smashed a few windows and reduced a few ovens to rubble.'

*Not*, note, the mad, bad (and dangerous to know? Or at least to be married to) Margrave Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg-Schwedt that Wilhelmine didn't marry and poor other sister Sophia Dorothea did.

Wikipedia doesn't give me any hints that Charles was actually mad or bad, this one window-smashing episode aside, so I wonder if MacDonogh is getting them confused. Or perhaps that branch of the family could give the main Hohenzollern line a run for their money too!

Fritz getting married:

It was Seckendorff who sent the gossip back to Vienna about the wedding night, 'That the king had to parley and threaten the crown prince to get him into the bridal bed, but that he didn't stay there more than an hour and afterwards was clearly to be seen walking in the valley…'

EC getting married:

The linchpin of Elisabeth's suite was a massive ceremonial bed, a present from the king (she actually slept in a smaller one alongside). Questions were being raised once again as to whether there was any sexual congress between the couple.

Fritz at Rheinsberg nicknaming his friends:

Ernst-Christoph von Manteuffel, for example, was 'Quinze-vingts' because he claimed he was 'too blind to illuminate the prince', or sometimes he was 'the Devil', which played on the diabolic part of his name. There was 'Caesarion', an allusion to the diminutive emperor in 'Keyserlingk', who was also the 'Swan of Mitau', in a reference both to his gracefulness and to the Baltic port near his birthplace. Algarotti was another swan, sometimes of Padua, occasionally Mantua, once or twice Venice. His architect was 'Apollodore' or 'le chevalier Bernin'. Jordan was 'Hephaestion' or 'Tindal'. Grumbkow was referred to as 'Biberius' or 'the Cassubian': he came from Pomerania, like the Slavic tribes of that name. Fouqué was 'Chastity'. The military man was reputed one of the best actors of the court. Lastly, the Saxon envoy Suhm was 'Diaphanes'.

Note on "Quinze-vingts": "After the hospital for the blind in Paris. Saint I Louis’s foundation offered beds for 300 blind men and women: fifteen times twenty. The number was associated with the blind ever after."

I'm not entirely sure Caesarion counts as an emperor, but that's not nearly as bad as not recognizing Hephaestion and struggling to come up with a connection to Hephaestus. I promise you, MacDonogh, Fritz knew who Hephaestion was. (I believe he later acquired a painting of Alexander and Hephaestion for his picture gallery.)

Speculates that "Tindal" may be an allusion to William Tyndale.

He doesn't say anything about Bernin, but I'm guessing Bernini.

Apollodorus is probably Trajan's architect, not the more famous ones that immediately came to my mind when I saw this name.

The architect in question is Knobelsdorff, btw.

Diaphanes is a bit of a mystery, different biographers have different explanations. MacDonogh attributes it to Suhm's open-heartedness. If I ever write my Suhm fic, you'll see my own headcanon.

Fritz with his friends at Rheinsberg:

This circle formed the basis for Frederick's 'Bayard Order', commemorating the famous French knight. No joke was intended. The order existed for the serious study of the arts of war. It had twelve members, including Frederick’s brothers William and Henry and, uncharacteristically, his sister Charlotte. The remainder were close friends. The Grand Master was Fouqué. Deliberations were held in archaic French.

EC can get favors out of FW for Fritz, but doesn't quite pass the broccoli test:

At the beginning of 1736, for example, Frederick William asked her just what was missing at Rheinsberg: 'I wasn’t aware of anything other than mirrors and chairs … I forgot to mention the ticking for the tableware.' A few days later the king plundered his father’s uninhabited palaces and 150 English chairs arrived at Rheinsberg. Frederick, however, had a rather more grandiose conception for his new home, and he put them straight into storage. He did not want any old junk which his father found lying around the royal palaces.

Bielfeld reports on life at Rheinsberg:

Keyserlingk entered the halls like a whirlwind, 'or like Boreas in the Ballet of the Rose'. Bielfeld later encountered the Balt returning from hunting dressed in a nightshirt. 'While he changed, he recited passages from the Henriade to me and long chunks of German poetry, he spoke to me about horses and hunting, performed a few pirouettes … and discoursed all the while on politics, mathematics, architecture and tactics.'

'We see the prince and princess only at table, at play, at the ball, the concert, or other common pleasures of which they participate.' Despite the restricted size of the house, Frederick could elude his courtiers, and concerts were by invitation only. He was generally closeted in his seven-room empire upstairs, but he was occasionally sighted, wearing the uniform of his regiment, Bielfeld regretted his inaccessibility: 'I would freely go some leagues barefooted, at least once a week, to enjoy the delicious pleasure of supping in his company.' There was still a chance to see him amusing himself at the ball: 'The prince dances in a noble and graceful manner. In a word, he loves all rational pleasures, except the chase, the exercise of which he thinks as troublesome, and scarce more useful than chimney-sweeping.'

One day Frederick came down from his ivory tower (it was indeed a tower) and joined in the debauch. Champagne was served and everyone got drunk. Bielfeld had to go out to empty his bladder. When he returned, the crown princess had changed his water for celery wine, which he then, in turn, poured into his wine to dilute it. 'I became joyous.' Frederick made him drink bumper after bumper of Lunel muscat. When Elisabeth broke a glass, it became the signal for a rout: 'in an instant all the glasses flew to the several corners of the room; and all the cristals, porcelain, piers, branches, bowls, vases, etc. were broke into a thousand pieces. In the midst of this universal destruction the prince stood, like the man in Horace, who contemplates the crash of worlds with a look of perfect tranquillity.'

The evening ended badly for Bielfeld: he fell down the grand staircase and passed out. A servant woman mistook him for a dog and kicked him in the guts, calling him by 'an appellation somewhat dishonourable'. The rest of the party had taken to their beds and remained there all day. Such larks were rare at Rheinsberg: 'the prince is very far from being a toper, he sacrifices only to Apollo and the Muses; one day, however, he may perhaps raise an altar to Mars'.

That all sounds lovely, but I hope the "made him drink" wasn't the kind of "made him drink" that FW had done to him. However, in his letter (which I checked), aside from the falling down the stairs incident, he seems to find the entire evening enjoyable, rather than something he later said he didn't want to do (as Fritz did), and even the accident he said he later laughed at, after he recovered. And apparently Fritz came and visited him at his sickbed every day until he did recover. So I'm going to go with "not roleplaying Dad ~~for once~~."

Early Voltaire letters:

Voltaire was getting to grips with the prince's phonetic spelling, which characterised his French as much as his German: 'auser' rather than 'oser', 'tres' instead of ‘trait’, 'matein' for 'matin', etc. More important, perhaps, his inability to pronounce certain words made it impossible for him to scan his lines: 'amitié' had four syllables instead of three, 'nourricier' three and not four; 'aient' one and not two.

Keyserlingk visits Cirey and has the hots for Émilie:

'when she spoke, I was in love with her mind; and when she didn’t, I was [obsessed with] her body'.

Haven't found the letter for this yet, but haven't looked systematically. Am curious about those brackets.

FW to Pöllnitz in the twilight years of his life:

I am not that worried about living, for I leave behind me a son who possesses all the gifts [necessary] for a good ruler. I should not have said that five years ago: he was still too young then; but, thanks be to God, he has changed and I am satisfied. He has promised me to maintain the army and I am reassured that he'll keep his word. I know he loves the soldiers, he has understanding and everything will go well.

Citation: Carl Hinrichs, Der allgegenwärtige König: Friedrich der Grosse im Kabinett und auf Inspektionsreisen 3rd ed, Berlin, 1943, 41; Jessen, 80.

Have not been able to check this citation.

MacDonogh thinks FW is a big fan of future Frederick the Great:

Austria's ingratitude towards him riled the king at the end. He must have felt a fool to have placed so much trust in Charles VI. He had not even been informed of the marriage of the Archduchess Maria Theresa to the duke of Lorraine, and despite his willingness to fight for them, they had shown no serious inclination to win him Jülich and Berg. On 2 May 1736 he pointed to the crown prince, that Fritzchen who had caused him so much heart- and belly-ache in the past, and with a rare gift of prophecy he said: 'Here stands someone who will avenge me.'

No citation! From the same guy who said the 1722 political testament specifies his heir should try to get Silesia.

Edited Date: 2020-01-29 01:43 am (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Fritz starting off his reign as the most informal king in Europe:

When the late Field Marshal Grumbkow had written to the crown prince in old age complaining that he had not been addressed as 'your excellency', Frederick had pretended that he was perfectly confused when it came to titles: 'I accord count, marquis, duke, cousin, excellency, brother, etc., to anyone and everyone, without knowing whether I have got it right or not.'

I actually found this letter and it says what MacDonogh says it says!

Fritz refusing to keep a proper court:

What court there was revolved around poor, stuttering Elisabeth: 'it was to her that they went on the appointed times on the fixed days, ministers, generals, envoys and courtiers; it was to her that foreigners and the like made their presentations: the etiquette was entirely with her court'. It must have been stultifyingly dull. Nothing was said, because no one had anything to report. There was nothing much to eat either: one night the wife of Field Marshal Schmettau had to make do with one preserved cherry. The same source mentions a facetious Frenchman quipping later on in Frederick’s reign: 'There is a great gala at the queen’s today … for, as I crossed the Schloss [courtyard] I saw an old lamp lit on the grand staircase.'

SD's chamberlain:

The queen mother was compensated with a small court complete with marshal and chamberlain. The latter was a dullard called Morien. The marquis d'Argens apparently used to amuse himself by lending him the same book over and over again. He managed to get him to read it seven times in this manner. Finally Morien told him, 'Monsieur, I find it admirable. However, if I might be allowed to say, it seemed to me that the author repeated himself from time to time.'

I don't know, the guy sounds kinda witty to me, based on this one quote.

Fritz pays for Voltaire to visit:

"Your miser [i.e. Voltaire] will drink the dregs of his insatiable desire to make money; he is going to get 1300 thalers. His six-day appearance is going to cost me 550 thalers per diem. That is a lot to pay a lunatic; no court jester was ever paid such wages."

For comparison, Peter Keith gets 1200 talers a year at this point, and complains it's not enough to live on in Berlin.

Fritz invades Silesia:

[Maria Theresa] called Frederick the Heretic-king; other epithets were 'the enemy without faith or justice', 'the evil animal' and 'the monster'. Nor was she prepared to cede Silesia: 'Never, never, will the queen renounce an inch of all her hereditary lands, though she perish with all that remains to her. Rather the Turks before Vienna, rather cession of the Netherlands to France, rather any concession to Bavaria and Saxony, than renunciation of Silesia.' It was all music to Frederick's ears. He boasted to Algarotti that in Vienna, 'They say public prayers against me', and soon he would be taken for the Antichrist himself.

