cahn | Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 17

...we're still going, now with added German reading group :P :D

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From:

selenak

My icon is from the Lester movies, using a quote about Richelieu. As for a lot of other movie versions, here is the entry in which I make fun of one basic problem modern scriptwriters all seem to share when it comes to the Cardinal.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I have to say my favourite is when Amalie gets to play the Grand Sultan while Heinrich plays the Sultan's favourite odalisque. Gender switching costumes for the win!

Yeah, that was fun.

Dear readers, if you want to know how the delicate feelings of a lady were offended at that time, check out what the Princess Amalie had to put up with when her brothers organized a fete.

Um.

...Schmidt-Lötzen, of all the things Amalie could and would complain about in her life, I really don't think these parties were included. I bet she enjoyed the drag stuff enormously, rather.

I bet! I mean, with Ziebura saying she and Ulrike romped with the boys and would rather have been boys (which is not to say they were transgender, just feeling confined by gender roles).

Yep, and why such a lot of Prussian nobility were constantly in debt.

Which would be suboptimal but still not totally crazy, if Fritz wouldn't complain when you get into debt. OMGWTF.

*mentally revising just how much scrimping Peter and Ariane must have done*

BTW, it occurs to me that it could have easily been otherwise re: Fritz being in a great mood, because: 1753 is the year of Voltaire's departure.

Omg, you're right. I was guessing Fritz's physical health might have been on an upswing in August/September, but I had forgotten about Voltaire!

Voltaire having spent the intermittent months at the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha's place

"Who, God be thanked, did not make verses," aka my favorite line from his memoirs. :P

Though hang on, when did the Frankfurt arrest happen, wasn't that in autumn as well?

Voltaire left Prussia in March, and Frankfurt was June/July. Just a few weeks before the big camp. Hmm.

I do remember Varnhagen von Ense (per Carlyle) arguing that Fritz was out of Prussia and busy with military stuff much of the time, and the orders were relayed through Fredersdorf (of whom von Ense is not a fan). Which is who I take Macaulay to be arguing against when he says it's ridiculous to claim that Fritz wasn't responsible.

Also, you know, *Voltaire* would certainly be in a bad ~~letter-doctoring~~ mood right after Frankfurt, but Fritz, having gotten his book back and asserted his dominance might be in a *good* mood because of Frankfurt more than in spite of Frankfurt.

But yes, it could easily have gone the other way, since Fritz does not soon forget his (boy)friends leaving him. Good catch.

Review in Spandau: you truly are the best detective. :)

:)

We know so little about Peter that I can remember most of the few details we *do* know, and I have a soft spot for him, so I'm always on the lookout for more.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Though he would argue he was just trying to convincingly impersonate Fritz on that occasion. :)

I would argue that Heinrich is capable of some *very* convincing Fritz impersonations. ;)

Re: the timing - don't forget this was also when Charles Hanbury Williams was, or every recently had been Ambassador, aka the one English envoy who loathed Fritz and vice versa.

Ah, yes, very true. 1750-1751, per Wikipedia.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

By Lucasta Miller? Yes, I did, and agree it's very interesting.

Yep, that's the one. I figured if you liked Hahn's account of the evolving historiography of Fritz, you'd like the same being done with the Brontes, especially with an eye toward methodology. I'm glad I read Miller *before* I read Gaskell. Miller may not be right in all of her conclusions, but she at least gets you thinking critically.

it would have been a shame to lose this over the most fickle of swans

Indeed, and I love the way you phrased this.

Which must mean that both Hervey (who usually loved to gossip) and Algarotti kept absolutely mum.

That is really interesting, and good for them! Algarotti had better keep mum *frowny face*, but good for Hervey, rival love interest yet loyal friend.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Ha. I didn't think of counterchecking the dissertation

I worked my way through the dissertation a second time for putting together the chronology, and I spotted a few things I hadn't the first time around. Boyfriend detective!

( The allusion to p [ rostitutes ] was probably a euphemism ; a month later Voltaire described in vivid detail the sexual activity between the French ambassador's young male secretary and Algarotti, who is depicted as a Venetian Socrates with large eyes and aquiline nose.)*

Oh, I assume Fritz is eliding male-male sex here. My only question is whether that includes Fritz/Algarotti action or not.

Btw, MacDonogh claims that Algarotti was disappearing "into the homosexual brothels of Berlin." I'm not sure what the evidence for that is, but it's entirely possible.

(1) Except if this poem is from a private letter rather than from a publication? Halsband and Grundy don't say.

Private letter to Fritz, although if he also published it elsewhere, I don't know. I'm entertained that both MacDonogh (who doesn't believe Fritz was gay, that was just Voltaire slander) and Blanning (GAY!) both feel the need to quote and translate this poem at length.

Given the new info that he was Algarotti's tasty dish afterwards I suspect he didn't remarry because there was no family pressure on him to do so and he just plain did not want to, enjoying the single life style. It also explains why Lehndorff never mentions a mistress of Mitchell's, whereas he does that for other envoys he socialized with.

Yep, this makes lots of sense. I'm now guessing there's been some editing out by Bisset. Didn't Bisset's James Keith never start a family because manly man totally absorbed with the military?

Remember: if Bisset didn't approve of it, it never happened!

Love that dare not speak its name indeed. (And that goes for het, too!)

So Fritz would have had to bring him up first.

And Fritz totally would. <3

...and I feel even more entitled of having included your Algarotti/Heinrich speculation in My Brother Narcissus. Clearly, Algarotti absolutely would have if he could have.

