Carrying over replies to comment on the last post:
"Three whores of Europe": you know, I've never seen a direct citation for this one. It gets quoted in every single 20th century biography that I've read, but without the addendum of "as such and such reports". (Same, btw, with MT's "evil man from Potsdam" - that also gets quoted as a saying of hers about Fritz without "see letter x" or "memoirs y" because it's so often used that it's taken for granted. (Meanwhile, the "but does this hero who has won himself such praise etc..." sentence I let her use in the Yuletide story are from a letter to Joseph the Rational fanboy"; *pats self on back for using actual sourced quote*) All this being said, Fritz' subject and contemporary Lehndorff, when the war is going badly for Prussia, does have an entry where he doesn't quote "three whores" but says that maybe the King shouldn't have insulted all the female leaders of Europe.
The letters to Heinrich, to Voltaire and to Wilhelmine have Fritz casting himself as Orpheus, peacefully minding his own business, and MT, Elizabeth & the Marquise de Pompadour as tihe maenads who after him to tear him apart. There's also the famous description "the league of petticoats" which again I don't think I've ever seen being given with a direct citation. Barbara Stollinger quotes a couple of direct MT directed insults and she's good with citation, but my copy of her MT biography is in Munich, and I'm in Bamberg, so I can't look it up.
"Women smelling bad": depressingly, this seems to have been a historic gay men's trope about women? Because Philippe d'Orleans and his favourites used that one, too. Now how anyone could smell anything in Versailles, between all the bodily waste necessitating the court moving every few months and all the perfumes used is beyond me anyway.
More seriously, in a lifetime of hypocrisy, there is little that Fritz was more hypocritical about than money. If you ask me, he's trying to compensate for a deprived childhood. Anyone trying to take money that could be his is a trigger that emotionally puts him back in a place where he has to live without books and music and adequate food. I think his obsession with good food, what he described as "disorderly cravings, like a pregnant woman," and his apparent inability to keep from bolting it (even when he had no trouble skipping meals or living on tight rations) stems from the same source.
*nods* Agreed. And I think the way he both withheld from and showered his siblings at different times with money also plays into this. (Btw, since McDonogh is wondering: yes, he paid Amalie's debts.) Money isn't just money. Money is power, control and affection. Not always as point blank as as when he sends some and tells Heinrich to get rid of Kaphengst, but the subtext is often there. And of course, he keeps sending food to them, too. (Even to EC in their fruit exchanges.)
But the fact that it remained so deniable, and the fact that he spent that much time denying it, and the fact that people like Heinrich or Algarotti leave us in no doubt about their sexual activity, and the fact that there are so few candidates and he spent relatively little time with them (even Fredersdorf and he are frequently separated after 1740), and the fact that Trenck absolutely would have talked...it kind of makes me think he'd figured out that he liked the idea of sex better than the act.
I mean, his contemporaries seem to have been in little to no doubt in terms of orientation, even those who were not particularly close to him. It's not just Liechtenstein with the Alexander seal and Manteuffel with the "Seckendorff, read up on Hadrian if you want to understand Junior!" tip, but courtiers like Lehndorff who report matter of factly that Glasow's original in with Fritz were his good looks, and also says of Fredersdorf that "a very pretty face aided him and was the beginning of his fortune". But Voltaire's story about morning fooling around with the pages and cavaliers between breakfeast and work aside, I can't recall a contemporary claiming that he/she knew without the shadow of a doubt that Fritz had actually had sex with any of them. (Though correct me if I'm missing good examples, and if Blanning reports otherwise.)
Thièbault making FW the author if the Fritz/MT marriage idea demonstrating he had zilch idea about FW's hardcore Calvinism:
Yup. He also didn't live at a strictly Calvinist court, and Fritz was pretty chill about religion (I mean, he badmouthed Catholics, but we all know he was willing to pretend to be a Protestant for the sake of winning his wars), so why not FW? I mean, if Voltaire can have FW present at the execution...
Quite. I mean, don't get me wrong: if there had been a way for FW to get a Hohenzollern son of his on the throne of the HRE without religious conversion (or, even better, an Archduchess go Protestant), I do think he'd have jumped on it, which was my justification for making him that tiny but key bit more ambitious in the first MT-Fritz encounter. But the Prussian kings being Protestants was really a key part of their image. Remember, as late as the mid 1750s Fritz asks Wihelmine to make a stop at Geneva on her way back from Italy to squash the rumors that she and the Margrave were converting to Catholicism (that's when she promises to "make my salamaleikums"). Allowing Jesuits in his kingdom was one thing, but having members of his family go Catholic would have been damaging Fritz' standing as the hero of the Protestant faith and he knew it. (Especially since that business wiht the Stuarts must have been on every Protestant's mind in this regard, and that, too, started with first family members converting.