Note for

cahn: the Turks before Vienna was not a hypothetical. It had happened less than 60 years before, in 1683. There was a siege and a big battle, and the led the battle, in alliance with the Austrians, was John III Sobieski of Poland, which I still remember after all these years because he was the maternal grandfather of Charles Edward Stuart, and please don't ask me about the Jacobites, or we'll be here forever. ;) I do not have

selenak's breadth of historical knowledge; I have very specific knowledge of whatever has caught my interest over the years.

MacDonogh's dating on Fritz being King of Prussia is 1742:

a few months later the beleaguered emperor returned a few favours by changing him from king in Prussia to a more authentic king of Prussia.

Fritz tries to talk Voltaire into joining his court:

At the beginning of September, he went to Aachen to take the waters, hoping to see Voltaire there. His fellow hypochondriac tried to cry off again. In his then state he would be 'like an impotent man in the presence of his mistress', which would not do at all. He was too ill to submit to a cure, he wailed; but in the end he came. The poet lodged in the king’s apartment and they had a four-hour chat, two days running, during which Frederick again tried to convince him to move to Prussia.

If I can just find the source for that passage where Voltaire compares moving to Sanssouci to getting married to Fritz, our shipping will be complete!

Fritz's friends join him at Charlottenburg after the war:

Charlottenburg. His circle closed in around him. It contained some new members: the plump 'Chevalier Bernin' (Knobelsdorff) was now flanked by M. des Eguilles (the marquis d'Argens) and the 'Limping Satyr' (Pöllnitz), the permanent butt of his jokes as a result of his frequent changes of religion. Frederick kept Rothenburg informed of the cronies: 'Pöllnitz is ill; Fouqué is drinking tokay and losing at chess; Keyserlingk is drinking water and writing elegies to his beloved...'

MacDonogh's strong anti-sibling bias is showing:

There were family chores, not least two unmarried sisters, Ulrica and Amalia, who were enjoying what life Berlin and Potsdam had to offer and running up gambling debts. They even had the temerity to ask Frederick to pay them. History does not relate whether he did or not.

The temerity! In a few years, Ulrica's even going to have the temerity to ask him to pay her dowry! Can you believe it? "Optimism" is more the word I would use.

At the same time, the Austrians were clamouring for compensation and Frederick instructed Podewils to see them off. Money was for the arts alone. In a language worthy of his father, he wrote: 'Le roi de Prusse ne paie rien.'"

Well, as Voltaire said in his memoirs, "Like as Louis XII would not revenge the affronts of the Duke d'Orleans, neither would the King of Prussia remember the debts of the Prince Royal."

Mind you, if we're talking language worthy of his father, another biographer says that FW once replied to a request from one of his subjects with "I don't shit money."

Voltaire shows up in 1743:

Although he was as smitten as ever, Frederick was suspicious that he had not been asked for the usual travel expenses and correctly surmised that Voltaire was spying on him. He was therefore hesitant about discussing matters of state with his friend. Voltaire bought off his employers with letters stressing his intimate relationship with the Prussian king, who spent four hours a day closeted in Voltaire’s apartment, where he amply revealed his foreign political 'intentions'.

At least one biographer's figured out who was smitten!

Not content with making a pass at the French ambassador's cook (she fought him off!), he was now making cow eyes at Frederick's sister Ulrica. They acted together, and in their congress Voltaire forgot his place. He wrote her some verses as a birthday present, telling her that he had dreamed of her.

MacDonogh, as we know, claims that Fritz was disapproving, but I turned up that article on how Fritz was actually playing along, and having read the poems, I agree. He seems much more concerned that Voltaire isn't giving him, Fritz, his undivided attention than that he's hitting on Fritz's sister. Now I just want the story of the cook fighting Voltaire off!

Our favorite "can't live with you, can't live without you" ship:

Theirs was a puzzling relationship. There was a permanent friction between them, and Voltaire never ceased to cause problems for the king by his indiscretions, yet they seemed to nourish one another. Despite the bad blood over Ulrica and Voltaire's ham-fisted espionage, Frederick was soon writing to him offering him all sorts of blandishments to take up residence in Berlin.

Fritz and law:

From 31 May 1746, Prussia opted out of imperial justice with the scrapping of the appeals to Vienna. This liberated it from the constraints imposed by German law. Already in 1738 Frederick William had asked Cocceji to draw up a complete legal code. After the demise of the appellate jurisdiction, Frederick asked him again. The results were the Codex Fridericianus Pomeranicus and the Codex Fridericianus Marchius of 1747 to 1748. Appeals went to the king. Voltaire cites the case of a man who had enjoyed a love affair with a she donkey, which was a capital offence. Frederick minuted that the sentence was annulled: 'in his lands one could enjoy freedom of both conscience and penis'. A similar tale is told of the cavalry trooper who was found to have sodomised his horse. Frederick again refused to enact the punishment deemed due in the circumstances: 'The man is a pig', he wrote. 'Transfer him to the infantry.'"

Either all copies of Voltaire's memoirs I have are bowdlerized, or MacDonogh is being creative again. All my copies, French and English, say is that the crime was of an infamous nature, no mention of donkeys.

It's possible, though, since he also mentions the marriage analogy being in the memoirs, and he may just have a copy that I don't.

On the other hand, bowdlerizing Voltaire's memoirs has got to be like bowdlerizing Lehndorff's diaries: surely there's nothing left by the time you're done!

Fritz and MT:

He knew that business remained unsettled between him and Maria Theresa even despite the guarantees of his ownership of Silesia meted out at the Conference of Aix-la-Chapelle, but he never descended to personal insult, beyond speculating on who might wear the trousers in that ménage.

Hmm. You seem to be missing out on the vast amounts of personal insult Fritz descended to, MacDonogh. But good job whitewashing.

This one is interesting because Gundling was FW's court jester/fool:

Maupertuis, freed from Austrian captivity (they had, in fact, treated him with respect), was pestering Frederick for his patent as president of the Academy [of Sciences]: 'that position first made honourable by Leibniz, and rendered ridiculous by Gundling … will be for me, Sire, what you want it to be'.

That's FW for you, always taking the sciences seriously.

Fritz's friends starting to die off en masse:

At the time, he had longed for Rheinsberg and his friends, but Frederick's world had since been made poorer and sadder for the loss of such companions as Keyserlingk, Jordan and Duhan. Jordan's portrait was hung up in his cabinet, and Thiébault tells the story of one of his friends — it is hard to say which — whose coffin was taken into Frederick's apartment, after which it was only with some difficulty that his servants convinced him to relinquish it, for the body had begun to stink.

Another case where I tracked down the citations in the Thiébault memoirs and both passages seem entirely unrelated. One I recognized the pagination off the top of my head (lol), because, of course, it's the Katte episode; the other turned out to be Trenck. I'm starting to think his copies have vastly different pagination than mine, but maybe I'm being too charitable. On the other hand, he's definitely got different paginations on the Oeuvres than I do on Trier. I can often find his quotes, but only by ignoring the page numbers (which are also not letter numbers, in case you're wondering).

Fritz on friendship:

Despite his impossibility on close acquaintance, Frederick felt he could not go on without friends. He took issue with d'Argens' contention in his Nouveaux mémoires that a Carthusian might be happy, despite his solitude. 'I should like to say affirmatively that he is not. A man who cultivates the [arts] and sciences and who lives without friends is a lone wolf. In a word, the way I see it, friendship is indispensable to our happiness.'

Fritz, just because you can't do it, doesn't mean no one can. What is it with you not liking it when people react to things differently from you, and also when they react to things the same way as you? Oh, right, emotional stuntedness.

The Palladion:

Readings of Le Palladion surely raised a few laughs at Frederick’s petits soupers. One or two of his friends must have been indiscreet. Soon there was talk in Paris and Versailles, where the French king voiced a singular desire to lay his hands on a copy. Wheedling the poem out of Frederick became a diplomatic priority. A year later Valory wrote that he wanted to read Frederick's description of his exploits with the Pandurs for himself. Frederick was not prepared to let it go: 'how the theologians, politicians and purists would scream'. When Valory pushed, Frederick sent him his Histoire de Brandebourg instead.

Frederick had given Darget a rough ride in verse: sodomised by so many Jesuit fathers. Perhaps for that reason he wrote him a poem too: 'A Darget, apologie des rois'. In it he admitted that the life of a king’s secretary was not always a happy one. Based on Boileau's Epitre XI, A mon jardinier, it is one of Frederick’s most successful poems.

Tous les jours, par cahier, tu mets ses vers au net,
Et quand tu les lui rends, Dieu sait le bruit qu’il fait:
D’un sévère examen le pointilleux scrupule
S'étend par chaque point et sur chaque virgule;
Là sont les e muets qui devraient être ouverts
Ou c'est un mot de moins qui fait clocher un vers;
Puis, en recopiant cet immortel ouvrage,
Tu donnes son auteur au diable à chaque page.

Every day you put whole books of his verse to rights,
God knows, a thankless task which leads to frequent fights:
The meticulous pedant he alights on a
Misplaced colon or full stop, or a missing comma;
Here is a silent e, which should be stressed
And there’s a missing word which leaves the line a mess;
Then as you copy out the immortal autograph,
You damn its author with every paragraph.

I don't have enough data to express an opinion, but Blanning tells me Darget considered this an inadequate apology. If so, one can hardly blame him!

Also, Fritz, yeah, I'm sure the silent e's are why he's so upset. I really hope he *wasn't* your boyfriend, as Blanning thinks.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Algarotti gossipy sensationalism:

Meanwhile, keeping Algarotti in line was proving difficult. He was showing an interest in one of the king's dancers, Giovanna Corrini, the wife of Jean-Baptiste Denis, who played commedia dell'arte roles and was known as 'la Pantaloncina' as a result. Whether the interest was carnal or not is an interesting question. Frederick evidently thought it was: 'I hope that you have less need of physicians than you do pimps, from the point of view of both diet and pleasure, and that rather than obtaining galbanum from the chemists you are drinking the wine of Aÿ which makes the blood circulate faster and carries happiness to the brain.'

MacDonogh's footnotes:

"Galbanum resin was used for treating venereal diseases. Aÿ is in the Marne Valley, i.e. Champagne."

Re "from the point of view of both diet and pleasure," he says, "Macquereau is the French for both mackerel and pimp."

Immediately following the preceding:

Algarotti knew how to parry this ribbing. He sent the gourmand king broccoli seeds. Frederick was delighted: 'the only way to eat decent stuff, you will have the first'.

Algarotti: the only boyfriend (that we know of) to actually give Fritz broccoli!