Oh, absolutely! Algarotti seems to have had the highest sex drive of them all. That's one reason I think that if Fritz was doing it with anyone, it would have been with Algarotti: good looking, charismatic, strong sex drive, sexually experienced, obvious mutual attraction, sexually charged banter with Fritz. So if Fritz is blase about Algarotti having an STD the next time they see each other, either Fritz considers getting an STD from Algarotti (or giving him one?) no big deal, or Fritz is indifferent to having sex with him. And gonorrhea is one thing, but given just how bad syphilis is...

Anyway, while we're here, all this talk of secret boyfriends and envoys leads me to: Algarotti/Suhm, y/n?

Algarotti visited St. Petersburg when Suhm was there, and when he visited Crown Prince Fritz at Rheinsberg immediately after, Fritz wrote to Suhm that "We talked a lot about you."

And we know it doesn't take people long to fall for Algarotti, he's like FS but with sex, in terms of how fast he makes a positive impression. :P

Since neither Algarotti nor Suhm chose each other over Fritz (both came running as soon as Fritz became king), and it was only a few weeks that Algarotti was in St. Petersburg (like 4-6 weeks), I think Fritz would totally be fine with this, and in fact, would consider it evidence of Algarotti's fine taste in men.

Suhm: So, young man, if you're looking for a job--I know FW is not a great supporter of the arts and sciences [because Suhm is too diplomatic to say THE WORST]--but his son! *sparkly hearts* You should totally go to Rheinsberg. Tell Fritz I would go if I could.
Fritz and Algarotti: *talk about Suhm*
Fritz: Finally, someone I can appreciate my erastes with!

From:

selenak

Overall: Isabel Grundy's biography of Lady Mary - which, as the daughter of a Duke married to someone of lower rank, was her title - is very informative, if also dense and sometimes exhausting to go through. Grundy admirably points out whenever she has to go into speculation, as already indicated in her foreword:

The most obvious facts about her, when examined , prove ambiguous or slippery. She eloped like a quintessential romantic heroine — but with a man she did not love. She respected him; she knew he would be hard to live with; she had broken off her relationship with him a dozen times. She was in love with a different man, someone who was already lost to her for reasons as unknown as himself.
Her face was ruined by smallpox — but within a few years it was de rigueur again for those meeting her to comment on her beauty, as if either her looks had somehow repaired themselves or those around her found it unthinkable that she should not be beautiful.
The period when Pope was her worshipper is not directly visible, but only refracted through the letters he wrote when she was safely distant and expected to remain so for the foreseeable future. The true causes why his worship turned to rancour are still mysterious, and unlikely ever to be fully explained. Fuller understanding could probably emerge not from hunting a particular moment or particular event, but only from clearer and bolder thinking about the working out of gender issues. We have made some progress in capacity to detect the hostility already immanent in the adoration. No reader today will find in Pope's letters to Lady Mary on her travels a transparent wish to please . He constructs her as a beautiful body - implicitly a nude body — while she is busy constructing herself as doing and seeing and writing. She was still constructing herself this way years later, when he was painting her as a monster.
Pope's final, full-blown, gendered hatred is extraordinary, yet it is also typical. As a highly visible, assertive, unconforming woman Lady Mary was a lightning rod for misogynist anxiety and anger. In the almost half a century from her elopement to the British expatriate campaign against her when she was an old lady in Venice, she seldom ceased to attract opprobrium.

Something Grundy also does is pointing out Lady Mary's own flaws and prejudices; for example, one of her enduring enemies, Griselda Murray, became her enemy after Lady Mary wrote a mocking poem about what was either a rape attempt or a covered up blackmail attempt, but either way, Griselda Murray was justifiably furious and never forgave her. And she points out the source problem: in Lady Mary's life time, she published only anonymously, and the majority of her poems and pamphlets were circulated in hand written copies among the aristocrats and literati. Which makes it difficult to say which ones were hers (save for some where we have a printed anthology copy where there are in her handwriting remarks like "this one is mine" or "I admit it"), or there's a manuscript. (And even then: copying something you like in your handwriting was also a thing for her circle back then.) The one manuscript she meant for publicaton were the "Embassy Letters". Which weren't, actually, the rl letters she wrote when she was in Turkey. They were based mostly on her diary entries at the same and some of her actual letters; for publication, she edited them to a form where no letter repeats information the previous has (as would have been inevitable in rl) and edited out any too personal info re: her and the recipients. This manuscript she left with a Dutch publisher on her journey back to England from Italy when she had breast cancer and knew she would die soon, with the strict instructions that it was only to be published after her death. All of this due to the social taboo that female aristocrats did not publish (and certainly not for monetary gain).

Her diaries, sadly, are lost to us safe for a few fragments. She left them to her daughter, Lady Bute (wife of Lord Bute the PM who ended the subsidies to Fritz and thus gained his unending hostility), who kept them until her own old age and according to her daughter Louisa often read them - Louisa was only permitted to read some excerpts, which she admired very much and tried to recreate from memory later - , but in the end shortly before her own death, she burned them. And this wasn't the only autodafé; when Lord Hervey's son returned the letters Lady Mary had written to his father during those last months of her life to her, she sadly told him they were a remarkable testimony of how much a man and a woman who never were lovers could care for each other as friends, and how his father was the best friend she ever had, whom she could tell everything to - and promptly burned them as well. (By contrast, a great many of Hervey's letters to Lady Mary thankfully survive since she kept and didn't burn them.) See, this is why we're lucky Mrs. Fredersdorf didn't return (most of) Fritz' letters to him!

And then there's the usual historical difficulty of everyone having the same names. There are three guys called Edward Wortley Montagu of relevance; Grundy tries to help by calling Lady Mary's husband Wortley, her son Edward, and the cousin "Montagu". Otoh, she also calls Lady Mary "Lady Mary" only when talking of her as a society person but when talking of her as an author, calls her "Montagu" as well. This is not helping!

