Frederick the Great, discussion post 14

[cahn]

Check out the opera clips at Rheinsberg!

(both the real-life place, which selenak found out hosts a festival for young opera singers! and the community rheinsberg)

Also! our fandom has been producing lovely fic at a rapid clip (okay, well, selenak has):

Sibling dysfunction: Promises to Keep and My Brother Narcissus

Sibling dysfunction PLUS sibling M/M love triangle: The moon flies face to face with me

VOLTAIRE! Between the hour and the age

Comments

Re: Katte! - execution details

[selenak]

re: did Fritz know that Grumbkow was lying on FW's behalf about SD disowning him: the more I think about it, the more I'm sure he did. In his later life, he never comes across as being insecure as to whether or not his mother loved him. The one point in the 1730s where for the first and last time he sounds tetchy about her in a letter to Wilhelmine is so rare precisely because of that, and in that letter he talks about the impossibility of making both their parents happy at the same time because if you're good with one the other one is incensed. So I think we can be sure he knew Grumbkow was talking bullshit but wanted to humor FW, especially if that meant he was allowed to communicate with Mom again. (I mean, we know he and Wilhelmine had letters smuggled to each other, but even Dickens mentions nothing about a secret Fritz-SD correspondance during the Küstrin year.)

"De Providentia" by Seneca?

Hinrichs just says "De La Providence von Sherlock". No, really, "Sherlock". It's on page 143, check it out.

I still think this is relevant both to Fritz's later "One can compel by force some poor wretch to utter a certain form of words, yet he will deny to it his inner consent; thus the persecutor has gained nothing," and his conviction that Voltaire is going to break on his deathbed. Voltaire, of course, lacked Katte's several motives for possibly Fritz-life-saving ostentatious piety; he just wanted a proper burial.

Quite. And of course Voltaire, life long hypochondriac with his insistence on being on death's door all the time, came across to Fritz as anything but a brave stoic. Interestingly, Voltaire seems to have been aware of what Fritz thought he'd do o nhis deathbed despite this never coming up on Fritz' part in their (preserved) correspondance, because here I have to quote one of my favourite Voltaire letters again, from October 1759, context: Voltaire is still trying backchannel diplomacy to achieve a separate French/German truce, and also, Maupertuis (that would be the bull dog from Saint Malo alluded to) has died in Switzerland:

Sire, there was once a lion and a rat; the rat fell in love with the lion and went to pay him court. The lion gave him a little blow with his paw. The rat disappeared into his rat hole again, but he still loved the lion; and one day when he saw the net spun to catch the lion and kill him, he gnawed through one of the stitches. Sire, the rat kisses with most humble submission your charming claws; he will never die between two Capuchins as a bull dog from Saint Malo has done in Basel. He would have prefered to die next to his lion. You may believe the rat was more devoted to you than the bull dog.

If I do manage to write the AU where Fritz gets captured and Voltaire is the world's most unlikely knight to rescue him via the power of trashy pamphlets, that quote will definitely be used.

Huh, that is consistent with Wilhelmine's multiple fainting episodes.

Which would argue she had this part from the horse's mouth, because like I said, this report is from the Prussian secret state archives, to which Wilhelmine in the 1740s has no access (nor, for that matter, does Pöllnitz). The 1731 pamphlet has nothing like it in it. And the Eklektische Monatszeitschrift copies of the other reports won't appear until 1785, years and years after Wihelmine's death.

but to know that Fritz asked, and to know that *Katte* asked...no wonder he looked so happy when he saw Fritz at the window. I knew he had to know that Fritz would be feeling guilty, even before we knew Fritz sent Lepel and Schack multiple times. And this way he got to tell him face to face that there was nothing to forgive.

OMG.

Yep, that was my reaction as well when I read it, and I just had to share immediately.

Re: Katte! - execution details

[mildred_of_midgard]

re: did Fritz know that Grumbkow was lying on FW's behalf about SD disowning him: the more I think about it, the more I'm sure he did. In his later life, he never comes across as being insecure as to whether or not his mother loved him...he talks about the impossibility of making both their parents happy at the same time because if you're good with one the other one is incensed.