Voltaire wants to spy on Fritz yet again:

He once again offered the king his services as a secret agent, but Louis was not interested, and nor was the foreign office in his repeated attempts to renew their relations. Madame de Pompadour was even less impressed at Voltaire’s decision, and never forgave him for going to Prussia. After he left, the French king allegedly quipped, 'That’s one less madman at my court and one more at his.'

Voltaire at Sanssouci:

Summer at Sanssouci was not so bad. In August there was a 'carousel' in imitation of that given by Louis XIV in Paris in 1685; the margravine was the guest of honour. At the party 46,000 Chinese lanterns were lit, and 31,000 soldiers were stationed round the park. There were little armies dressed as Romans, Carthaginians, Persians and Greeks, led by the princes William, Henry and Ferdinand and the margrave Charles of Schwedt. Warlike music was played. At the close, Princess Amalia was there to distribute the trophies.

Despite his minor court appointment at Versailles, Voltaire was treated better in Prussia. He had the right to dine at the queen’s table in Berlin (for all that it was worth — it might have sounded more impressive by report in Paris). He told Madame Denis that he had heard not a word of German spoken so far: ‘our language and literature have made more conquests than Charlemagne’. He wanted her to join him, but she was not at all keen. She told him that she imagined Berlin was like Paris in the age of the first Capetians.

Voltaire replied that the poetry in the opera performed in Berlin was indeed worthy of Hugh Capet. It was unkind of him: it was as often as not written by Frederick!

Notice how he doesn't say it was inaccurate, just unkind. :P

Voltaire at Sanssouci:

Voltaire mocked his own skeletal appearance. It must have been true, or the chambermaids in old Prussia must have been made of strong stuff. On one occasion as he lay in bed, one of these junos mistook him for a heap of dirty linen and picked him up, mattress and all, and threw him on the floor.

Fritz's idea of an intermezzo:

Franz Benda and his family continued to live modestly in their house in Nowawes, across the water from Potsdam, with the rest of their clan of Bohemian immigrants. The present house was built after lightning struck the original building on 22 July 1755. Frederick and Benda were in the middle of the Sanssouci concert, but as soon as the king had finished his adagio he rode over to inspect the damage. Fifty houses had been destroyed by the blaze. Frederick spent an hour and a half at this intermezzo, inspecting the damage and promising financial help, then rode back and finished the concert.

Is this true?

In January 1757, Prussia was expelled from the Holy Roman Empire

The Brits, as

selenak mentioned re portraits, fall hard for Fritz:

Frederick was something of a heart-throb in Britain even before his victories turned him into a folk hero. On 18 September 1756, the secretary of state, Lord Holdernesse, wrote to Mitchell to tell him: 'Our constant toast here now is, success to the king of Prussia: he grows vastly popular among us...' Frederick's success with the British largely hinged on his disingenuous assumption of the Protestant cause.

Still smitten with Fritz:

From this time [the battle of Prague in 1757] date the first of the pubs called 'The King of Prussia' that used to exist all over Britain. Less than a handful survive; most fell victim to the anti-Prussian feeling at the beginning of the First World War.

It's worth noting there's a town in Pennsylvania (settled heavily, of course, by Germans), still called King of Prussia. It's adjacent to the Valley Forge national park, which means I was about a mile away a couple years ago and never noticed, and it's best known for having the second largest shopping mall in the US. Named after Old Fritz. Go figure!

Catherine is smitten too:

On 20 November 1756 she wrote to Hanbury Williams: 'I read the writings of the king of Prussia with the same avidity as those of Voltaire. You will think that I am making up to you, if I tell you today that I am a profound admirer of His Prussian Majesty.'

Keep in mind the chronology: she won't be empress until 1762, and by then she'll be somewhat more of a middle-grounder where Fritz is concerned, and definitely more concerned with Russia's interests over Prussia's regardless of any personal feelings.

Fritz unhappy about how the war is going:

'Often I'd like to get drunk', he wrote to his sister Amalia in September, 'to drown my annoyance, but as I can't drink I distract myself by writing verses and as long as I am absorbed by this distraction, I don’t feel my unhappiness any more.'

The Prussians have their most one-sided victory, at Rossbach, against the French, who basically just run away despite outnumbering the enemy 2 to 1.

More than 5000 of the allied soldiers were killed or wounded and another 5000 taken prisoner. The tally included eleven generals and a rumour ran round that General de Broglie had died of his wounds in Merseburg. Frederick had lost 169 dead and 379 wounded. Prisoners kept arriving in dribs and drabs. Before the battle a boy had come to Seydlitz to enlist. The cavalry commander had told him he was too young to be a trooper. 'What must I do?' asked the youth. Seydlitz told him to take a French general prisoner. After the battle the boy came in trailing a dejected Gaul: 'See, here is a French general as you ordered.' Keith commented that he had done it as 'coolly as if he had been ordered to buy a pound of biscuit'. He was promptly made an officer. Two peasant girls brought in a French soldier on the end of a lead. Mitchell thought that if there had been two more hours of daylight the French would have been annihilated.

The Prussians score their most famous tactical victory, at Leuthen in Silesia:

Frederick surprised a number of exhausted and wounded Austrian officers in the manor house in Lissa. 'Good evening, gentlemen; certainly you weren't expecting me here, is there any room to spare?' Perplexed, but aware that the Prussian army was not far behind, they led him up to the hall of the manor where dinner was being served. Frederick talked to them politely for a while then found himself a room and settled down to pen letters and dispatches.

Fritz in 1761, looking for help with the war:

In June, Prussian officers were drinking to the health of Musrapha III, their new ally, but despite Frederick's hoping against hope, it was not a military alliance: Turkey was too weak. His new friends were considerate enough, however, to send him a brace of camels in September 1762.

Meanwhile, the gossip mill back in Berlin is hard at work:

A prostitute has accused Porporino of siring her child; the courts declared the child to be his, sentenced him to pay the prostitute 100 thalers and to feed the infant. There was no question of appealing against the verdict, Porporino paid the 100 thalers at once and admitted paternity of the child, which he took away and is having brought up in his house; and he thanked the judges for making good the loss inflicted on him by the Venetian surgeons. This story has spread mirth throughout the city.

Fritz not terribly impressed with Rousseau:

The earl Marischal alerted Frederick to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was seeking asylum in Prussian Neufchâtel. Frederick was willing. 'His only sin is having peculiar opinions, which he thinks are good.' He sent him 100 thalers. 'If we were not at war, if we were not ruined, I would have a hermitage built for him, with a garden where he could dwell as he thinks our forefathers lived … He will never persuade me to graze on herbs and to go on all fours.'

Shortly after Peter III's death:

[Fritz] was interested to note the sales of his Poésies divers among the [Russian] officer corps. They had ordered 900 copies: half the print run. He was philosophic about the popularity of his poetry in Russia: 'It is probably only in that country that they take me for a good French poet.'

Fritz roleplaying lightside Dad:

On one occasion his coach tipped over and the king of Prussia was landed in a ditch. He went for the coachman with his cane. The driver shouted at him, 'Don't you believe that I am not a thousand times angrier than you?' Frederick laughed, and forgot his temper.

I've also seen a variant on this anecdote where the retort goes: "And has Your Majesty never lost a battle?" I don't know, if you don't want to get whacked, I feel like the MacDonogh version would work better. But this is all apocryphal as far as I'm concerned.

Fritz meets Wilhelmine's husband's cousin's wife's second husband. MacDonogh says Wilhelmina's stepmother-in-law, but I think he's confusing his margraves. (It's a sad day when I trust Wikipedia over a biography, but confusing people is a specialty of his.)

He met Graf Hoditz-Roswald in Moravia during the Seven Years War, the husband of the dowager margravine of Bayreuth — Wilhelmina's stepmother-in-law. Roswald's gardens were renowned: they were full of concealed fountains that took promenaders by surprise. Behind a wall in a park, Hoditz kept a brothel for his sole use. Frederick visited Hoditz and on that occasion refused to reveal his identity. He came again in 1769, this time in majesty, if that was the word. Hoditz was charmed, and gave a magnificent feast for the king of Prussia. Hoditz had his own little opera at his Schloss and the local peasants acted in his plays. The women also stocked his private brothel. If they so much as looked at another man, he had them locked up and put on a diet of bread and water. Frederick loved Hoditz's conversation, and built a little frigate to bring him up the Oder to Berlin and Potsdam. When he was not in Prussia, the two men sent one another gifts: Brinza cheese, prunes, Istrian wine, champagne, even swans. In later years Hoditz took the place of the earl Marischal.

I like to imagine Hoditz being like crackfic!AW: "The King of Prussia keeps talking about how he misses his dead swan. I know, I'll send him a replacement!"

Fritz hasn't left off writing on behalf of his dogs:

One poem was ostensibly written by his dog Diane to 'wicked Elisabeth', the first wife of the future Frederick William II. Frederick’s purpose is clear:
Une chienne en ce jour vous donne un grand exemple.
j'ai mis au monde deux petits;
Tout curieux qui les contemple
Les trouve comme moi beaux, bien faits et gentils.
Soyez marraine à leur baptême,
Et mes voeux seront accomplis,
Si, madame, dans peu vous en faites de même.

Today a lowly bitch sets a grand example.
I delivered my puppies two;
The curious come and marvel
They're as pretty as me, kind and tough too.
Be godmother and bring them fame,
And all my wishes would come true,
If, Madam, in a while, you did the same.

Fritz and Voltaire snark:

Three years later KPM was issuing busts of Voltaire, 'which resemble you in the old days, perhaps even now', said Frederick. Voltaire peevishly acknowledged the gift of an 'old man in porcelain'. The king thought it a very good likeness and told d'Alembert it lacked only the power to speak. He recommended that the best effects could be had by reciting the Henriade to it and watching it at the same time. Voltaire wanted revenge in the form of a Frederick, but the king of Prussia still adhered to his policy of keeping portrait painters at arm's length, deeming them as adept at flattery as the most refined courtiers. He allowed Anna Dorothea Therbusch, however, to make the familiar bust of him that served as the KPM's model, injecting a little youthful grace into his raddled face. Voltaire received one in good time. Frederick decided that the bust would be more likely to 'ruin an apartment than to decorate it'. The king joked that the sculptress had refused to clothe him in the garb of an anchorite.

KPM is Königliche Porzellan Manufaktur, the porcelain factory where Fritz is effectively CEO, with the power to ban rival products and make people buy his stuff.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

The First Partition of Poland:

Henry was much keener on the idea of territorial expansion than his brother. He had his eyes on [territories enumerated]. Thiébault observed, 'Clearly the First Partition of Poland was his invention.' Frederick did not wholly see eye to eye with his brother. He thought the Russians were unpleasant neighbours, to say the very least, and he did not want them to have any more land than they already had.