With all these caveats: it's still a remarkable story that unfolds, if often frustrating, and I'm glad to have read it. Our heroine is a spirited book-loving girl of a rich aristocratic father, who in addition to getting the standard education for aristocratic females teaches herself what she can by passionate reading. She and her female friends joke about marital prospects being a "heaven" (marrying the one you love), "hell" (unloved parents choice, often old) and "limbo" (compromise, sensible but blah). Lady Mary ends up with a "limbo" in order to avoid her father's "hell". Originally, she'd been friends with her future husband's sister, and they wrote each other giggly letters. Then Wortley took over (we know this because the next few letters his sister wrote exist in his hand writing first) though without revealing himself. Then the sister died, and he did approach Mary directly. Cue awkwardness, various failed attempts at romance and parental negotiations (he wasn't yet rich, though he would become so later in life), and eventually she eloped with him not out of love but in order to avoid a worse prospect.

At least, though, we have a lot of primary data about her marriage and how it came to be. Most of her romantic life is based on speculation. Gossip gave her a lot of affairs, but the letters don't exist, and given how utterly she fell for Algarotti in her middle age and opened her heart then, Grundy thinks she might not have had affairs at all earlier (though flirtations, sure). She also, being a modern biographer, states that of course men aren't the only options. She had some intense friendships with women. One of them was with Maria Skerret, who was first the mistress of Robert Walpole the long term PM and then, after the death of his first wife, his second wife. (Very very unusual, this; mistresses getting married, I mean.) Horace Walpole the writer was the son of wife No.1, very much resented Stepmom and hated Lady Mary as her bff, which ensured she'd be vilified by one of the two main memoirists of the era (the other being Hervey, who adored her). She - Lady Mary - also copied one of Hervey's "Lesbian" poems for her collection, and one of her "Embassy Letters" became sensational because it describes a visit to a Turkish bath, celebrating the unabashed and relaxed nudity of the Turkish women. So Grundy thinks "maybe", but points out we don't have more than that, and again, there's the Algarotti case for how Lady Mary behaved when she was unquestioningly in love.

She quickly moved in not just fashionable but literary circles and gained the reputation of a wit, as well as a lot of colorful friends. She was one of the few people who managed to get along with Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (yes, the very one from The Favourite, now in disgrace; also Winston's ancestress) and with Sarah's daughter, both of whom were famous for argueing with almost everyone (including each other). Incidentally, when Grundy establishes the Georgian background as Queen Anne dies and Georg Ludwig von Hannover becomes George I. of England, things get very Anglosaxon, as in her explanation to her readers what an "Elector" was: "He had the right to vote for the Austrian Emperor in Vienna." I suppose technically that's one way to describe it, but really, being Elector in the HRE had once been a crucial thing in the Middle Ages, and it was still important enough to be a bargaining tool in the 18th century. Also: not the Austrian Emperor. The Emperor, who is an Austrian at this point, but he was reigning Archduke of Austria and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation. Who was crowned in Frankfurt, not Vienna, for that reason.

Both Grundy and Halsband repeat without qualifying the English aristocratic dig that George I., speaking little to no English when he ascended to the throne, was something of a blockhead. Now, an intellectual he wasn't, but as a typical high-ranking continental aristocrat of his time and the son of the very clever Sophie of Hannover and brother of Sophie Charlotte, he was bilingual in German and French, and good in Italian and Latin, with some Dutch. Meanwhile, Grundy without noting the irony states that Wortley was hoping to get the King's favour because among the four gentlemen working in the Treasury (the ministry, that is), he was the only one able to speak French. (And no other foreign language.) (It didn't work, because George I. wasn't interested in the Treasury.) Halsband, writing in the 1970s, still makes the mistake Horowitz mocks in his book, repeating the contemporary assumption that George arrives with two German mistresses (Katte's sort of aunt Melusine von Schulenburg and Sophia Charlotte (yes, another one) von Kielmansegg), while Grundy is more up to date and knows Kielmansegg was, in fact, George's illegitimate half sister, daughter of his father Ernst August, which the British aristos with their lack of German and evidently none too fluent French did not get. This Anglocentric world view continues; these biographies (of Lady Mary and Lord Hervey, respectively) are the first ones I've seen the Diplomatic Revolution described as England's daring and revolutionary decision to ally with Prussia instead of Austria. Bless.

Back to Lady Mary, earning a reputation as a wit with literary gifts and at this stage adored by Alexander Pope. Because his later hate of her was so fateful, there's a lot of Pope in the book. When he enters the tale, Grundy points out he himself was someone who rose against the odds: Not only was he excluded , as a Catholic, from full civil rights; he suffered a serious disability. Pott's disease (tuberculosis of the bone) had stopped his growth at about four foot six , and he was gradually and inexorably becoming more hump-backed. Side-effects included severely impaired sight, almost constant headache, muscle pains, and respiratory troubles. These he faced not merely with courage but with gallantry and
panache; but the years 1715-16 were among his healthiest . (....) Hampered in or barred from most of
the usual social expressions of his masculinity, he was now, in his twenties, eager to declare himself intensely and outrageously attracted by witty women, while his chosen ideal of femininity was one of muted and attentive docility.

Another fateful event of those years was that Lady Mary's sister Frances was married off to a future Jacobite, Lord Mar, likely because her father wasn't sure the Hannovers could carry the day and wanted to have a foot in both camps. This turned out to be a be a disaster for poor Frances, because her husband, at least as described by Grundy, proved to be an utter bastard. He first led the first Jacobite rebellion more out of spite than belief, than turned turncoat and sold out his comrades. She spent most of the subsequent years in exile in France (and we have Mary's letters to her and many of hers to Mary), and ended up going from depression to nervous breakdown to complete mental collapse. Cue ugly family quarrel about who got to have custody of Frances.