Serious question: does Lehndorff normally comment on the attractiveness of random courtiers and officers whose death he reports?
Not in the death reports, but he does mention attractiveness (or lack of same) when he draws one of his pen portraits. Both for the men and the women. And independent from whether he personally likes them. (For disliked but still described as attractive, see, Glasow, Heinrich's various no-good boyfriends, Ferdinand's wife, and Elisabeth the first wife of FW2, who even after she's shown herself to be MESSALINA to his beloved Crown Prince Jr. rarely gets mentioned without a remark of how pretty she is. See, for example, that entry about spotting her in her exile in Stettin and how she can carry off her extravagant fashion but everyone imitating her just looks stupid.)
This said, he mentions Peter being good looking in both the first entry on him (when Peter is still alive) and in the death entry, in combination of praising him in other regards as well, and that's certainly not standard. (Heinrich's various boyfriends gt a "good looking BUT...." type of description, not "so nice, and brave, and also good looking" the way Peter did.
In regards to how reliable Lehndorff calling someone good looking is, given the "beautiful as an angel" about Heinrich - well, to be fair, he says that specifically about Heinrich in his riding pants, so maybe what he found beautiful on that occasion wasn't Heinrich's face. Ahem. (Having more regular eating habits than Fritz, Heinrich kept his trim figure and in his older years erred more on the thin side than on the plumb side.) Otherwise, Lehndorff's Heinrich crush doesn't voice itself in praising his looks but his charm, intelligence, reading (out loud), and of course Lehndorff during the 7 Years War is delighted to now add "being a great general and looking out for civilians and pows" to his "why I love Heinrich" eloges.
Wilhelmine's memoirs: She should also sue the Boston editor guy who bowdlerized her memoirs and cut out the Dresden episode, oh and also her dad getting punched. Come on. Who *doesn't* want to read about FW getting punched? It's the most cathartic thing in the world after you've gotten through volume 1.
Indeed. The way she introduces this episode also cracks me up: "These memoirs really are all gloom and doom, I realize. So, here's a comic relief episode: how Dad got punched! (Describes it.) I return to my narrative."
OMG, Catt, you fucking liar! Look at this, guys.
*Looks* Tsk. My explanation would be that either Fritz woke him up on another occasion and he merges the two stories, or he changes the story as part of the effort of making himself look better, as the ultimate Fritz Wrangler, endlessly patient and enduring.
Various
"Three whores of Europe": you know, I've never seen a direct citation for this one. It gets quoted in every single 20th century biography that I've read, but without the addendum of "as such and such reports". (Same, btw, with MT's "evil man from Potsdam" - that also gets quoted as a saying of hers about Fritz without "see letter x" or "memoirs y" because it's so often used that it's taken for granted. (Meanwhile, the "but does this hero who has won himself such praise etc..." sentence I let her use in the Yuletide story are from a letter to Joseph the Rational fanboy"; *pats self on back for using actual sourced quote*) All this being said, Fritz' subject and contemporary Lehndorff, when the war is going badly for Prussia, does have an entry where he doesn't quote "three whores" but says that maybe the King shouldn't have insulted all the female leaders of Europe.
The letters to Heinrich, to Voltaire and to Wilhelmine have Fritz casting himself as Orpheus, peacefully minding his own business, and MT, Elizabeth & the Marquise de Pompadour as tihe maenads who after him to tear him apart. There's also the famous description "the league of petticoats" which again I don't think I've ever seen being given with a direct citation. Barbara Stollinger quotes a couple of direct MT directed insults and she's good with citation, but my copy of her MT biography is in Munich, and I'm in Bamberg, so I can't look it up.
"Women smelling bad": depressingly, this seems to have been a historic gay men's trope about women? Because Philippe d'Orleans and his favourites used that one, too. Now how anyone could smell anything in Versailles, between all the bodily waste necessitating the court moving every few months and all the perfumes used is beyond me anyway.
More seriously, in a lifetime of hypocrisy, there is little that Fritz was more hypocritical about than money. If you ask me, he's trying to compensate for a deprived childhood. Anyone trying to take money that could be his is a trigger that emotionally puts him back in a place where he has to live without books and music and adequate food.
I think his obsession with good food, what he described as "disorderly cravings, like a pregnant woman," and his apparent inability to keep from bolting it (even when he had no trouble skipping meals or living on tight rations) stems from the same source.
*nods* Agreed. And I think the way he both withheld from and showered his siblings at different times with money also plays into this. (Btw, since McDonogh is wondering: yes, he paid Amalie's debts.) Money isn't just money. Money is power, control and affection. Not always as point blank as as when he sends some and tells Heinrich to get rid of Kaphengst, but the subtext is often there. And of course, he keeps sending food to them, too. (Even to EC in their fruit exchanges.)
