Hahn sounds like he knows what he's talking about. (Which in this fandom is a super big compliment, hee.) ETA: I should have read further -- I am so behind! Guess I'll have to take this one back.
Mmmyyyeaahh, between that unsourced Fredersdorf anecdote in which his rival commits suicide, and those "but the kids provoked him!" I have no confidence in his facts or his opinions. But the historiography write-up was super interesting, and he definitely has his uses. (MacDonogh has his uses too! You have to read the problematic biographers, or you'll never be allowed to read anything.)
Mildred, is it possible for you to run it through your OCR/translation interface?
Haha, I knew you were going to ask this. :P
The good news is, there's no writing in the margins, so it doesn't matter whether they're regular or not, since I don't need to crop them. The other good news is that the OCR did a pretty good job overall, and it was only 50 pages, so I was able to do a decent job of manual cleanup in just a couple of hours.
So that file is now in the library. *bows* Your wish is my command!
Possible bad news, and definitely not what we were expecting...that volume is extremely short. Only 50 pages of French (and 50 of Polish). I wondered if it was abridged, since I don't remember seeing anything about the Elector of Brandenburg during my cleanup, and I went looking to see if there were other copies.
Now I'm just confused. archive.org has both a 200-page Mémoires secrets et inédits, and a 400-page Die Memoiren des letzten Königs von Polen, Stanisaw August Poniatowski. After Thiebault, I'm scarred for life in trusting 19th century memoirs to be the real thing.
selenak, can you clarify what the title of the memoirs Hahn uses is? I've gone ahead and put the shortest version, including OCR and translation, and the long German version, in the library, but I'm not doing all that manual cleanup on the secret unpublished memoirs until I find out that they're real. OCR is fast, translation is fast, manual cleanup of OCR is hours or days.
A couple of notes for cahn regarding the short version.
1) Kayserlingk is not to be confused with Fritz's Keyserlingk ("Caesarion"), the governor assigned to him as a teenager by FW, one of the "six whom he loved the most," and the one who went to Cirey to visit Voltaire and couldn't get the Pucelle out of Émilie the Very Wise. We've seen both Fredersdorf and Lehndorff write about his daughter. He died in 1745 and is not Poniatowski's Kayserlingk. (I haven't figured out how they're related yet, but they probably are.)
2) A.S. after some of the dates is "Ancien Style," called Old Style and abbreviated O.S. in English. That refers to the Julian calendar. By the Middle Ages, inaccuracies had caused it to drift several days off from reality. (Leap years weren't quite fine-tuned enough, basically.) Pope Gregory XIII made some adjustments and issued a new calendar, called the Gregorian calendar. It was introduced in 1582, when it was 10 days off the Julian calendar. So countries adopting it had to skip 10 days ahead.
Adoption varied by country. Generally speaking, Catholic countries were the first to adopt, because the Pope said so. England didn't adopt until 1752, at which point they were 11 days off. Russia didn't adopt until 1918 (obvious date is obvious, as selenak says), at which point there was a 13 day difference.
This means that if you're dealing with 18th century history, you'd better know what day it was in what country! And when dealing with international affairs, it's not uncommon to write two dates, or to specify that one was using the Old Style (O.S.) or New Style (N.S.). This also means that sometimes you'll see an event that happened around the turn of the new year written as 1761/1762. This doesn't mean we don't know what year it happened, this means it was a different year in different countries.
For example, the second Miracle of the House of Brandenburg, when Elizaveta of Russia died? Dec. 25, 1761 in Russia, where she lived, but January 5, 1762 in much of the rest of Europe. So you may see her death written as 1761/2, or December 25, 1761 (O.S.), or just January 5, 1762, because we're all on the Gregorian calendar today.
Poniatowski
Mmmyyyeaahh, between that unsourced Fredersdorf anecdote in which his rival commits suicide, and those "but the kids provoked him!" I have no confidence in his facts or his opinions. But the historiography write-up was super interesting, and he definitely has his uses. (MacDonogh has his uses too! You have to read the problematic biographers, or you'll never be allowed to read anything.)
Mildred, is it possible for you to run it through your OCR/translation interface?
Haha, I knew you were going to ask this. :P
The good news is, there's no writing in the margins, so it doesn't matter whether they're regular or not, since I don't need to crop them. The other good news is that the OCR did a pretty good job overall, and it was only 50 pages, so I was able to do a decent job of manual cleanup in just a couple of hours.
So that file is now in the library. *bows* Your wish is my command!
Possible bad news, and definitely not what we were expecting...that volume is extremely short. Only 50 pages of French (and 50 of Polish). I wondered if it was abridged, since I don't remember seeing anything about the Elector of Brandenburg during my cleanup, and I went looking to see if there were other copies.
Now I'm just confused. archive.org has both a 200-page Mémoires secrets et inédits, and a 400-page Die Memoiren des letzten Königs von Polen, Stanisaw August Poniatowski. After Thiebault, I'm scarred for life in trusting 19th century memoirs to be the real thing.
A couple of notes for
1) Kayserlingk is not to be confused with Fritz's Keyserlingk ("Caesarion"), the governor assigned to him as a teenager by FW, one of the "six whom he loved the most," and the one who went to Cirey to visit Voltaire and couldn't get the Pucelle out of Émilie the Very Wise. We've seen both Fredersdorf and Lehndorff write about his daughter. He died in 1745 and is not Poniatowski's Kayserlingk. (I haven't figured out how they're related yet, but they probably are.)
2) A.S. after some of the dates is "Ancien Style," called Old Style and abbreviated O.S. in English. That refers to the Julian calendar. By the Middle Ages, inaccuracies had caused it to drift several days off from reality. (Leap years weren't quite fine-tuned enough, basically.) Pope Gregory XIII made some adjustments and issued a new calendar, called the Gregorian calendar. It was introduced in 1582, when it was 10 days off the Julian calendar. So countries adopting it had to skip 10 days ahead.
Adoption varied by country. Generally speaking, Catholic countries were the first to adopt, because the Pope said so. England didn't adopt until 1752, at which point they were 11 days off. Russia didn't adopt until 1918 (obvious date is obvious, as
This means that if you're dealing with 18th century history, you'd better know what day it was in what country! And when dealing with international affairs, it's not uncommon to write two dates, or to specify that one was using the Old Style (O.S.) or New Style (N.S.). This also means that sometimes you'll see an event that happened around the turn of the new year written as 1761/1762. This doesn't mean we don't know what year it happened, this means it was a different year in different countries.
For example, the second Miracle of the House of Brandenburg, when Elizaveta of Russia died? Dec. 25, 1761 in Russia, where she lived, but January 5, 1762 in much of the rest of Europe. So you may see her death written as 1761/2, or December 25, 1761 (O.S.), or just January 5, 1762, because we're all on the Gregorian calendar today.
Just in case things weren't confusing enough!