I agree. He must have known. Years and years of her wanting him to get out of Prussia and marry an English princess and become governor of Hanover until FW died...and he's supposed to believe that she's upset that he tried to do exactly this?

Hinrichs just says "De La Providence von Sherlock". No, really, "Sherlock". It's on page 143, check it out.

Ooookay. Not Seneca, then. So ignore everything I just said.

William Sherlock, English churchman, wrote a discourse on Providence translated into French in 1721 in the Hague. At least it's Protestant! That makes more sense of why Katte was allowed to have it in prison.

Glancing at the volume in question, I see Sherlock is a fan of free will and reconciling that with the hand of Providence. Which I think would satisfy FW, and explains a lot. All right, then! We know what Katte was reading (other than the Bible) right before he died.

If I do manage to write the AU where Fritz gets captured and Voltaire is the world's most unlikely knight to rescue him via the power of trashy pamphlets, that quote will definitely be used.

Dooo iiiiitt!

Huh, that is consistent with Wilhelmine's multiple fainting episodes.

Which would argue she had this part from the horse's mouth

Agreed. She actually says 3 days, which is close enough to the 5 that she must have some kind of source. Okay, then her account may not be as inaccurate as we think; I was going by the fact that Fritz is up and discussing predestination the next day, but that interspersed with fainting episodes makes a lot of sense and is consistent with how grief and trauma works.

OH MAN SOMEONE GIVE THAT BOY A HUG

Yep, that was my reaction as well when I read it, and I just had to share immediately.

Thank you for doing so! I'm now wondering if the decision to make sure they could talk as Katte walked past the window was precisely because they'd had to refuse requests to let the prisoners have that hour or fifteen minutes. I'd always thought that it was an act of compassion, making sure Fritz and Katte got to say goodbye, but now that we know that both of them requested a final audience and that messengers were running back and forth between the two...

Well, it may not have been deliberate so much as forced on them by circumstances; in the 1921 map I have, past Fritz's window isn't the most obvious path to take from where Katte was kept to where he was to be executed, but Hoffbauer has a lot more walls, so...maybe they had to take him that way.

And if Fritz really couldn't see the execution site, the execution organizers presumably did need to be able to say that Fritz could see Katte, and having witnesses to Fritz at the window as they called back and forth to each other would mark "Fritz watched" indelibly in people's minds, even if Fritz just barely couldn't see the site because of Hoffbauer's wall.

But maybe Fritz and Katte were told, "Look, the best we can do without losing our own heads or at least jobs is give you two a chance to say goodbye as we lead Katte past the window."

Btw, it's worth keeping in mind that Fritz and Katte are not being held in the same building. They're a couple blocks apart. So if Lepel went from Fritz to Katte to Fritz twice and Schack once during those 5-7 am hours, that is a significant amount of running back and forth, before sunrise* to boot, just to make sure Fritz knows Katte doesn't hate him. I'm glad they considered at least that much within the scope of their orders.

* Sunrise is at 7 am in that location at that time of year. I looked that up long ago ;).

Re: Katte! - execution details

[cahn]

Sire, there was once a lion and a rat; the rat fell in love with the lion and went to pay him court. The lion gave him a little blow with his paw. The rat disappeared into his rat hole again, but he still loved the lion; and one day when he saw the net spun to catch the lion and kill him, he gnawed through one of the stitches. Sire, the rat kisses with most humble submission your charming claws; he will never die between two Capuchins as a bull dog from Saint Malo has done in Basel. He would have prefered to die next to his lion. You may believe the rat was more devoted to you than the bull dog.

This is hilarious, and touching in the more-than-half-ironic way anything with Voltaire is touching <3

(I waaaaaant that AU :D I should make a list for Yuletide! Yes, I know, it's only April...)

Yuletide fic brainstorming

[mildred_of_midgard]

Let's see:

Voltaire rescues Fritz via the power of trashy pamphlets
Fredersdorf and Georgii (with or without time travel!)
Adventures in Rococo Babysitting
Broccoli tests (if no one has written it by then)

What else?

ETA: Mimi and the pandurs!

ETA2: Heinrich running into Barbarina and Schmeling-Mara during his second Paris visit at a Parisian café

Also, I think Fredersdorf and Georgii should be written both *with* and *without* time travel. You could get two totally different fics out of them.