But back to earlier times. After not really getting anywhere in government, Wortley worked for an embassy post and got one. Not too long before their departure, Lady Mary contracted the small pox, which ravaged her. She maintained a scarred face and scars all over her body, and her eyelashes never grew back, which made her previously praised "very fine eyes" looking very intense. Now, the portraits painted of her after this show no more scars than the portraits painted before, when she had the reputation of a beauty. This seems to have been the usual policy (you don't see any small pox scars on Mozart portraits, either, or on Katte's, for that matter) for painters, but as Grundy points out, it's noticeable that the compliments for Lady Mary's beauty continue after an interlude of about a year as if the small pox never happened. She did use makeup, but still. Charm and allure of personality or the victory of trope over reality?

Once she was healthy, she, her husband and their kid sum took off to Turkey, the long way around. This meant they visited a lot of European countries and met a lot of people before ever getting to Turkey. Including Prince Eugene at his prime, fresh from his most famous victory over the Turks, giving travel advice (he told them to wait for the spring, when the Danube would have thawed), and Mt's parents in Vienna:

The high point of Lady Mary's visit, described early in the Vienna Embassy Letters, was reception at court. The requisite costume was not only formal but ‘ more monstrous and contrary to all common sense and reason than tis possible for you to imagine ' . She addressed her embassy account of it to sister Frances (her chosen recipient for almost all her
accounts of exotic clothes),and did her level best to realize it for her mind's eye . The headdress had a foundation ‘ about a yard high ', covered in both false and natural hair, ‘ it being a particular beauty to have their heads too large to go into a moderate Tub ... Their whalebonepetticoats out-do ours by several yards Circumference and cover some Acres of Ground . You may easily suppose how much this extrordinary Dresse sets off and improves the natural Uglyness with which God Allmighty has been pleas'd to endow them all generally.'
Despite this robust resistance to Viennese fashion , Lady Mary was thoroughly charmed with the empress, Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick Wolfenbüttel: with her beauty, her sweetness, her favour to her English visitor, her pregnancy, and later by her grief at the death of her previous child, five months old, long desired, and male. (Lady Mary did not hesitate to blame his death on bad management, saying he was ‘kill’d by ... weaning him in the beginning of the Winter'.)

From:

selenak

Lady Mary in general was no fan of anything old fashioned on the continent, but she admired more modern stuff, like the use of china on stoves which she witnessed in Dresden, and hoped she'd have the chance to use it back home. During the obligatory stop at Hannover - where George I. was in residence - she made much of little Fritz of Wales, then a nine years old kid who impressed her with his "sprightliness and understanding". Once the Wortley Montagus have reached Serbia, Lady Mary shows a very unusual reaction for the era to being shown Eugene's last great battlefield against the Turks:

The last topic Lady Mary found for her pen in Christian Europe was the battlefield of Peterwardein, scene of Eugene’s ‘ last great Victory ' , when the Turkish cavalry fled towards Belgrade, leaving perhaps 30,000 janizaries to be slaughtered and some impaled or decapitated . An English officer wrote, 'We took no more than twenty prisoners because our men wanted their blood and massacred them all . ' All this had happened almost as the Wortley Montagus left England. ' No attempt was made to bury the dead ' ; they must have been badly decomposed, though now , with snow lying on the ground, they no longer stank. Lady Mary's first response was emotional shock and outrage — sharpened , no doubt, by her personal acquaintance with the victor, who had been fresh from this triumph when she met him . But these painful feelings quickly modulated into intellectual analysis of the human systems which permit struggle and slaughter for the sake of small spots of earth , even while fertile tracts lie unoccupied.
"The marks of that Glorious bloody day are yet recent, the field being strew'd with the Skulls and Carcases of unbury'd Men, Horses and Camels. I could not look without horror on such numbers of mangled humane bodys, and reflect on the Injustice of War, that makes murder not only necessary but meritorious."
The entrenched acceptance of such a harmful custom , she thought, plainly proved ' the irrationality of Mankind (whatever fine claims we pretend to Reason) ' . In her Embassy Letters she addressed this impassioned argument to Pope.

What shows up here gets more of a theme when Lady Mary actually arrives in Turkey; she very much rejected the contemporary view of the Turks (and Muslims in general) as inferior or barbaric. Whether it was the comfort of sofas ("I shall never endure a chair again") or the baths:

The women's beauty delighted her: the ‘shineingly white ' skins, with no ornament but ‘their Beautiful Hair divided into many tresses hanging on their shoulders' . The good order, good humour, and friendliness of the naked assembly — the freedom from 'surprize or impertinent Curiosity ', immodest gestures, disdainfull smiles or satyric whispers '-—impressed
her even more . So did the egalitarianism ( you could hardly tell the great lady from her slave) . As usual,Lady Mary was alert to what was and what was not different. The female body was the standard of beauty in her own culture; the Turkish women's grace and charm were what she might have expected ( though their freedom from smallpox scarring, and from the red marks left by tight lacing, were unfamiliar). It was like an artist's fantasy, and Lady Mary ‘had wickedness enough to wish secretly ' that her friend Jervas might have been there invisible to represent it on canvas. But to find unadorned ,
unimproved femininity free from lewdness or narcissism or rivalry: this was a most happy denial of what her own culture had led her to expect. From now on she had two separate models of the admirable in Turkish culture: the male library and this ‘ Women's coffee house'.

She learned Turkish, and during her time there tried to learn as much as she could about local literature and music, too. The most lasting legacy of her time in Turkey was the inoculation performed on her son Edward, though, which when she had it repeated on her daughter - who was born in Turkey - years later when they were back in England started the big fight for inoculation there. Very importantly to Lady Mary, the Turkish style of inoculation differed from what European doctors later tried first - which included enormous bloodletting and big amounds of infected matter transfer instead of a "small prick" done in Turkey.