The immediate cause of the partition was Frederick’s feeling that the Russians should be kept sweet, which was why he had dispatched Catherine’s childhood friend Henry in the first place.

Childhood friend? Is that true, or is he confusing Henrys again?

Fritz rejecting Henry's initial partition suggestions:

If you are too eager to snatch at trifles, it gives you a reputation for greed and insatiability which I don't want to have any more than I do already in Europe.

Fritz...I hardly even know where to begin with that statement. I'll just leave it there so we can all blink and stare at you.

Fritz and Voltaire after the partition:

[Fritz explained to Voltaire that he] was keen to honour the memory of the region's most famous son, Copernicus, who was buried in the cathedral at Frauenburg. Voltaire was pleased at Frederick's interest in the astronomer: 'Put up a little man on his ashes so that the sun, which he put in its proper place, should come and salute him every day at noon, its rays coupled with your own.'

Frederick began to boast in April 1769 that anyone wanting to set eyes on one of the breed would have to come to Silesia. Elsewhere they had all been 'despotically' banished. D'Alembert enjoyed the joke too. He wrote to the king in June that year: 'It is going to be odd, Sire, that whereas Their Very Christian, Very Catholic, Very Apostolic and Very Faithful Majesties [France, Spain, Hungary, Portugal] are destroying the grenadiers of the Holy See, Your Most Heretical Majesty is the only one to preserve them.'

Fritzplaining how to make German into a literary language:

The basic sounds of German would not do. You could do nothing with sagen, geben or nehmen. Frederick's suggestion was to add an 'a' at the end to give them a down beat: 'sagena', 'gebena', 'nehmena'.

I'll just let this one speak for itself too. (To his credit, at least he acknowledges that even if the HRE and imperial diet decided to promulgate a decree to the effect that these words were to be pronounced this way, everyone would continue doing exactly what they had always done.)

Oh, remember when Fritz sent his Jacobite friend the Earl of Marischal as foreign envoy, and said "I don't give a fuck" when asked if this might offend the English? When Marischal is dying, you can see why he and Fritz were friends:

As the campaign got under way, Milord had seized the moment to die, but not without wit. He summoned the British envoy, Elliot, on 23 May 1778: 'I called you, because I find pleasure in emitting the last sighs of a Jacobite to a minister of King George.'

In case you're wondering about what Fritz liked to eat:

We know the complete menu for one of his last meals, on 5 August 1786: broccoli soup à la Fouqué, beef in breadcrumbs with carrots, chicken with cinnamon and stuffed cucumbers in the English style (Frederick crossed it out and asked for cutlets), little pasties à la Romaine, young roast hake, salmon à la Dessau, chicken fillet à la Pompadour with ox tongues and croquettes, Portuguese cake, green peas, fresh herrings and gherkins.

Broccoli again!

It's worth adding that as he's dying, his doctors are trying to get him to cut down on rich food, and he refuses, because since when did he ever listen to ~~anyone else~~ his doctors? MacDonogh reports his physician telling him in frustration, "The only dangerous enemies Your Majesty has are his cooks."

I'm kind of with Fritz? I'm sure he's getting upset stomachs from his diet, but you have to consider the cost-benefit angle, and he's only got a little time left to live. I don't think the 18th century had the ability to come up with a heart healthy diet, I think he's going to have upset stomachs anyway (maybe fewer on a better diet), there's no way he's quitting tobacco, it's probably too late anyway, and I think he should just enjoy one of the few pleasures left to him. By August 5, 1786, he was in too much pain to enjoy reading, and he'd had to give up playing the flute a few years before. Let him eat cake!

From:

mildred_of_midgard

The librarian has been foiled! By not having a billing address in Europe. Curses.

selenak, as royal reader, would you be willing to acquire a copy of this volume, in pdf form for our library, in addition to reading and summarizing it for us? And work out reimbursement with

cahn?

I think it's a fair trade: I give you sibling correspondence, you give me boyfriend research. :D

From:

cahn

In the last post

mildred_of_midgard wrote:

So this came up in conversation in another corner of the Fritz fandom (mob-boss-fic-writing fan) the day before you posted it, and we were wondering: how shocking or normal was it that Voltaire was having an affair with his niece? Was this something that like, royals could get away with because royals were expected to do a certain amount of inbreeding, or was it like, "Well, it's technically consanguinity, but they're not getting married, and who cares, anyway?"?

Well, all I have to go on is Zinsser, who doesn't give a cite for this, but she definitely does think it would have been shocking. She says, "The poet had naively assumed that he could keep his secret from Du Chatelet and from the public, and thus avoid the inevitable ridicule and condemnation the incestuous affair would invite."

But then she goes on to say "no one discovered the illicit liaison until the 1950s, when an enterprising dealer offered at auction some of Voltaire's own love notes," and I thought either you or selenak had said that it was known earlier than that?

From:

selenak

Before I share anything else, mes amies, I have to share this extraordinary gem. It's not a German but a French passage, but if you read it, you'll know why I just HAD to. To recapitulate: Mantteuffel, aka Le Diable, the Devil = in Austrian pay, is supposed to get close to Fritz and report on him. According to the German editor of the Trier letter to Grumbkow where Katte gets mentioned, Fritz is aware of this at least at the point where he writes the "You know what I did for Katte" letter, when Mantteuffel is in disgrace by FW. Whether or not he already was aware of it when he makes the following statements to the guy, I leave to you to judge. But on page 144,ff July 2nd 1736: Mantteuffel - le Diable - reports that Fritz after dinner after showing him "all the tendernesses imaginable", took him into his room afterwards and there confided in him about this family:

Dad:
About his Father, Iunior is always very unhappy, since he lets him suffer so much and doesn't give him enough to live in dignity and according to his fancy. Because Iunior frankly confessed to the Devil, that there were days when he doesn't have a penny in his pocket, and that with all of that, in addition to the ordinary expenses, a lot of extraordinary expenses to be made, for
example more than five to six hundred ECU per year in small gifts for the servants of the king (..)

Meaning: Gimme more money, Austrians!

Mom:

To Olympia Junior does the justice that she raised her children worthily, as much as the King had left this in her hands to do so, and besides, the she does everything in the world to please him, Junior.

AW:

Of his brother Wilhelm, he says that the later has a good nature and a lot of common sense, and
should do something good, if he can still get into good hands; but that the bad education he receives endeavours to make him stupid like a real peasant, with the result that you can't look at him without feeling pity. He fears that if this goes on for four or five years more, the bad result will become second nature, and (Wilhelm) will become a truly bitter man because it will be impossible to correct later on.

Heinrich and Ferdinand:

Of his two younger brothers, Heinrich and Ferdinand, he has an even worse opinion, since he judges that they don't have the same good nature that Wilhelm has, and thus they will take all the more easily the bad form which must result from the education given to them. Especially from Ferdinand he says that he has all the bad qualities of the father and that when this great childlike vivacity that he inherited from his progenitor, will have passed, he will become the most wicked child of the king.

Let's pause here for the only moment good old Ferdinand, age six at this point (Heinrich is ten), gets singled out for the prediction he'll exceed in anything. Ferdinand, coming menace, this was your day! Also, Heinrich, what did you do that Fritz deemes you not as good natured as AW? (One hopes for a kick under the table during the winter holidays.)

And what about his sisters?

Between his sisters Iunior gives preference to that of Bayreuth for the strength of her mind, in
saying: "She's a fine fly, who knows more "Long than you think".

I venture to guess this is an allusion to a French saying unknown to us.

He is corresponding with her on literary matters. The Margravine tends to take the party of the philosopher Descartes and Iunior that of Wolff. He promised to show the Devil this correspondance.

For the Duchess of Wolffenbuttel - of Braunschweig-Wolffenbüttel, i.e. Charlotte - he esteems her also very much because of the liveliness of her manners and her laughter. He says: „She is a true Harlequin, who also expresses by her letters her humor and will die joking etc."

Princess Sophie, Iunior judges to have the best heart of the world, and beautiful common sense, but he fears she will be ruined by her husband, the margrave of Schwedt, whom he regards as the greatest fool and the greatest villain of the king's states.

For the Duke of Wolffenbuttel - i.e. Charlotte's husband, EC's brother - Iunior esteems him genuinely, saying he is a good sort. „He is not a big genius," he continued, "but a prince who does not know what it is to act badly, and as a mark of his good heart, you can see that when his fortune changed by his becoming reigning Duke, he did not change his behavior in any way."

For the margrave of Bayreuth, he puts him beneath the Duke of Wolffenbuttel in his esteem, and the other princesses there was not discussed this time. (...)

And now comes something that's especially delicious if, like me, you've read the Pleschinski translated Voltaire correspondance relatively recently. Because remember, Fritz had send Voltaire, in the year 1736, a Socrates head - which Émilie reported to Voltaire as showing Fritz, and then they had the Socrates/Alkibiades exchange? I later fund out what this actually was was not a bust but a golden knob for a walking stick. So imagine my cackling when I came across this gem, just a few lines after the sibling assessments:

Iunior showed the Devil a small present that he intends for him. It's a golden apple for a cane
that he had comissioned to be made. It represents the image of Socrates and there are engraved French verses above, which Iunior composed himself. This composition is most flattering for the Devil: because Iunior in these verses represents himself as Alcibiades and looks at the Devil like Socrates.

Oooookay. *wipes tears from eyes*

So:

1.) Fritz, cheating on Voltaire this early on in the relationship? Also, did you have multiple Socrates images made? I thought you were practically broke? Who was the original intended recipient, Voltaire or Mantteuffel?

2.) Heinrich totally kicked him under the table. Or Ferdinand did, since he gets to be the coming menace. I mean, it's totally true that Heinrich isn't as good natured as AW, but he's also ten at this point, so it's remarkable Fritz gets this opinion of him. Alternate possibility: Heinrich wondered out loud whether Fritz cultivating AW was because Fritz wanted to use AW to cajole favors from Dad?

3.) Younger brothers, your educational day will come. Junior is a man with a mission here, clearly.

4.) So did he have sex with Mantteuffel, and do we count Mantteuffel among the boyfriends or the witty pretties?

Edited Date: 2020-02-01 07:43 am (UTC)

From:

selenak

So, a typical French-German diary entry goes like this, on May 15th 1735:

Fréderic Wartensleben me raconte des particularités de Potsdam. Der König ist gesund, sagt er, wünscht zu sterben und hernach wieder auf zustehen, um die Veränderung mit anzuſehen Alexandre veut parier sa tête, que Junior n'a pas donné commission à Lichtenstein, de m'éloigner d'ici. Der Kronprinz hält mich vor unconversabel.

