cahn | Frederick the Great discussion post 11

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In our last installment, our heroes found that Henri de Catt's memoirs, a major source for current biographers of Frederick the Great, are not to be trusted!!

rheinsberg

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From:

mildred_of_midgard

Speaking of marriage! The reason I tracked down this book (well, the reason I bought it on my current budget was that it looked like it was full of ambassador report goodies, but the reason I wanted it in the first place), is that it's the citation in a bio for "Fritz didn't want to sleep with EC on his wedding night, FW had to bully him into it, Fritz was seen walking in the valley an hour later." That was supposedly a report from Seckendorff back to Vienna after the wedding that's quoted in Jessen. Can you confirm or deny?

From:

selenak

Actually, what Seckendorff is writing to Eugene is that all the satiric pieces launched by London and Hannover - „Allesamt unwahr“ - i.e. „all untruthful“ - , are CLAIMING that FW had to bully Fritz into sleeping with EC and that he was seen walking in public through the Salztal an hour later. Seckendorff further reports that this makes FW even more pissed off at the Hannover cousins than usual and that to this hour, he hasn‘t written an official notification (i.e. a „dear bro in law, my son got married“ to them. Since Seckendorff has no problem informing Eugene whenever Fritz does pull stunts like this, and was present at the wedding, I‘m taking him at his word that it was untruthful satire. All on page 57 of the first Jessen volume.

Let me guess: Blanning‘s bad German strikes again, and he can‘t read the conditionalis or disclaimers? (The construction of the sentence is „it is claimed by satiric pieces, all untruthful, that“ etc.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Thank you for clarifying. I had a feeling something like that was going on. It's actually MacDonogh this time, saying that Seckendorff "sent the gossip back to Vienna," without ever stating that Seckendorff didn't believe it or implying any disbelief on his own part other than attributing it to "gossip." He makes it sound like Seckendorff is reporting this as the best source he's got.

Both authors are prone to mis-citing their sources in amazing ways. I would like to blame poor French/German, but Blanning mis-cites Voltaire's memoirs, which have been *translated into English*.

As noted, Asprey gets around this problem by not citing! And when he does, it's a book, not a page number.

All on page 57 of the first Jessen volume.

Just to spare you confusion in case you ever find yourself looking up Jessen in a hard copy: there's only one physical volume. I proactively split the pdfs because you had trouble downloading the large Fredersdorf file back in December.