For all her openess to another culture, though, Lady Mary, and Grundy doesn't hide this, was utterly typical of her time when it came to a) slavery and b) racism against black people. Whom she saw very differently to how she saw Turks and Arabs; imagine all the usual vile slanders and prejudices, and yes, she said and wrote them. (Including even speculation that surely there miust have been some "cross breeding" with animals.) This sadly isn't a paradox when compared to her admiration for Turkish culture; I remember reading the memoirs of Emily Huete, born Salmé bin Osman, a Sansibar princess, which include a whole rant on how slavery is right because "negroes" are just that inferior and only happy when employed in service etc etc etc; this from a woman who herself endured a lot of anti-Arab prejudice when living in Europe.

Wortley when being called back to England just about had it with civil service; he want private, and became a coal magnate in the north of England. Lady Mary remained in London, became bff with Hervey, conducted her inoculation campaign... and then the feud with Pope started. Grundy doesn't think the story about her rejecting a direct pass is true because she doesn't think Pope would have made himself vulnerable like that. But whether or not it happened, Pope, who in his letters to her during her time abroad had built her up and up and up in his imagination, could not cope with the real deal, and started to attack her. After that "poxed by her love, and pillored by her hate" quip, she had enough, and enlisted Hervey (also attacked by Pope as "Sporus", an allusion to the dancer Nero had castrated and then dressed up as a woman he could marry); together, they wrote a counter satire on Pope, which was just as vicious, and then the literary feud began in earnest. Unlike Fritz/Voltaire, this one isn't funny, because with Fritz and Voltaire, you think they both could take it (and deserved it). Pope - again, the poet of the age - really cut loose, no holds bared, and threw everything at "the furious Sappho" (i.e. Lady Mary) he could think of, from sexual license and STD (of course) to financial greed (he accused her of starving her by then mentally ill sister so she could enjoy their father's money, which was completely untrue) to being physically repellent and dirty. This proved so effective a portrait that young Horace Walpole, a Pope fan and predisposed to dislike Mary anyway (due to her friendship with his stepmother), later when he met her in Italy described her in terms identical to Pope's without (and only very late in life admitting that well, okay, all that "dirt" talk was maybe a bit of an exaggaration), with some additional horror of the middle aged (by then) female body because he'd heard (or claimed he did) that she'd gotten her menses so strongly that she bled into the inn where she was passing through and had to pay the innkeeper for a new linnen. That she at age 51 still menstruated was to him the epitome of monstrosity. He also couldn't believe she still danced and called it utterly shameless and again repellent; a woman of 50 going through physical activity that made her sweat was disgusting, and so forth.

There's a lot of inner English politics in the book as well - Lady Mary was a Whig and friends with some key Whigs, Hervey included, after all - and I thought all the manouevres and counter manouevres were somewhat more lucidly explained in the Hervey biography. Then Algarotti arrives, and the two biographies work very well as completing each other. He couldn't have shown up at a worse time in terms of Lady Mary being extremely vulnerable. She was becoming exhausted with all the literary pilloring and the struggle about her sister Frances. Her son Edward (who was Algarotti's age) had turned out to be an increasingly rotten character, a scoundrel of the unfun kind and a cheat. Her daughter, with whom she had gotten along very well when said daughter was still a child, and would get on very well again once she was married and a mother herself, was now a teenager in love butting heads with Mom. And presto, here's this young, charming, dazzling Italian. She must have thought this was finally a break, something new and good in her life. And for the first time - if there were previous times before - she threw caution in the wind and allowed herself to utterly and completely fall for someone, not holding anything back. :(

From:

selenak

Well, we know what happened. Grundy's description of Fritz showing up in Algarotti's life works as an amusing antidote (she notes Algarotti must have thought he hit the jackpot - a princely patron who was young, smart, charismatic and sexually compatible! - and with some Schadenfreude reports how that turned out). Lady Mary herself never met Fritz, but she did tease Algarotti about him when they were resuming relations in their final years, during the 7 Years War in the later 1750s:

The balance of power had shifted between them . Lady Mary was no longer emotionally nor Algarotti financially grasping. She was a self confessed old woman, and he a scholar- critic in his early forties, retired from
public life . Their minds still struck sparks. (...)n She told him that Graeme was piqued at having laid siege for months to a
citadel (herself ) which Algarotti had once taken by storm in a fortnight. On the other hand she freely mentioned her age. She had turned soft and sentimental, she said , and was recklessly squandering her short remaining
time when she enjoyed the pleasures of Carnival . As before, she sought to charm him by her wit. The earliest of these
letters , written at the end of 1756, showed off by imitating Homer (as she put it) in combining different dialects : that is , in her case , by shifting from English into Italian and thence into French. It also flattered him and sniped at his former ‘ Roial Patron ' by exalting the wisdom of retirement and attacking the destructive , even demonic, pleasures of the military hero. She sounded and resounded this anti -war motif, playing it both for strong feeling and for airy paradox. She suggested that killing innocent beasts for sport is more culpable than killing human beings who mostly deserve no better. The butcher-hero thus becomes the hunted animals avenger, less guilty than meat- eaters like herself. She blended her Enlightenment
reformism with impish play.