"Friedrich Wartensleben told me of the Potsdam oddities. The King is healthy, he says, wishes to die and to resurrect, in order to get to watch the changes. Alexander wants to bet his head, which Junior did not commissioned Lichtenstein to walk away from here. (? Help me out here, mes amies?) The crown prince doesn't consider me worthy of conversation."

Hence Other Seckendorff increasingly relying on Mantteuffel, I suppose. Anyway, this linguistic mix does make for an odd reading experience. Still, there are all kinds of interesting cross connections, like this one. Remember, Biberius = Grumbkow. The Countess Fuchs may be chief lady in waiting to the current empress, but more importantly, she's the governess of the archduchess Maria Theresia. Orondates = original Seckendorff? Suhm? I honestly don't know. It's not FW, that's clear from the context.)

I know from Biberius, that Pöllnitz wrote to the countess Fuchs, grand-mistress
from the Empress, a twenty page letter with sharp sayings from Orondates. And the Devil will try to ingratiate himself with Pöllnit so that Pöllnitz shows him the letter, which is sure to make for an entertaining reading. "t is very good that Orondates is gone: because with his suspicions he would have ruined everything, and given all the trouble which he enjoyed stirring between the crownl prince and the king, he would soon have put everything into confusion and disunity.

More than it already is, you mean? Anyway, this also makes it look like Orondates = Original Seckendorff:

Borck (the general). He told Biberius that the king according to Gotter sounds friendly towards Orondates: “It's not true that I don't like him. I deem him to be a great General and a reasonable and capable man."

The journal mentions "Katte" repeatedly, but context makes it apparant it's always Hans Heinrich. Also, in 1734, when journal writer Seckendorff arrives, FW has one of his worst dropsy attacks resulting in touching father-son scene on page 11 already:

The Crown Prince is truly touched by the king's situation; there are always tears in his eyes, he's cried his heart out, has worked to get a more comfortable bed for the King; hadn't wanted to leave Potsdam. At last the King has forced him to, and told him not to return before Saturday afternoon. "As long as the king does live, I would give an arm to extend his life by twenty years." The King has called him "Fritzchen" all the time.

In case anyone thinks Wilhelmine is exaggarating Mom's hostility towards her (and EC) in the first half of the 1730s, here's Seckendorff backing her up, on page 69, June 8th:

Olympia. She seems to be very indifferent to the subject of Vitellius' disease, so apparently is tired lying to him, and hoping well for the future; but she could be terribly wrong in her calculation: because, although she hates the crown princess and the later being liked by Junior the most, Olympia at the same time also hates the heriditary princess of Bayreuth and does her ill services with her father, telling him all kind of odious stories about her. And that's where she spoils everything with Junior, who values this Bayreuth sister beyond expression and who, according to appearances, will make make her shine in favour one day.

Well, she won't "spoil everything with Junior" but it supports that at least 1730s Fritz was aware SD was a different mother to Wilhelmine than she was to him. Now I knew via Wilhelmine's memoirs she hadn't given up her English marriage intentions but transferred them to Charlotte, only to be foiled again. Something I've also learned through Seckendorff's diary is that SD then transferred them to Ulrike, no more with the Prince of Wales - who'd tied the knot by then - but a younger brother. No dice, though as we know, Ulrike will be the only daughter to become Queen. And this, Hohenzollern boys, is why your sisters have a different impression of Mom than you do. Not that FW as a father to his daughters was anything to write home about. Voit was the Bayreuth envoy to Prussia.

June 13th: Voit from Bayreuth gets an audience with the King. - "Should I congratulate or send my condolences? My daughter has to let herself be f... better."

: The news question can't have been the birth of his granddaughter, since that girl was already born in August 1732, so I'm assuming it was the death of the old Margrave? Anyway, the FW quote is in German, and either the editor or Seckendorf writes f.... Same word than in English, if you're wondering, with an i instead of an u.

Everyone distrusts everyone else on the court. Discussed is whether or not Fritz gets to join the already sadly senile Eugene at Philippsburg:

28th The king graciously refuses to permit the crown prince permission to join the campaign. Alexander Wartensleben tells me that the King's illness is just pretense, and that father and son are in good standing with each other.

29th: The King gives the Crown Prince permission to join the campaign, under the condition that the two imperials corpses join his etc.

No detail is too insignificant to be noted down for its potential political implication, as when FW orders little Ferdinand to get a Polish page so he picks up some of the language. Potential Prussian designs on Poland? Also, here's other Seckendorff on a much debated topic:

Frederic Wartensleben tells me, that crown prince sleeps with the crown princess, and that he reprimanded Count Truchsess for what the later said about my uncle and me.

On July 6th, FW is having second thoughts again about letting Fritz hang out with Eugene:

The King is afraid that Junior might become too good an Imperial if he leaves him too long with the (imperial) army. (No danger there, FW.)

So what's your opinion on chatty Pöllnitz, FW?

"Pöllnitz is a writer. A writer doesn't have a clue about soldiers. If Pöllnitz tells me about the Ansbach and Bayreuth courts, I believe him; but if he talks about complete an incomplete armies, he doesn't know what he's talking about.

When Fritz is feeling let down by Eugene who has lost most of his memory not being the legendary figure he expected, and the campaign is mostly boring, FW is gleeful:

Judge for yourself whether I shouldn't bee happy that the old guy is made fun off, especially since I can't stand the fact the Emperor and I share a Field Marshal. You may write all this in confidence to General Seckendorff.

While FW will indeed be indignant about not being told of the FS/MT marriage until after the fact, he evidently knew Franzl was a primary candidate for her hand, because in October 1735, i.e. before the marriage, the journal notes:

He charged Gotter with all the demonstrations of submission imaginable for the emperor and as many for the duke of Lorraine. "He should lay himself on the feet of the Emperor and kiss his ass."

FW is also protesting again and again how much he hates the French and how he'd never desert the Emperor for them. This is why Austria trading Lorraine to the French for the Pragmatic Sanction acknowledgment (remember, FS had to give up his dukedom for marrying MT) is regarded by him as as a betrayal (though not as much as the fact MT's dad doesn't back his claim on Jülich and Berg).

In January 1736, relationships between FW and Fritz are on the downslide again:

Biberius tells me about the secrets, that Junior confided in Pöllnitz. The King encourages him to produce children, had him made a marital bed out of velvet. Biberius does not believe, that Junior will survive the father, but that pessimus Wilhelmus will succeed one day.

Pessimus Wilhelmus, the worst William, is of course AW. But mostly FW is busy getting in advance indignant about the impeding marriage and the other claims on Jülich and Berg:

The Emperor treats me and all HRE princes like pushovers, which I certainly do not deserve form the Emperor. God knows I never arlied with France. I always ask myself whether I ever went against the Emperor's interests, and I can't find anything. And now I'm pushed aside for that son of a whore Mantelsack, and I doubt they'll notify me of the Duke of Lorraine marriage!

The Emperor, soothingly, sends some tall guys. Observes Seckendorff the journal writer, in German: "If France had as many tall fellows to offer as the Emperor, Prussia might be French by now, but this wouldn't have any more real effects as the professed allegiance to the Emperor.

And finally, the entry that caused Mildred to track down the journal to begin with, in May:

The king is outraged at the ignominious manner in which the mperial court treated him to what he claims in the matter of the preliminaries of peace, as well as regarding the report of the marriage of the duke of Lorraine, and the way the court still neglects him to this very hour. The king doesn't give a f- about the tall guys that the emperor can give him; he wants to be honored and distinguished as he thinks he deserved by his past conduct, which he always seeks to justify, saying by pointing at the Crown Prince: "Here is someone who will one day avenge me". And
although the king begins to moderate a lot in his passions and speeches, he cannot yet moderate anger when it comes to the negligence of the imperial court towards him,and tears come out of him in anger.

Then follows the amazing "What I really think about my family: By Fritz" entry courtesy of Mantteuffel, which I'm posted above, and that's as far as I've gotten for now. Thought? (Beyond: This has to be the biggest tantrum thrown about not getting a wedding invite in that century.)

Edited Date: 2020-02-01 03:12 pm (UTC)

From:

selenak

More spicy crown prince gossip reported by the Devil to Seckendorff Jr.: Manteuffel advised Fritz to try harder with the procreation business:

"(...)because it would make your state now happier, and would save you from many future worries, because when we see that You have no lineage, we will marry your brother William, and then the scheming and plotting will be inevitable" .

Junior agreed to all this; "But", he said, "I can't embrace my wife with passion, and when I sleep with her, I do it rather out of duty than by inclination."

Mantteuffel points out that the earth would be barren if the only children born were born to couples who loved each other, and hey, gird your loins, I hear she's got at least a nice exterior?

Junior: ,, This is true, her form is very pretty; but i have never been in love with her. However, I should be the last man, in the world if I didn't esteem her: because she has a very sweet nature, a more docile woman one cannot imagine, she's excessively compliant, and hastens to do everything she believes can please me. Also, she can't complain that I'm not sleeping with her. I truly don't know why there isn't a child there already."

In case Seckendorff Jr. is slow on the uptake, Manteuffel has a literary hint for him:

The Devil makes me read the Roman History of Des Echarts and points out the character of Junior, who is the same as that of Emperor Hadrian.

On December 1st (still 1736), FW is not a fan of Suhm: Upon hearing of the appointment of Suhm as envoy to the court of Petersburg, the King says: "He's an arch villain, and I'm sorry I didn't hang him while I had him here."

In early 1737, Seckendorff is not impressed with teenage AW: Prince William had a weak spell yesterday at the parade; however he was obliged to dine with us, where he cut a sad figure.

On the other hand, he has a soft spot for coming menace Ferdinand, when it's Ferdinand's turn to dine with Dad and his smoking chums:

Little Prince Ferdinand did not contribute much, other than his kindness to keep the king in good spirits. But above all, this kind child deserves to be reported because, wanting to have something of Biberius, who was sitting next to him, he uses the expression: Your excellence, be as gracious as to give me something of this." To which Bberius replied: "I can't dole out graces; the King alone is capable of providing grace." To which the prince replied: "OH yes, your excellency, but you are Field Marshall now, so you will be able to act gracefully." Biberius couldn't help but show his amusement. The King smiled; but the Beard" - La Barbe, the Beard, is der alte Dessauer, Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau - behaved with the air of a Hercules in his fury.

(Because Grumbkow has been made a Field Marshal.)

