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Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 20
Yuletide signups so far:
3 requests for Frederician RPF, 2 offers
2 requests for Circle of Voltaire RPF, 3 offers !! :D :D
(I am so curious as to who the third person is!)
3 requests for Frederician RPF, 2 offers
2 requests for Circle of Voltaire RPF, 3 offers !! :D :D
(I am so curious as to who the third person is!)
Re: Fritz/Voltaire
I would assume that her late husband was a subscriber of the collected works and used to inflict them on her, except that Poniatowski claims that Peter thought Fritz was like FW, only into soldiers and drill and not into books at all, and had them mixed up in his had. (Mind you, Poniatowski isn't exactly unbiased when it comes to his beloved's husband, of course, but he is is the guy providing us with the "Dulcinea" crack.)
Aaaanyway, good to know the mixture of Voltaire in his old age going all crusader on the Turks while not changing his view on all other wars had the same effect on you as it had on me. Incidentally: what I didn't know when reading and summarizing the correspondance for our salon was that Voltaire in the 1760s alsoread and very enthusiastically reviewed (in an article for the papers) Lady Mary's Embassy Letters. Which are of course full of praise for Turkey and the Turks, argue against the idea that Muslim women are oppressed (one has to add here that Lady Mary was of course speaking from a position of privilege herself), and point out that there's a vivid cultural life going on in Turkey.
Duchess of Würtemberg: I think someone whom I've read in the recent year - might even have been Pleschinski himself, though I'm not sure, could also have been a wiki article - confused the two duchesses, and had Friedrike, Wilhelmine's daughter, be the one who copied the Pucelle in 1743, when it was her (then future) mother-in-law Marie Auguste who did that. So you're not alone in mixing them up without a reminder. But yes, the one who had the good cry about Wilhelmine with Voltaire was Friederike the daughter, who also was on good enough terms with him for him to say "tu" intead of "vous" to her according to one source.
Wilhelmine/Voltaire correspondance: the German edition of her memoirs which is available on kindle has some of her letters to him from her last year of life. And the biographies quote from some of his letters to her. But I haven't seen a proper edition, no. I mean, not even Wilhelmine's letters to her non-Fritz siblings have ever been published in an collected edition, just some of them in other collections, and again, some were quoted in biographies. On the Voltaire side, I think they're also still busy editing and publishing his letters, and Wilhelmine isn't famous enough in France in her own right to be a priority there, I suspect.
Re: Fritz/Voltaire
who also was on good enough terms with him for him to say "tu" intead of "vous" to her according to one source
Heh, I wrote "Uncle Voltaire" and "shitty marriage" in my notes for her, although the last one doesn't actually narrow it down. (Which reminds me, I had a look at the family tree today and went from "wait, Bayreuth!Friedrich married Charlotte's daughter after Wilhelmine's death?" over "Ferdinand married Sophie's daughter?" to "oh, so FWII's first wife was another one of Charlotte's daughters". Sigh.)
Re: Fritz/Voltaire
Re: Fritz/Voltaire
"oh, so FWII's first wife was another one of Charlotte's daughters".
A double first cousin, in fact, since FW's mother Luise was the sister of Charlotte's husband the duke, and Charlotte was of course AW's sister.
Charlotte was, iirc, the one who refused to take her daughter (MESSALINA Elisabeth) back after the divorce, because what is family for if not dysfunction?