The story of Lady Mary's years in Italy (and some in France) have their drama quite apart of the Algarotti epilogue; one of the local gangsters named Palazzi managed to first trick, then threaten her (to the point where she wasn't allowed to go anywhere without his "protection") , helping himself to a considerable part of her money, until she finally managed to get free and rid of him. (He later ended up imprisoned and executed for murder; this really could have ended lethally.) But on the bright side, she still was a fascinated traveller and explorer of other societies, and a voracious reader, who was very glad when her daughter kept sending her new books from England (which she always reviewed and wrote comments on). As mentioned, relations with her daughter became very well again; by contrast, her son - who showed up once or twice in the hope to get some money - went from bad to worse. The war stories worried her from afar; she had retained her atypical dislike of war, was a stranger to Fritzmania and didn't think England should stay involved. When she returned just as the war was ending, as mentioned, she left her "Embassy Letters" manuscript with a Dutch printer en route, figuring, probably correctly, that if she brought it to England her family would not let it get published, or at least not the way she wanted. As it was, it turned into a bestseller - an international one; Heinrich read it in Prussia and recced it to Fritz, remember - , and awoke an appetite for more letters and writings of hers. But that was after she had died, with her daughter and grandchildren, her husband (with whom she'd kept in contact throughout their lives) having died already at that point. An edition of her work beyond the Embassy letters was published in 1803, but by then, the climate had been changing, and not in a way friendly to controversial women. Grundy just gives a quick epilogue, covering the publication history of Lady Mary's works, which is a telling difference of emphasis to Halsband's epilogue for Lord Hervey with its "where are they now?" story. Hervey was a hobby poet, a courtier and a memoirist, and his biographer put the main emphasis on his life; Grundy always tries to balance Montagu the writer with Lady Mary the person, and makes the case that it's as a writer she has become immortal.

Useful for Enlightenment crossovers: like Hervey, Lady Mary met and befriended Voltaire when he was in England. (Neither of them was uncritical of Voltaire as a writer, but they kept up good relations from a distance, and Voltaire wrote a glowing review for the French papers when the Embassy Letters got published.) Depressingly, she didn't meet (that we know of) Émilie - her travels didn't coincide - but that's where fiction could come in. Incidentally, while Halsband in the 70s knows so little of Émilie that he thinks Voltaire was the only one writing about Newton and that Émilie was "catty" to Algarotti the second time he visited because his work about Newton was a rival to Voltaire's, Grundy knows just a little more and thinks Émilie was annoyed that Algarotti didn't dedicate his "Newton for Dummies" to her. Neither mentions Émilie's own work on Newton, or Émilie's work in general. Anglocentrism to the end.

However: Lady Mary and Wilhelmine were in Italy at the same time! And they definitely could have met. (If they have, I don't recall it from the letters posted at the travel letters website, but I could easily have missed it - I haven't read every single one. If they haven't, well, maybe they kept it secret for Reasons!)

Edited Date: 2020-09-07 06:00 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I trust her up to a point. She gets little details like dates and name spellings wrong, and as

selenak caught, doesn't seem to know MT is the Queen of Hungary and Bohemia in 1742.

But she works mostly off Algarotti's letters in the archives in Italy, and she does have citations. Plus I did some googling, and I found this one book from 2019 which is heavily footnoted, called Andrew Mitchell and Anglo-Prussian Diplomatic Relations During the Seven Years War, which looks useful if someone wants to write Mitchell for RMSE next year! Anyway, this book agrees Algarotti stayed with Mitchell and wrote letters to him, and it cites those letters in very scholarly-looking footnotes.

Oh, looks like it's a reprint/e-book edition of a 1986 publication. Still. I would say Mitchell and Algarotti knowing each other is reasonably well corroborated.

~~somebody should read this book~~

~~it might be relevant to their interests~~

From:

mildred_of_midgard

So I wonder if Lehndorff would be easier to read syntax-wise?

He might be? My concern there is that there might be a lot of players we don't know and want to look up or ask Selena about, so I wanted to put that off until my German was a little better. But I'm not wedded to doing it after Krackow and Oster. We could try doing it before and see how the syntax goes.

I'm starting to think I should read things I don't want to discuss in great detail alongside things I do, so that I keep up my German page count but don't accumulate vast numbers of things I need to discuss/research every day.

So if you're willing to start Wives as soon as we finish AW, I could read Sons alongside Wives (Sons being very short, of course), and then Wives would go more slowly. I might also start tackling Wilhelmine's memoirs in German, since they seem to be less or not at all bowdlerized in that edition, I could use the practice, and I do want to reread volume 1 and finish volume 2 now that I know a bunch of things I didn't over a year ago.

Also, just so you know, the interleaved AW has a weird issue where the first 40% is the same as the second 40%! I think the second time it goes on to the end, though.

Argh, I thought I had fixed that! Either I didn't save that change, or I sent you the wrong file. It should go on to the end the second time, though, yes.

Do you want me to send you a corrected file?

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Great! I've emailed you all three files.

Ziebura, or AW? We're about to finish AW, but it might be a while before we get through the remaining Ziebura books. Especially if we try to slow down Ziebura so that we're less overwhelmed by the amount of discussion happening.

Unless you feel like you're not ready for Melody until you do more Duolingo, I actually don't think it would be a bad idea if you did some Melody in conjunction with Wives, which you could read purely in English while practicing your German on something simpler.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I didn't realize that forgiving one's enemies was one of the things one was asked in deathbed confessions until, uh, quite recent reading. :P That is fantastic.

Reading Macaulay recently reminded me of this anecdote of FW on his deathbed (or a sickbed that he ended up recovering from, not sure):

Roloff: And then there is forgiveness of enemies; Your Majesty is bound to forgive all men, or how can you ask to be forgiven?
FW: Well, I will; I do. You Feekin [his wife, Queen Sophie], write to your brother (unforgiveablest of beings), after I am dead, that I forgave him, died in peace with him.
Roloff: Better Her Majesty should write at once.
FW: No, after I am dead, that will be safer!

The passage ends: "At parting he said to Roloff, 'You (Er, He) do not spare me; it is right. You do your duty like an honest Christian man.'"

