This is another bit of fantastic scholarly analysis! I agree with your conclusions, though I would say that if what Catt has Fritz tell him did indeed happen this way, Fritz would have had to know that either Fredesdorf or Voltaire were holding out on him re: their linguistic knowledge. Behold the scene from the memoirs, in which the messenger is the Abbé de Prades:
Annoyed at this bad faith, and carried away by a movement of anger, I had this diatribe burned. After the burning, I was sorry for it, as I was sorry in what followed for having mixed myself up with the literary and academic disputes of these two madmen. To repair a little of the evil done and to appease Voltaire, I sent the Abbé de Prades to him. I commanded the abbé to say pleasant things to him, and to report to me how he had taken them. The abbé arrived; Voltaire came up to him with a furious expression, which became still more furious when the abbé gave him my compliments. ‘ What, burn me! What, prefer to me that rogue and that Laplander, aupertuis, to me who was on such good terms with the King of France, my master, and who so stupidly preferred to him this vandal King who sends you! Ah, the b——, the b——, the Archduke Joseph will avenge me!’
The abbé, who came to me immediately after this fine scene, described it to me without missing anything; and I laughed with my whole soul. On the following day, I sent the abbé to ask news of the health of my faithless poet, who knew or suspected that the abbé would come again. What did the author of Mérope then do ? He ordered a bath, had put in it the potherbs destined for his soup, and when the abbé arrived : ‘ Come here, sir, come; see what this man has reduced me to! He is killing me, M. l’Abbé, and I loved him, was faithful to him, corrected his insipid prose and his prosy verses, but he will not escape me, the wretch.’
This second scene, which was rendered to me exactly, made me laugh still more, as you may imagine. There is nothing more comical, my dear sir, than this Voltaire before an illness or the idea of death. My imbecile is then the plaything of panic terrors. He paints for himself a thousand devils waiting ready to seize him. You will certainly hear said, when he is on the point of death, that he had all the confessors and all the priests come to him. He will dishonour us all; never was there a man less consistent than he.
Leaving aside the conculdung Fritzian obsession with Voltaire caving at death's door (which did not happen, but, as Mildred has pointed out, might owe something to the example(s) in Fritz' life who did give into religion at death's door), I can see why de Catt substituted de Prades here. Fritz sending his reader to Voltaire to make nice while getting the message across? Sure. Good choice. Sending his right hand man who supposedly doesn't speak French and at any rate is bound to be seen as an enforcer of the royal will rather than a diplomat? Not so much, if Fritz really did want to make nice at this point. So without Bischoff pointing out the substitution, I wouldn't have guessed, but he's right, for lo and behold, the Catt diary entry this long scene is apparantly mainly based on:
Frédéricdorf (sic) heard: ›Ah, the bugger, the Archduke Joseph will avenge me.‹ He answered: ›There is no ointment for the burn.‹
Quite. (And that's it with this particular entry.) BTW, if that's Fredersdorf answering "there's no ointment to the burn", in whichever language, he apparantly is up to making snarky comments himself.
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Re: Lucchessini, Catt and Fredersdorf, oh, my
Date: 2020-03-03 07:44 pm (UTC)Annoyed at this bad faith, and carried away by a movement of anger, I had this diatribe burned. After the burning, I was sorry for it, as I was sorry in what followed for having mixed myself up with the literary and academic disputes of these two madmen. To repair a little of the evil done and to appease Voltaire, I sent the Abbé de Prades to him. I commanded the abbé to say pleasant things to him, and to report to me how he had taken them. The abbé arrived; Voltaire came up to him with a furious expression, which became still more furious when the abbé gave him my compliments. ‘ What, burn me! What, prefer to me that rogue and that Laplander, aupertuis,
to me who was on such good terms with the King of France, my master, and who so stupidly preferred to him this vandal King who sends you! Ah, the b——, the b——, the Archduke Joseph will avenge me!’
The abbé, who came to me immediately after this fine scene, described it to me without missing anything; and I laughed with my whole soul. On the following day, I sent the abbé to ask news of the health of my faithless poet, who knew or suspected that the abbé would come again. What did the author of Mérope then do ? He ordered a bath, had put in it the potherbs destined for his soup, and when the abbé arrived : ‘ Come here, sir, come; see what this man has reduced me to! He is killing me, M. l’Abbé, and I loved him, was faithful to him, corrected his insipid prose and his prosy verses, but he will not escape me, the wretch.’
This second scene, which was rendered to me exactly, made me laugh still more, as you may imagine. There is nothing more comical, my dear sir, than this Voltaire before an illness or the idea of death. My imbecile is then the plaything of panic terrors. He paints for himself a thousand devils waiting ready to seize him. You will certainly hear said, when he is on the point of death, that he had all the confessors and all the priests come to him. He will dishonour us all; never was there a man less consistent than he.
Leaving aside the conculdung Fritzian obsession with Voltaire caving at death's door (which did not happen, but, as Mildred has pointed out, might owe something to the example(s) in Fritz' life who did give into religion at death's door), I can see why de Catt substituted de Prades here. Fritz sending his reader to Voltaire to make nice while getting the message across? Sure. Good choice. Sending his right hand man who supposedly doesn't speak French and at any rate is bound to be seen as an enforcer of the royal will rather than a diplomat? Not so much, if Fritz really did want to make nice at this point. So without Bischoff pointing out the substitution, I wouldn't have guessed, but he's right, for lo and behold, the Catt diary entry this long scene is apparantly mainly based on:
Frédéricdorf (sic) heard: ›Ah, the bugger, the Archduke Joseph will avenge me.‹ He answered: ›There is no ointment for the burn.‹
Quite. (And that's it with this particular entry.) BTW, if that's Fredersdorf answering "there's no ointment to the burn", in whichever language, he apparantly is up to making snarky comments himself.