Seckendorff Jr. has the bad luck that Original Seckendorff, the Field Marshall, temporarily falls from grace back home in Vienna and has been arrested and imprisoned in Graz, where he'll stay until MT ascends to the throne. (She'll release him.) This means Seckendorff the nephew is called back from Prussia. In Vienna, he first tries to make good weather for uncle and also shares gossip with people bitching about MT's new husband. Remember, they all think Franzl is the future ruler, nobody considers MT will rule, and they aren't impressed by his lack of military prowess. Also, he's a foreigner from Lorraince, so basically half French, and everyone hates the French. So Seckendorff Jr. notes:

Dissension at home. The Duke of Lorraine has all Austrians as enemies. He is at odds with his parents-in-law and they are displeased with him; the archduchess alone stands by her husband. The Duke is very annoyed with Bartenstein and has cause to be. He's only told of the May decisions after his return to the army. Bartenstein has told him to his face that after the Emperor has done him the honor of giving him his inheriting daughter, he was to submit himself to the Emperor's will in everything.

Like I said: Franzl's early life in Vienna was one long humiliation conga. (With the important exception of MT standing by him, as he would stand by her in the years to come.)

On page 206, Seckendorff the nephew is asked to give his assessment on the topic: Fritz: Hot or not? Well, he also has to say whether or not he thinks FW is still trustworthy, but we have our priorities here, don't we?

About the feelings of the King. Myself: "The King has a good heart, he is at his core imperially minded and remembers the dinner in Prague with enoyment." Himself: "Ah, if only his actions would fit with this supposed good heart!" Myself: "One has to bind him by solid and mutually beneficial conditions." Himself: "One has to see how that could be accomplished."

About the person of the Crown Prince. His figure: handsome, looks like a Hannover, wears his own hair, looks pretty masculine, if flabby." "Does he love horses and hunting?" "No, he is a terrible rider and hunter; he loves reading, music, magnificence and "la bonne chère"."

"The good dear? Is this code for something? Anyway, the obvious question is asked: how reconciled are father and son, really?

His relationship with the King his father. "In public, things are well. But there are still needling phrases. Besides, the Prince in his heart has never forgotten his arrest in Wesel, and he hates with an eternal hatred all which contributed, i.e. Derschauer." Himself: "But not Grumbkow?" "No. Biberius is corresponding with him; he sits at his table and drinks from his wine."

His relationship with the Crown Princess. "Good; she's pretty, compliant; they sleep together."

His religion: "That of an honest man; God; all confessed will be forgiven." The Crown Prince loves pomp and grandeur; he'll reestablish all the court offices; he wants to have princes and counts at his court.

See, Seckendorff Jr., with that kind of intelligence it's not surprising poor MT was caught unawares. If she even had time to read the files before he invaded. It's on page 206 ff if you want to read it for yourself.

Anyway: Once it's apparant Uncle Seckendorff isn't going to get out of Graz any time soon, Seckendorff the nephew decides that his career in Austrian services is doomed for now, and requests to be allowed to transfer to Anhalt. Where he'll continue to work for Fritz' brother-in-law, one of the two odious ones. Which is how this volume concludes.

Edited Date: 2020-02-01 12:28 pm (UTC)

From:

selenak

More stuff from the third Förster volume, the collection of original documents. Mildred already knows this, but Cahn does not, so: Grandpa Wartensleben's petition for mercy and FW's reply.

Your royal majesty will allow gracefully that the fear of my heart causes me to address the matter once more and to cinlude what unhappy Katte has sent me from his imprisonment. For this reason, it was that yesterday, I undertook the most daring audacity and sent a memorandum to your royal majesty in the utmost confidence thath you will mercifully listen to the pleas and pleadings of a very old man. . But because, all-gracious king and Lord, today's removal of the unhappy man makes me desolate, and little wonder that I am heartsick, so my conscience makes me throw myself again at the feet of your royal majesty with this, and my letter from yesterday, and repeat my request. I do not ask for a penalty, but only the life of the unhappy man, so that he can show repentance, so that he recognizes his mistake correctly and can feel heartfelt remorse, serene, and thus his soul can be saved.

The omnipotence God will reward your royal majesty plentiful for listening to my prayers and pleas, if you will show mercy to the old, grieving man who I am.

Your royal majesty can do this without harming Justice, of this I am sure and certain, and even if this was not so, your majesty's hands are unbound and your royal majesty remains free to show mercy. Besides, your royal majesty may consider it worthy of consideration that I have offered my body and life so often in the service of the (Holy) Roman Empire, and have been serving your royal majesty and your house faithfully and honestly, and that the father of the unhappy man has often been ready to sacrifice himself for you, and we are both ready to do so furtherly.

Therefore I live in the most humble confidence that your royal majesty will save a handful of blood which is no use to you and for which we beg you so fervently to give us, and that my grey hair will not see me fall into the grave with so much grief. Once again, I beg you, and remain in the most humble devotion,

To this, FW replied:

My dear General Field Marshal Count von Wartensleben,

I have indeed received your letter. It certainly pains me with heartfelt sorrow that misfortune struck Lieutenant of Katte so deeply, because he is so close to you. However, you know what follows such a crime, which is why I am not propelled to further explain myself than to say than that it is better for a culprit to die according to justice, than for world or the kingdom to fall into ruin. And thus I am not able to provide a pardon, because the well-being of the entire country and myself, as well as that of my family, and of the future make this necessary, which is why no one else must take responsibility; I give the order.

Since this man in puncto desertionis has conspired so far with my son, and has done all sorts of things, including conspiring with foreign envoys, to make this cause succeed, he would have deserved to be torn apart with glowing pliers. But in consideration of the Lord Field Marshal and the General Lieutenant of Katte, I have lessened the punishment to the extent that his head should be cut off to be an example and warning to others.

I remain your very affectionate King Friedrich Wilhelm. Wusterhausen, November 3rd 1730.

Edited Date: 2020-02-03 10:32 am (UTC)

From:

selenak

Now, if I go by the editorial remarks Förster in his first volume thought there was an evil Catholic-Imperial plot afoot to make Fritz in his hour of need a Catholic. Here, in volume 3, he admits the documents don't bear that out, as the Imperials are less than thrilled by the MT/Conversion idea, which is that of Fritz, but he assures his readers that the hero of the Protestant faith surely was just looking to incriminate Grumbkow & Seckendorff in the eyes of FW and never would he ever. Meanwhile, in 1731, Prince Eugene seems to be far from senile, for upon hearing from Grumbkow that Fritz is interested in aquiring an Archducess, he makes this assessment of Junior:

The proposal sent by the Crown Prince to Grumbkow is strange, and Grumbkow did well to give his response in such a way, for it seems likely that the Crown Prince suggested such a project to deduce from the replly as to whether the King has any attention of looking for a marriage with an Archduchess. This is enlightening regarding the Crown Prince's falsehood, as is his reply through Hille to Grumbkow that he would have to do violence to his nature in such case, as so far he has little love for the Archhouse. This new project as well as the one from some months ago which came to us via Natzmer, shows how far reaching ideas this young man has, and while these are currently spontanous and not well thought through, he does not appear energy or common sense. Which is why he ought to become more dangerous to his neighbours in time, if he can't be rid of his current principles. Other than the Bevern marriage, there's little or nothing to hope for him right now. The harder the King treats him, the more he'll insist on changing all his father does once it is his time.

Eugene, I'm impressed.

From:

selenak

...of tips for Fritz, written in the August of 1731, i.e the month where Fritz' official submission to FW complete with feet kissing is taking place, is interesting to me not just because Grumbkow is probably sincere here as far as it goes - i.e. this is from his pov good and useful advice - but a case can be made that Fritz is listening and adjusting his behavior accordingly. For the suggestions amount to: "Don't give your father the impression you're secretly mocking him; being respectful and loving to your mother is okay, as long as you don't rub it in how much more you like her than you like your Dad; you and Wilhelmine have no boundaries with each other, so put up some quickly; be nice to your brothers and show some interest in how they're doing. As for your brothers in law, don't single one out but be polite to them all, and always remind them that Dad now should come first in their lives."

Oh, and Grumbkow uses "Crown Princess" - Princesse Royale, this letter of instruction is written in French - for Wilhelmine, too.

Or, in rokoko speech:

If the King seeks the opinion of Crown Prince, or his feelings on something, and he foresees, that this opinion does not conform to the King's ideas or principles, it will be necessary to use this phrase: If your majesty does me the honor of asking, I must say my feeling, it is such and such, I may well be wrong, however, and my little experience can make me err easily. It is important to avoid all spirited mocking and all mischievous expressions towards the King, which would cause disadvantages to even the least of the servants, but on the other hand, do get rid of any austere air, reservedness or brooding, which the King has so often complained about. (...)

As to Her Majesty the Queen: I believe that the tenderness and the deep respect that your highness naturally has for
this worthy Princess, does not need to be regulated and governed. However, everything must be done with beautiful
discernment; there is surely no need to recommend to show no preference in what is said to the King; past experience must have taught his royal highness that the suspicions we had in this arena caused much grief to the illustrious mother and the
beloved son.

Whatever tenderness, trust and friendship, the incomparable Crown Princess has the right to claim, and which are due to her in a thousand remarkable places, I still believe that in the beginning it will be necessary to put up certain boundaries. As to the princes, your royal highnesses brothers, you need to show a tender and natural friendship and show your joy when they do their duty well.

As to your royal highness' brothers in law. I believe you will have to treat them on an equal footing without distinction, with
friendship, civility and politeness, accompanied in this with a little seriousness, and in conversation with them, always preach to attach themselves solely to the King and to expect all their advantage and happiness from him.

Now, here's the thing: I previously put Wilhelmine's impression of Fritz when she sees him for the first time post-Katte during her wedding due to them being observed and his having had the year of hell behind him. (Which is also the explanation she has at the time, but her 1740s self wonders whether it starts here.) Especially since the next time they are physically together, they're back to their old footing. And similarly, I put the fact that in his first preserved "regular" letter in the Trier archive, in 1732, he tells her to disregard any impression he's gone cold on her and how can she believe this due to Wilhelmine (like him) having no chill. But here's Grumbkow giving this very pointed advice, and given FW did have a hang up about the affection between his two oldest long post Küstrin - hence him not permitting Fritz to visit Bayreuth when Fritz is en route to Philippsburg, for example, and the need for the two to arrange a secret rendezvous when Fritz is en route back but technically does not stop in Bayreuth (just, as later MT, on the outskirts). So I now think Wilhelmine might not have been just hypernervous and needy in the aftermath of the big catastrophe plus a year and confused PTDSD (without any P in this traumatic stress) with Fritz emotionally withdrawing from her. Maybe he did at least try to provide Dad, Grumbkow and everyone else with the impression he was, in fact, putting boundaries between them. (Made easier by the fact he was traumatized as hell and so was she, in a different way, and they had no real chance to be together at length and talk until the post marriage family visit from hell.)