You better believe this anecdote was not reported by Macaulay, hater of FW. This is the 1882 editor chiding Macaulay for his one-sided portrayal of FW and trying to show FW in a better light, for which the editor quotes at length a passage from Carlyle.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Yay! I mean, after all this fuss, I hope you like it :P, but at least it's a good way to make the Bronte history and anecdotes memorable.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

HARD SAME

From:

cahn

That sounds good. I also want to read Wilhelmine's memoirs in English, so if you are able to do an interleaved of the German then I'd be very interested in that :) (Or just English, really, as we have already ascertained that Wilhelmine's German is too fancy for me at this point. Although every day I'm like "hey, I just did that word in Duolingo, I recognize it now!")

Nah, I can cut and paste myself :)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Hmm. Wilhelmine's paragraphs are pretty long, so it would either be completely useless to you interleaved (as I discovered Horowksi was), or I would have to manually insert arbitrary paragraph breaks and then run it through Google Translate, because I am *not* going to do paragraph alignment again. :P Also, the English copy I have of her memoirs is a terrible quality scan, which OCR would really struggle with.

I vote for you holding off on her memoirs until we do French, when you can deal with separate files. You have Voigt to practice your German on now, and you can read Wives and Lehndorff with me in English (and maybe some Lehndorff in German), and if I can talk you into it, Oster's Wilhelmine bio in English. Come oooonnnn, she's your fave, it's fic research, we'll talk about her together, it'll be great! ;)

Besides, we'll go slowly while we practice our German on texts we don't need to talk so much about.

Anyway, I'm 4-5 pages from the end of AW, so I've put the interleaved Wives text into the the library. I'll be reading Wives at the same time as Sons, and if I finish Sons first, then either Heimwärts or the Wilhelmine memoirs.

When we finish Wives, then we can discuss whether we want to do Lehndorff next, or whether I should do Oster and Krackow.

Edited Date: 2020-09-07 10:18 pm (UTC)

From:

cahn

Ah, waiting for French makes much better sense! I still *might* like interleaved Google translate for the French memoirs, long paragraphs and all, but I would NOT expect paragraph alignment :) Or even arbitrary manual paragraph breaks. But I think the way I process is sufficiently different from yours that the interleaved is still helpful for me in cases where it's not for you.

From:

cahn

Our good Prince of Prussia worked terribly in the Lord's vineyards during his stay here. Little Kraut, as the prettiest, won the lottery, Knesebeck a few times and Frau v. Brandt for the sake of [old times].

LOL omg Lehndorff! Ha. I'm glad that Ziebura gave some context, as I would not have figured that out just from the text.

AW! :(

From:

mildred_of_midgard

* Fritz: always punish the officers so as to make "ein Exempel für die anderen."

Yeah, "pour encourager les autres" is not making me want you as my leader, Fritz.

Also Fritz: I am der einzige König, so there are keine anderen, so there's no point to punishing me, obviously. :P

Ooh, I just looked up "pour encourager les autres," and it hasn't been coined yet. Voltaire will coin it in Candide, published in 1759, with reference to the British executing one of their admirals for a lost battle in 1756. Huh. I didn't know that was Voltaire, and I didn't know it was inspired by the Seven Years' War.

The battle of Minorca, won by the French on May 20, 1756, per Wikipedia:

Byng displayed considerable caution and an over-reliance on standard fighting procedures, and several of his ships were seriously damaged, while no ships were lost by the French. Following a Council of War, at which all the senior officers present concurred, it was agreed the fleet stood no chance of further damaging the French ships or of relieving the garrison. Byng therefore gave orders to return to Gibraltar.

The Admiralty, perhaps concerned to divert attention from its own lack of preparation for the disastrous venture, charged him for breaching the Articles of War by failing to do all he could to fulfill his orders and support the garrison; he was court-martialled, found guilty and sentenced to death, and - despite pleas for clemency - executed on 14 March 1757 aboard HMS Monarch in Portsmouth harbour.

There may be 20 examples of executed generals under Fritz that I don't know of, but the only one I know of who was condemned by the court martial was given a last-minute reprieve. Much like Glasow.

* Wilhelmine writing to Fritz to exonerate AW: Only you, dear brother, are free from mistakes.

Because it's Wilhelmine, I honestly don't know how much sarcasm to read into that. (If it were Heinrich, then obviously 1000% sarcasm.) Clearly she's decided that's what he wants to hear so he can be forgiving of other people's mistakes, and as we all know, she's figured out that total submission is the only way to get anything from him, but, well, wow. No matter how mad I was at someone, if someone said that to me, I would take it as an attempted wake-up call to remind me that everyone, even me, makes mistakes...but I'm not an absolute monarch.

* Ziebura seems to think Heinrich and Ferdinand were wrong to encourage AW in holding out, "without considering how unhappy he felt about it."

Ugh. This was really a lose-lose situation.

* "Without envy, but with bitterness, Wilhelm watched his brother's star rise, while his own fell inexorably." Wow. :/

Google fail:

Ferdinand was not shot dead underneath his horse at the battle of Prague; his horse was shot dead underneath him. Ferdinand lived until 1813, the last surviving child of FW and SD.

Not Google's fault for once: the text has a typo. "Perhaps his solo data thanked him" should be "Perhaps his soldiers thanked him": Soldaten, not Soladaten.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I would NOT expect paragraph alignment

Okay, but when the paragraphs are misaligned, text and translation get increasingly out of sync, until by the end of the book, you might get 20 consecutive German paragraphs that aren't interleaved at all, but just clumped together, because the total number of paragraphs is different.

So the "translation" of a paragraph later on in the book ends up completely unrelated to the text it's supposedly translating, and you have to hunt for the actual translation. This would ruin the point of an interleaved translation for me, but yes, I suppose that may not be a dealbreaker for you. For me, scanning three pages ahead or behind to try to find the translation would defeat the purpose; I'd rather just have separate files at that point.