But the fact that it remained so deniable, and the fact that he spent that much time denying it, and the fact that people like Heinrich or Algarotti leave us in no doubt about their sexual activity, and the fact that there are so few candidates and he spent relatively little time with them (even Fredersdorf and he are frequently separated after 1740), and the fact that Trenck absolutely would have talked...it kind of makes me think he'd figured out that he liked the idea of sex better than the act.
I mean, his contemporaries seem to have been in little to no doubt in terms of orientation, even those who were not particularly close to him. It's not just Liechtenstein with the Alexander seal and Manteuffel with the "Seckendorff, read up on Hadrian if you want to understand Junior!" tip, but courtiers like Lehndorff who report matter of factly that Glasow's original in with Fritz were his good looks, and also says of Fredersdorf that "a very pretty face aided him and was the beginning of his fortune". But Voltaire's story about morning fooling around with the pages and cavaliers between breakfeast and work aside, I can't recall a contemporary claiming that he/she knew without the shadow of a doubt that Fritz had actually had sex with any of them. (Though correct me if I'm missing good examples, and if Blanning reports otherwise.)
Thièbault making FW the author if the Fritz/MT marriage idea demonstrating he had zilch idea about FW's hardcore Calvinism:
Yup. He also didn't live at a strictly Calvinist court, and Fritz was pretty chill about religion (I mean, he badmouthed Catholics, but we all know he was willing to pretend to be a Protestant for the sake of winning his wars), so why not FW? I mean, if Voltaire can have FW present at the execution...
Quite. I mean, don't get me wrong: if there had been a way for FW to get a Hohenzollern son of his on the throne of the HRE without religious conversion (or, even better, an Archduchess go Protestant), I do think he'd have jumped on it, which was my justification for making him that tiny but key bit more ambitious in the first MT-Fritz encounter. But the Prussian kings being Protestants was really a key part of their image. Remember, as late as the mid 1750s Fritz asks Wihelmine to make a stop at Geneva on her way back from Italy to squash the rumors that she and the Margrave were converting to Catholicism (that's when she promises to "make my salamaleikums"). Allowing Jesuits in his kingdom was one thing, but having members of his family go Catholic would have been damaging Fritz' standing as the hero of the Protestant faith and he knew it. (Especially since that business wiht the Stuarts must have been on every Protestant's mind in this regard, and that, too, started with first family members converting.
Serious question: does Lehndorff normally comment on the attractiveness of random courtiers and officers whose death he reports?
Not in the death reports, but he does mention attractiveness (or lack of same) when he draws one of his pen portraits. Both for the men and the women. And independent from whether he personally likes them. (For disliked but still described as attractive, see, Glasow, Heinrich's various no-good boyfriends, Ferdinand's wife, and Elisabeth the first wife of FW2, who even after she's shown herself to be MESSALINA to his beloved Crown Prince Jr. rarely gets mentioned without a remark of how pretty she is. See, for example, that entry about spotting her in her exile in Stettin and how she can carry off her extravagant fashion but everyone imitating her just looks stupid.)
This said, he mentions Peter being good looking in both the first entry on him (when Peter is still alive) and in the death entry, in combination of praising him in other regards as well, and that's certainly not standard. (Heinrich's various boyfriends gt a "good looking BUT...." type of description, not "so nice, and brave, and also good looking" the way Peter did.
In regards to how reliable Lehndorff calling someone good looking is, given the "beautiful as an angel" about Heinrich - well, to be fair, he says that specifically about Heinrich in his riding pants, so maybe what he found beautiful on that occasion wasn't Heinrich's face. Ahem. (Having more regular eating habits than Fritz, Heinrich kept his trim figure and in his older years erred more on the thin side than on the plumb side.) Otherwise, Lehndorff's Heinrich crush doesn't voice itself in praising his looks but his charm, intelligence, reading (out loud), and of course Lehndorff during the 7 Years War is delighted to now add "being a great general and looking out for civilians and pows" to his "why I love Heinrich" eloges.
Wilhelmine's memoirs: She should also sue the Boston editor guy who bowdlerized her memoirs and cut out the Dresden episode, oh and also her dad getting punched. Come on. Who *doesn't* want to read about FW getting punched? It's the most cathartic thing in the world after you've gotten through volume 1.
Indeed. The way she introduces this episode also cracks me up: "These memoirs really are all gloom and doom, I realize. So, here's a comic relief episode: how Dad got punched! (Describes it.) I return to my narrative."
OMG, Catt, you fucking liar! Look at this, guys.
*Looks* Tsk. My explanation would be that either Fritz woke him up on another occasion and he merges the two stories, or he changes the story as part of the effort of making himself look better, as the ultimate Fritz Wrangler, endlessly patient and enduring.