Love the Moliere detective work, that's some awesome literary context!
One thing that came to mind while thinking about the translation of the Hille quote, though:
... for the last two days he has been torturing himself to render into French some German verses that the idiot Wilke* has given him. I recited him the verses on Oronte from Molière's "Misanthrope" until I was exhausted. He said they were wonderful, and nothing could convince him otherwise. The devil take his cursed tutor [Duhan], who didn't know any better than to put this kind of shallow stuff into his head.
If this is all one paragraph - which is what it looks like in the original - then I'd suspect that the bolded they ["sie" originally, not any more clear on what it's referring to, so not a translation problem] might mean Wilke's verses, not Moliere's, and that Fritz might have understood Hille's Moliere reference to mean mostly Wilke and not himself, therefore seeing himself in the position of Alceste more than Oronte here?
Either way, I'm delighted that Hille basically accomplished the opposite of what he wanted.
Re: Fritz' passion for poetry, I really liked the recurring "I don't want your flattery, I know my poetry isn't that great, I rather want you to correct me and tell me what I'm doing wrong, because I want to learn" theme in Fritz' letters to Voltaire.
Re: Molière - Küstrin poetry
One thing that came to mind while thinking about the translation of the Hille quote, though:
... for the last two days he has been torturing himself to render into French some German verses that the idiot Wilke* has given him. I recited him the verses on Oronte from Molière's "Misanthrope" until I was exhausted. He said they were wonderful, and nothing could convince him otherwise. The devil take his cursed tutor [Duhan], who didn't know any better than to put this kind of shallow stuff into his head.
If this is all one paragraph - which is what it looks like in the original - then I'd suspect that the bolded they ["sie" originally, not any more clear on what it's referring to, so not a translation problem] might mean Wilke's verses, not Moliere's, and that Fritz might have understood Hille's Moliere reference to mean mostly Wilke and not himself, therefore seeing himself in the position of Alceste more than Oronte here?
Either way, I'm delighted that Hille basically accomplished the opposite of what he wanted.
Re: Fritz' passion for poetry, I really liked the recurring "I don't want your flattery, I know my poetry isn't that great, I rather want you to correct me and tell me what I'm doing wrong, because I want to learn" theme in Fritz' letters to Voltaire.