Even when the paragraphs were in sync, Horowski's 2-3 page paragraphs had me flipping several phone/Kindle pages forward to find the translation, then back again to find the original text, then forward again, and I just could not deal.

Edited Date: 2020-09-07 11:03 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Things like this is why I think, regardless of syntax, bios may be easier to follow than Lehndorff! Bios will at least explain things.

From:

cahn

Hmm, I think either I'm misunderstanding your process or I wasn't clear. I was thinking that if I could get the Google translate interleaved (which I assume interleaves automatically) that my French is good enough that I would be able to figure out when it was doing it incorrectly (which I can't do with German), and possibly consult the non-interleaved actual English version if necessary at that point.

But yes, I agree, misaligned translations would defeat the whole purpose!

But I think I'd be able to handle 2-3 page paragraphs in French, although with German, yeah, not so much.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

the Google translate interleaved (which I assume interleaves automatically) that my French is good enough

Oh, yes, I see what you mean. Yes, *Google* translate gets interleaved automatically, and the paragraphs would be aligned. When you said you didn't expect paragraph alignment, I thought you meant you didn't mind misaligned paragraphs. Never mind!

ETA: Though be aware that this will either mean using more of our Google Translate free trial on Wilhelmine, or paying for the translation (if we've already exhausted our free trial by that time). Although it just occurred to me the French memoirs are on Gutenberg, which means no OCR issues at least. Small victories!

Um, do you perchance use a Mac?

Edited Date: 2020-09-08 12:48 am (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

* Oh, man, AW starts to feel a little better, and laments how his strong constitution is binding his soul to his body. Knowing how this is going to end... :-((((

* FRITZ. THOSE LETTERS.

* Es ist bewundernswert, wie es dem Prinzen aus Rücksicht au seine Verwandten und Freunde gelang, sie über sein körperliches und seelisches Elend zu täuschen.

Google translates "bewundernswert" as "admirable." Is it "admirable," or would "impressive" or "remarkable" or something like that be better? Because "admirable" to me means, "This was the right thing to do," whereas "impressive" or "remarkable" would mean, "Doing this highlighted many of AW's good qualities."

Because while you certainly have the right not to tell people about your health, I would take issue with saying that doing it to protect them is necessarily admirable, even if it's impressive. Like maybe Lehndorff would have liked to get there in time to say goodbye.

Now, if AW didn't tell people because he didn't want nonstop pressure to see doctors and he didn't want to deal with everyone else's emotions, *that* I could get behind. I've read too many accounts by terminally ill or potentially terminally ill people about how they were expected to perform emotional labor for everyone else at the absolute nadir of their own mental health. AW is definitely making a very unpopular decision here, and I could see him not wanting to defend it against all comers.

* "Egerer Brunnen" -- this is mineral water from Eger?

* The opium they gave AW to slow the bleeding probably caused his death to be more painful than it would have been. See, this is why on the one hand, the stress from the Fritz situation probably weakened AW's immune system in addition to his will to live, and thereby his chances of survival, but on the other, refusing to see doctors, as much as it might have been caused by a death wish, might actually not have hurt his chances that much.

Ugh. Everything sucks so much.

*

cahn, what Google translates as "blow flow", Schlagfluss, is a stroke.

* OMG, I didn't realize Lehndorff arrived the same day AW died, but too late. :-(

Then he drives the first nail into the coffin. :'-(((

"No, you don't die from pain. I am proof of that."

</33 POOR LEHNDORFF

* WOW, Google, this may be the best mistranslation ever, even surpassing the "cheap warehouse in rubbish soaps" or "Cape Stallion":

When AW in his will is decreeing that Louise doesn't get to take (zu sich nehmen) the kids...Google translates this as, "She shouldn't eat my daughter."

Not that that phrase doesn't mean that, but major context fail, Google. On the other hand, that's one way to translate the will so that AW looks like the good guy!

AW: really just misunderstood this whole time. :P

More seriously, I know children belonged to their fathers, legally, for a super long time, but "She shouldn't take my daughter" is just one of those ugh moments.

* "But if she does go and live in my house in Berlin, against my will, instead of in that place FW would have liked out in the middle of nowhere, the kids should live elsewhere." AW! This is why

cahn wanted to read about your horrible undeserved treatment before reading about your wife's horrible undeserved treatment.

* Continuing with this theme: Apparently it wasn't customary for women to take part in the burial of their husbands.

I mean, it keeps you from having to fake grief in cases like this, but what about those actually happy marriages? Was this just for royal funerals, military funerals, or what? Because Ariane will be at Peter's funeral, FIGHT ME. :P

I want to believe FW2 invited EC to Fritz's funeral just because. :P

* Fritz kept his word to be a second father to the kids! Wilhelmine and Henricus Minor are proof of that!

FW2: *crickets*

Fritz: Do you by chance know what "father" means in this family?

* Louise getting to see her mother for the first time in ages alleviates her grief over the loss of her husband. Either she's really an angel, or the word we're looking for here is "stress."

* And EC gets to see her husband's palace for the first time. The Potsdam City Palace? Because I thought 1760 was when she saw Sanssouci ~~and MT's portrait~~ for the first time, per Lehndorff's oft-quoted comment.

* Alas, poor Karl Emil, we hardly knew ye.

And, that's it for me. I finished AW! Sons and Wives next. Reading group continues to be the best!

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Though I have to say, 2-3 page paragraphs, even when aligned, still defeat the purpose of an interleaved translation for me. It's fewer clicks to have two tabs open and click on one to see the translation, and on the other to see the original, than to page forward six times to find the translation (because one text page = multiple pages on a smaller screen), and six times back to find the original, and back and forth every time you need to look something up. I don't know how you would put up with that!