Förster also has the protocol of the big feet-kissing public submission from that same August of 1731, which was written by Grumbkow for Seckendorff. This one is in German, and seems to be quite close to the real event given FW keeps switching between the formal second person plural and the "Du" when adressing Fritz. (Including, btw, in the "Did you seduce Katte or did he seduce you?" question - that's a "Du" question.) This protocol includes the "what I've done to your mother and sister and Hannover if you'd succeeded" which Mildred has mentioned repeatedly.

"Now listen to the consequences! Your mother would have fallen into the greatest unhappiness, for I would naturally have treated her as if she'd known everything. And your sister I'd have locked up for the rest of her life at a place where she'd never seen the sun or moon again. I'd have gone to Hannover territory with my army, and would have burned everything down, even if I had lost my country, my people and my life for it!"

Fritz then submits and asks to be given the chance to prove himself and win back FW's esteem, FW then asks the Katte question and when Fritz replies "without hesitation" that "I seduced him", FW replies "It pleases me that you tell the truth for once."

Now, I have my doubts whether we'd have gotten a Prussian invasion of Hannover had Fritz managed to escape, because even enraged FW knows better than to start a war with the British Empire. But the SD and Wilhelmine threats would undoubtedly have been carried out. It's hostage taker logic at its most ruthless.

From:

selenak

Having browsed through the diary now, all hail Mildred, some impressions and quotes beyond what Mildred has already posted:

Definitely no Katte mention, but several times his harsh upbringing is adressed.

As the 1884 editor says in the preface, Henri de Catt massively rewrites his involvement when Fritz gets sibling death news. What is in the diary re: AW (who as in the memoirs has been edited out of Fritz' descriptions of his 1740 Straßburg trip when still alive), is, four days post Fritz getting the news, "spoke of his good heart", a quote I'll get to after Wilhelmine's death, and, much later, the "I totally would have retired from kingship after the war had he lived".

(All his siblings: get a coughing fit)

The actual passage:

21. Called at 7. We talked a lot moral. He often quotes these lines from Agamemnon:, Happy who 'etc. You see, it has been a long time since I thought of these sweet moments that I would find in retirement; I thought of retiring, my dead brother disturbs my plan, because I cannot do it in a time of minority. It is not necessary; my nephew is fourteen, in four years he will be of age. We must put an interval between these worries and death. I still have five years in my body. That is all. I'm losing my fire. Ah, if you had seen me a few years ago! If you saw me in fine weather, you would find me very different.

Bad AW, spoiling Fritz' retirement plans. Sigh.

Which means anything else in the memoirs about AW and his death - and there is a lot - was made up by Catt and/or taken from various other sources, as said in the preface.

Otoh, what I don't recall from the memoirs (though I might have missed it, it wasn't what I was looking for) but which is in the diary is Fritz still indulging in the love letter ghost writing business, even when no sibling and no Voltaire are involved:

I tell him that I had made a verse piece for a beauty. He read it, criticized it. "Oh, I'll make you another one. Have you fucked her?" "No," I said. He composed a page of it in my presence and showed me a dictionary he had made during the last wars.

Now here's a civilian job that, as opposed to flutist, no one has imagined for Fritz: love poetry ghost writer.

Lots and lots of "Voltaire is the WORST!" as per the memoirs, and he keeps coming back to the prediction that Voltaire will die as a repentant son of the church with priests at his side out of fear, he's obsessed with it. My current guess as to why he keeps harping on this is: the idea of being broken. He himself has given in, not out of fear for the afterlife but of his father, but still, he has submitted. So Voltaire, who is so similar and yet not, can't be unbroken to the end. He is, of course, also irked that Voltaire still is war-critical:

Catt quoting Fritz quoting Voltaire happens often, but this is the most interesting passage to me, because it's as good a reconstruction of an authentic Fritz and Voltaire conversation we're likely to get:

Voltaire said to me: "But when you fight, are you not in rage?" - "No, that's when you need the most tranquility." - "But all your wars are the same." - "All the oxen appear as such; but to anyone who sees them up close, there is always a difference." - He (V) was attached to the Marquis de Villars, who, no doubt, had described to him a cavalry attack. - "But all these are heroic actions. You destroy the world and we enlighten it." - "But what is enlightenment? Whether the world is flat or round, what does it do for happiness?" - But you need moral principles, and follow them. However, in ten months I will have defeated the French, the Austrians and the Russians.

Err, not so much, Fritz, but okay. He's really irked that Voltaire doesn't appreciate the military genius enough:

I have had a lot of trouble since morning, so far it is not over. Gentlemen, the scholars laugh at our profession. Voltaire ridicules it. It is bad by the evils it causes: but it takes talent. Voltaire won't listen to anything. He says that reading battles annoys him, that he learns nothing there; but when I read the campaigns of Eugène, Montecuculi, Luxembourg, it gives me a thousand ideas.

The poem Fritz wrote to Wihelmine before her death shows up a lot.

"Come, I made a piece to my sister of Baireuth, on friendship." We talked about Voltaire, on the Henriade, which he found very beautiful, with this one flaw that he did not put his hero in the most touching situations. He said it to Voltaire, and he agreed to it. (...)

I was at 6 o'clock; he showed me the epistle to his Princess. Come, he said, see this epistle you're interested in. I worked on it a little, but I will let it rest for 5 or 6 days.

(I would say that Henri de Catt’s main job is admiring Fritz‘ poetry, but that’s unfair. Also, aw on the phrasing "his princess". Sa princesse indeed.)

So, in the memoirs, Catt gets dragged to Fritz at 2 am when the news of Wilhelmine's death arrives and they keep talking about her for hours three times during a single day. Meanwhile, diary:

18. I learned in the morning of the Princess's death. I wrote this letter to the King - His Majesty sent for me. I saw him sorry for this loss. We hardly talked (...).

To be fair, they do talk of Wilhelmine on other days. However, just because Wilhelmine is also dead doesn't mean AW is forgotten. Just...remembered in that special Fritzian way.

I was after dinner. The King was overwhelmed; his smile always came back to him. He ate nothing. He was just drinking, he was so heated. We reasoned on the price of friendship; how little he indulged. There was talk of his brother, who had caused him much sorrow, in pace ut and in bello. "What consoles me is - without it I would not live."

In peace and in war? Whatever is AW supposed to have done in peace as well as in war, Fritz? There's one upcoming visitor who surely would love to know.

20. I was there at 2. - „Ah, how grieved I am! I don't have time to mourn the loss of this sister. We must hold on. Prince Heinrich arrived, which caused general joy.

I dare say. So how did that meeting go, Henri de Catt?

21. Called at a quarter past five in the morning. His Majesty was very distressed. - »I cried well yesterday with my brother. Here, my dear, it is not the loss of a battle that moves a captain or a warrior, but the death of a sister is irreparable, and what a sweeter feeling than friendship! His Majesty went out at 8 . "I went for some recognaissance of the Austrian camp." I was there in the evening. His Majesty was fine. „Now here I am in force. We will see how it all ends. The massacre at Hochkirchen was terrible. Everything came out pell-mell from the cemetery. Some were slashing their teeth, others were going there with their butts. Marshal Keith, speaking on the eve of the battle to the Margrave, said how the Austrians should attack us and how he would do it himself; we made the rope, them the bow.

As you may recall, Marshall Keith died at that battle. (And is listed on the Rheinsberg Obelisk.)

Meanwhile, yay for Seydlitz, provider of comic relief:

22. I went with His Majesty to take a turn to the left wing. Called, I spoke of these three sentries from whom the guns had been taken. - »This is not surprising, if three sleep in an army. It is good, he said, "that kings are sometimes unhappy. Don't you think we are accurate enough? "- Yes. But I don't see how they surprised us. But these misfortunes happen every hundred years. - General Seydlitz, on the 14th, said to the King: Does not His Majesty want to withdraw the infantry? "But, Seydlitz, I will lose the battle!" Well, may Your Majesty win it, and go away.
------------------------------

The Émilie gossip, which according to the Memoirs was with D'Argens. It is, however, clear that Fritz is the one contributing the garbled suicide attempt tale which Cahn identified to a gossip story about Émilie predating her involvement with Voltaire.

2. Left at 7, arrived at 3:30 in Jauernick; pretty well with a good peasant, from where I had two men decamped. Dined at 7. His Majesty sent for me. She was very tired. They spoke of Madame the Marquise du Châtelet; that she got fucked, but only by mathematicians or poets; that she was tight with Maupertuis, and that this was the beginning of his feud with Voltaire, who was jealous of him. "Maupertuis' physiognomy, says His Majesty, "is the most gloomy I have ever seen, but he is brutally honest man, he never gives in." The Marquise wanting to make an experiment on fire, burned an entire forest and made to admit to her husband, she said that it was a gallantry that she created for him, so that he had a good view. "" She put herself in a very hot bath, to see how far she could sustain the heat. would have remained without her chambermaid, who ran in a timely fashion. "" She was waiting for Voltaire from Potsdam; as he was late, because he still had some scheme to earn money, "said the King," she came to meet him in Brussels. Not seeing him, believes him unfaithful, takes opium."

Ferdinand, once the most wicked child of FW, now gets a different assessment from Big Bro.

4. I was. at 5. He told me that he had mourned his sister, and when in these moments of rest he thought of her, he cried again. He spoke to me with the highest praise of Prince Ferdinand, his brother, of the kindness of his heart; Prince Wilhelm: quoted pieces of Iphigenia which had to do with his situation, the end of the first act: they don't have time to cry; he read some places. This led to the spectacle. He quoted pieces of opera from me.

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The hunting passage, which is in the memoirs, though somewhat altered. Here with Latin and dissing of the Schwedt cousins.

He asked me if I liked hunting. - ›Etiam.‹ »Quam delectionem invenis? My father believed that I was a paste which we poterat facere quid volebat. It was not. He wanted me to be a hunter. I was given all the proper education. You had to run: I stopped the dogs; and we had to be careful. If I had stepped on one, the King would have screamed. The stitcher was very comfortable as I stopped. I haven't danced once since turning fifty. I really liked dancing; now I don't like it anymore, but videre juventutem saltantom, hoc mihi arridet. "Mihi dixit from Margrave's father:" he drank in the morning, at noon, after dinner, beat up all his grooms, drank in the evening: was very orthodox ; said to everyone, even to his grooms: "I am the son of the Grand Elector."

The story of FW's return to Potsdam definitely is heard by de Catt when he's Heinrich's army while Fritz is elsewhere. And there's one thing in the diary version which didn't make it into the memoirs which makes me wonder whether, no matter how they got along later on, Heinrich might not have been the source after all. Or maybe not him directly but his sidekick and boyfriend du jour Kalkreuth, whom Catt later mentions talking to in another context. The detail in case: Heinrich himself, what he was doing on that occasion.

