cahn | Frederick the Great, discussion post 16

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We have slowed down a lot, but are still (sporadically) going! And somehow filled up the last post while I wasn't looking!

...I was asked to start a new thread so that STDs could be discussed. Really! :D

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From:

mildred_of_midgard

No, not her opinions on him leaving for Potsdam, I haven't reread that section. But the incest question! (I mean, this is the sex thread. We have to stay on topic!)

Was he, as some scholars think, obliquely referring to the question of possibly marrying Mme Denis? The idea seems absurd. Mme Denis was his niece, and marriage with her would be incestuous and illegal. And yet it was not absolutely impossible, in the eighteenth century, for a man to marry his niece, if he got the right papal dispensation. Charles-Marie de La Condamine, the mathematician and physicist and one of Voltaire’s friends, married his niece in 1756; and the financier Jean Pâris de Montmartel also married his niece. Voltaire investigated the question in some detail. He claimed that there may have been about forty such marriages every year; and he estimated that the cost of the papal dispensation would have been some 120,000 francs (‘once you include the small expenses’), though he went on to say: ‘I have always heard it said that it cost M. de Montmartel only 80,000 francs.’

If Voltaire was so interested in the question of marriage between uncles and nieces and what it entailed, the implication must be that at some stage he gave real consideration to the idea of marriage with Mme Denis.

Footnoted citations: Voltaire, Romans et contes, pot-pourri, vol. XIII (Éditions de La Pléiade, Paris), p. 464 (first published in 1765); Voltaire, Mélanges, La Défense de mon oncle, de l’inceste (Éditions de La Pléiade, Paris), p. 1156, (first published in 1767).

Thoughts?

From:

cahn

Basically I find Voltaire hilarious, and this is no exception. I think it is absolutely hilarious that he investigated the frequency and cost of marriages to nieces :D

From:

selenak

And yet it was not absolutely impossible, in the eighteenth century, for a man to marry his niece, if he got the right papal dispensation.

Or if he was Protestant and the King's brother, says Ferdinand. Anyway, what Cahn said. V.v.. Voltaire to check out the expenses and precedents here. Mind you, I can think of another reason why he might have at least considered making it official and marrying Madame Denis: in theory, either or both of them could have ended up in prison because it was illegal. Voltaire wasn't just the son of a notary but also in his later life the attacker of various legal injustices, so he was quite aware of how easily the law could destroy you even if you hadn't committed any offense. The good city councillors of Geneva, for example, might have been willing to put up with his non-religiosity, but uncle/niece incest could have been one thing too many?

Conversely, and also possible: he might have been afraid Madame Denis would remarry and leave him, otherwise, at least early on.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Conversely, and also possible: he might have been afraid Madame Denis would remarry and leave him, otherwise, at least early on.

Davidson quotes numerous letters early on where she keeps talking about getting married to someone else, and Voltaire keeps freaking out, so yes, there is that.