When the King was in Kustrin, the Queen mother told her children to throw themselves on the King's knee to beg for mercy. The Princess of Baireuth, as the older one, threw herself before him in the anteroom; she got beaten. Then the family got under the table. Prince Henry stuffed it. (That's the algorithm's translation. Original: " Le prince Henri s'y fourra" - which google has as "Prince Heinrich will get into it"; honestly, I'm a bit lost - I mean, I'd say "got under it, the table, but the family is there already?) The King had a stick, he wanted to beat them. Arrives the chief stewardess, the Countess of Kameke. She spoke. - ›Go away, carrion!‹ Dixit ei Rex. One argues. - ›The devil will take you away,‹ she said, ›if you don't let these children alone!‹ Which she put in a room. The next day the King saw her, thanked her for the madness she had made him avoid. - ›I will always be your good friend,‹ and he was. Grumbkow said to the late King: "You should send this rascal over there", speaking of His Majesty. What horror!

With you there, de Catt, but I wish you'd have clearly said who told you this particular version of the story. Wilhelmine's version in her memoirs, which Henri de Catt couldn't have known (and certainly not writing his diary in 1759) has the intervention by Madame de Kamecke as well, but it has the sibs pleading with their father for mercy after she herself got punched and is dizzy. The other difference is that here the beating threat is to all the children, and Kamecke tells FW to leave the children alone, wereas in Wilhelmine's memoirs she tells FW not to do a Peter I and Philip of Spain with his oldest son. Note the shift in focus, which usually says something about who tells the story and has the memory. Now when I read the Catt memoirs, where Fritz tells this story to Catt, I assumed Fritz had the story from Wilhelmine and it got garbled in retelling. But seeing as Fritz is not the teller in the diary, and Heinrich is the only sibling other than Wilhelmine namechecked (which is edited out in the later memoirs version with Fritz as the speaker), since this version emphasizes the threat to all the siblings (as opposed to the threat to Fritz), and since he's the one person currently near Catt who actually was there that day, I wonder. Though like I said: it's also possible he told his boyfriend, and his boyfriend told Catt. Since Heinrich's boyfriends aren't known for their tact and restraint in general. Because if it's neither Heinrich nor a boyfriend who heard the story from him - wouldn't some other Prussian who got the story through court gossip put the emphasis on the threat to Fritz, current living legend, as Wilhelmine does in her Version, instead of on the kids?

Edited Date: 2020-02-04 06:03 pm (UTC)

From:

selenak

Kunersdorf, catastrophic defeat that is is, happens. This evidently is when someone in Catt's hearing voices criticism of the King, or several someones, for we get this indignant entry in the diary:

Alas! as the great ones are served. We aspire to be with them, we enjoy it. If they demand something painful from us, we get disgusted. I saw this Prince who by himself, by the circumstances, where he is, deserves the most to be cherished, the most capable: and I saw a crowd of ignorant people criticizing all his steps, his camps , its maneuvers, its provisions, its particular conduct; lend him views he didn't have; complain about any preference; I have seen people incapable of acting by the third hand, making them conceive of the most advantageous ideas, pushing themselves, believing themselves to be great men, being mysterious on small objects, indiscreet on important ones.

And also:

Men are strange; they have pleasure in lowering the King, in order to raise the Prince; others vice versa; but are we reasonable? The Prince acts sparingly; but he has to answer, the army is not his. And will we condemn his brother who, master, can do more? and can we not risk a few, to hope to win a lot? By pushing people this way, they are wasted or saved, and, the troops having suffered enough, the campaign does not go so quickly.

There's a Lehndorff mention in the camp gossip!

In a masked ball Madame de Bentinck came with lots of currency and portraits. There was M. de Lehndorff, chamberlain of the Queen, in a basin of a balance, in the other a feather which carried it, with this inscription: ›Lighter than a feather;« - by M. Danckelman like Diogenes, with a lantern, with this inscription: ›Hominem quaero.‹ - Maupertuis, who had fallen out with her, said to him: ›People have a false mind and a wicked heart; you, Madame, have a wicked mind and a false heart. ‹

Once Fritz and Catt are reunited, Fritz makes it clear who's the military genius around here by a reminder of his most admired battle, that of Leuthen:

When the King left for Leuthen, he wrote to his brother what he wanted to do. ›I will march on them, I will try to get them out, I will beat them. I will besiege Breslau, I will take it. You will say to me: this design surprises you, and you may think that only despair today gives birth to it. I apologize for your mistake.

As you might recall, by the end of 1759, Fritz takes over command in Saxony again, sends Finck to entrap the Austrians against everyone's advice, including Finck's and Heinrich's, and it's a disaster.

In the evening, I was from 3 and a half until 9. He was very distressed, came back to the same idea. - "So I will have brought my misfortune to Saxony!" I tried to distract him, but this image always returned. - »See how unhappy I was: treated harshly by a father, locked up alone for three months in a room; at noon I was brought to eat by a small window, I was given a shirt at the same time, and then I returned the plates of my food. I only had Bossuet on Variants and Basnage. Misfortune has always pursued me; I was only happy at Rheinsberg. Ah, if this peace comes, can anyone blame me for living a little for myself, for withdrawing and living in peace?

He does make peace time plans. These somehow include THE WORST coming to visit again:

"If Voltaire came to see me, it would be rare, and I would prevent any bother." - He made the plan of the building he would like to have. "There would be no vanity, no stools, but each would have armchairs."

Meanwhile, someone keeps being Fritz critical:

This Kalckreuth, adjutant of the Prince, jeers with a sneer: "And here is Silesia lost!" I would punch someone who would tell me, my sister is dead, I have no homeland at all.

If it's any consolation, Catt, we don't know whether Heinrich ever hit Kalkreuth, but he will dump him for Kaphengst at a point when Kalkreuth definitely does not want to be dumped.
Prince Ferdinand here is EC's brother, Ferdinand of Brunswick. Catt doesn't say who his source for the following story is:

After Kolin's unhappy affair, which it was believed we could not recover from, Grant came to Henckel, adjutant to Prince Heinrich. The latter announced it to the Prince, who sobbed. He was dispatched to Prince Ferdinand, who was in command; all were in tears. Orders were given to assemble to consult on the retreat. Prince Ferdinand did not say a word and he only wept. - ›This won't do,‹ said the Prince (Heinrich); ›It is necessary to make a decision.‹ It is essential to make yourself known. - ›I can not.‹

›Well‹, dixit princeps, ›I will make a retirement plan.‹ - The King is announced: the Prince goes to meet him, he takes him by the hand, squeezes him; ›Ah, my frater!‹, And he continues. They then enter the room and we sob on both sides. The Prince dixit, quod optimum esset, to make a retirement plan. - "Not possum," ait Rex, "sed crastina die prope meridiem." - ›This hurries!‹ - "Well, do it, mi frater!" - Here it is. - "It will be good, no doubt," said Rex. - The next day the Prince's adjutant was announced to the King, who made the King say if, on leaving, it would not be good to have the march beat and the flags displayed. - »Yes!« - We did it. Marshal Keith was vigorously attacked, he was cannonaded in his tents; but he escaped. Prince Ferdinandus Brunsvicensis in calamitate is admodum sensitilis.

I'm leaving the Latin, btw, because it cracks me up. "Well, do it, mi frater!" and all.
And here's an FW anecdote from none other than Eichel:

The late King, said M. Eichel to me, had brought with him M. de Schumacher, private counselor. - ›I have an important secret to communicate to you, it must not be disclosed. If that happens, one of the three of us will have spoken." Two days after the adviser comes, hears grenadiers talking about this affair; he was surprised, said Mr. Schumacher. He is very worried and surprised. The King said to them: 'How could it be that the affair had transpired? ‹M. Schumacher complained. Councilor Eichel said to him: "Let Your Majesty Remember if he did not speak of it." - "Yes", he said, "I am thick in the head; I told Grumbkow, I had this weakness. ‹-

Grumbkow, not known for his discretion? Tsk.

The two MT mentions are great, and as opposed to the memoirs version, come without "at leaset she hates whores", which makes me wonder whether de Catt isn't the one who has an anti sex worker bias? To recapitulate:

It must be admitted that the Queen of Hungary has talents, that she is capable, that she applies herself; we cannot refuse her, "he said," this justice. "

and

It must be admitted that the Queen's obstinacy and mine do much harm. What a cruel war! We only wreak havoc. "- In the evening, the enemies set fire to the outskirts of Pirna.

As Mildred said, it's the way he equals them both, rather than presenting himself as the menaced party, that makes it feel both honest and poignant.

Still hankering for a "Well done, son" from FW:

He thought he was in Strasbourg with Marshal Daun, who was suddenly transplanted to Charlottenburg, where his father was. There he found old Dessan. - "Did I behave well?" - ›Yes‹, said the King, ›yes‹. - »Well, I'm happy; your approval is worth me better than that of the whole universe. "- The French are announced. - "Should I attack?" He said to Prince Anhalt - and he awoke.

Fritz, somehow I don't think your memoirs will have the wished for effect on your family. Given, you know, Heinrich's copy of it with hand written comments was supposedly so incendiary that it got disappeared from the state archives:

I composed my memories for my family. People will talk a lot about me. It can find out the reasons that made me act. Let the public say what they want! What do I care! It is important to me that my family is happy with me. If I made mistakes, it's because I know what men are like.

And lastly, one more Voltaire statement. Can't tell whether this one is meant as a diss or an endearing story:

Voltaire, on leaving, gave three copies of Louis XIV to the cook and the servants.

Louis XIV = Voltaire's "The Age of Louix XIV", one monumental work in terms of histories because it didn't just focus on the monarch and his battles but tried to draw the picture of en entire era, its culture and society. This was according to Pleschinski the first of its kind and changed the way people thought history could be written. When Fritz, years later, writes "I am content to have lived in the Age of Voltaire", he's also alluding to this work in addition to paying a compliment to his frenemy. (And coining a phrase, as this is what the Age will be called in France.)

But, like I said, I can't tell whether he tells that anecdote to -

a) make a point about writerly vanity - i.e. "Voltaire thinks so much of his work, he even hands out copies to the servants

b) reporting a slight against himself - i.e. "here I was thinking Voltaire giving me copies of his works means he thinks I'm special, but guess what, he even gave them to the staff!"

c) telling an "aw, Voltaire" type of anecdote, i.e. "Look, he's not always a meanie; he did give copies of his masterpiece to the servants as a farewell present".

Edited Date: 2020-02-04 06:10 pm (UTC)