cahn | 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!)

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From:

mildred_of_midgard

Aaahhh, I need to work on Yuletide before bed, but I just wanted to leave you with Diablotin and Diablotin.

More when I have time!

From:

felis

Oh, thank you for the link, I see you also concluded that he must have been rather short. And digging through some older entries, I also found this thread about the nickname, which makes perfect sense. I was kind of wondering if it was simply based on looks or on things FW might have said about him, but yeah, the Manteuffel connection is the most logical. Love that Fritz seems to have changed it once he got to know him better.
(Funny enough, googling told me that Diablotin was also the name of a French chocolate candy. :P)

From:

selenak

Well, no doubt Suhm was also sweet. :)

Speaking of heights, I just recalled we actually have a statement from Fritz re: EC's height, in his March 1732 letter to Wilhelmine describing her after their first few encounters, and what he says is:

The princess has a very pretty face, but deep set eyes and a very ugly mouth. She walks like a peasant and has a way of looking up from below like that of little Marschall*, an unpleasant laugh, moves like a duck, has bad teeth, is very badly dressed, fearful in conversation and almost always mute. That aside, she has a beautiful complexion, beautiful breasts, a beautiful figure in your size, pretty hands, blond hair, a good heart. She is not capricious but polite but always too much or too little, very modest, very badly educated and without the slightest savoir vivre. Given this portrait, dearest sister, you can guess that she is not to my taste at all and that I'm very angry about this marriage. One can predict that it will be a very bad marriage.

That often hurts me, but what you can't change has to be accepted. My consolation is that I have another one and a half years first. Everyone holds the picture drawn here for true; I can assure you it is impartial. I don't even respect her and I'm very afraid I never will.

Quite. This letter is not at Trier, I don't think (or rather not the uncensored version - I think Trier, which is to the the Preuss mid 19th century edition, has somewhat less detailed - no breasts!, more bland "do not want" statement), but it's both in the Volz edition of their correspondance and in "Solange wir zu zweit sind". Now, since I only know the letter in German (from Volz), I can't say what phrase Fritz uses originally in French, but in German he says "eine schöne Figur in deiner Größe", which can both mean EC and Wilhelmine have the same type of body shape, or it can mean they're the same height. In any case, Wilhelmine wasn't tall. Though she could have had a few centimetres on Fritz for all I know. In any case, he seems to list this as on of EC's few positive attributes, not a negative, and since he's so harsh about much of everything else, I don't think he's being coy.

*Volz thinks "little Marschall" is the daughter of future cabinet minister Samuel vn Marschall

Sophie is now the favourite, but only because she's so different from her married sisters.

My translation says "but only under the condition she's to be different than her married sisters" (since Sophie is not yet married but soon will be, to the ghastly Schwedt cousin; Wilhelmine's letter referencing the news hence uses "so poor Sophie is to be sacrificed" as a way to describe it.

Wilhelmine met James Keith in August 1735 already, when the Russians moved through Bayreuth.

*looks it up* You're right! That means she met him before Fritz did. And had a very positive impression of him, too.

Or worse, given that his experience in Bayreuth might have been a lot better than in Frankfurt...

One would hope Wilhelmine would have found a way to get that book back from him which didn't involve arresting him. Place your bets, though: would he have handed it over, if she asked nicely, or would at he very least a break-in have been necessary?

Edited Date: 2020-11-07 12:02 pm (UTC)

From:

felis

My translation says "but only under the condition she's to be different than her married sisters" (since Sophie is not yet married but soon will be

Oh, yes, okay. I read it differently because I forgot about the marriage happening only two weeks later, so out of context it came across as a present-day matter-of-fact condition, not a future one.

And you are right, the EC description isn't at Trier. (Which does however have a handkiss letter that isn't even in Volz? Pour ce qui s'agit du baisemain, je vous assure que je ne les lui ai pas baisées, ni ne les lui baiserai, car elles ne sont pas assez belles pour être appétissantes.) I really wish all the French originals were available to double-check things occasionally - there were a couple of lines where I wanted to look up the exact phrasing and found hardly any of the letters I was looking for. Except the moon one. :)

That means she met him before Fritz did. And had a very positive impression of him, too.

Ah, I thought so but wasn't completely sure. Nice little background detail for a later letter, too, where she's in Berlin and writes that Keith, Voltaire, and the Countess de Camas visited her.

Place your bets, though: would he have handed it over, if she asked nicely, or would at he very least a break-in have been necessary?

Hee, I could see arguments for both, what with Voltaire being put on the spot by someone he actually liked, but also having a talent for being weasely when necessary. Given that Fritz said he would sent someone to retrieve it, I'm also wondering who that might have been.

From:

selenak

I read it differently because I forgot about the marriage happening only two weeks later, so out of context it came across as a present-day matter-of-fact condition, not a future one.

I don't blame you, I do this often with quotes, too, but in this case I think context is key, because FW was always sentimental about his daughters around their weddings. (See Stratemann's description of him dancing with Wilhelmine at her wedding and then with all the other girls, despite his bad physical condition.)

Speaking of context, browsing through the "So lange wir zu zweit sind" edition suddenly made me realise that Stratemann's May 1730 report about FW being so considerate a husband to highly pregnant SD, reconciling with Wilhelmine, telling her to look after Heinrich etc.... that all of these family anecdotes reported by our Braunschweig envoy happen in the very same weeks - May 1730 - that Guy Dickens reports FW discovered that Fritz had written to Queen Caroline he'd only marry her daughter, which led to him losing it, going after Fritz with cane and fist and abusing him in public. Not a peep of any of this in Stratemann.

In conclusion: two different realities in reporting are nothing new in the world...

I could see arguments for both, what with Voltaire being put on the spot by someone he actually liked, but also having a talent for being weasely when necessary. Given that Fritz said he would sent someone to retrieve it, I'm also wondering who that might have been.

Not Fredersdorf, given Fredersdorf didn't go to Frankfurt, either, he just sent someone. But of course Frankfurt and Bayreuth are very different circumstances. Otoh you don't want to sent someone like Pöllnitz who'd be more likely to team up with Voltaire. So probably some nonedecript official.

I could see arguments for both, too, and of course it would depend on how badly Voltaire wants to keep those poems in order to embarass Fritz. But he did like Wilhelmine, and he might have thought it would be good to keep her in a friendly dispostion towards himself, not anger her by refusing to return the book. Especially if he still wanted her to hire people he recced for her court. Conversely, Wilhelmine wouldn't have made the mistake of arresting him and/or having Madame Denis menaced by thugs, as the overzealous Freytag in Frankfurt did.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Per Carlyle (following Varnhagen von Ense), the sequence of events went like this:

April 11: Fredersdorf writes to Freytag to await Voltaire in Frankfurt, obtain the key, the ordre pour le mérite, and the book, and detain and arrest him if necessary.

May 31: Voltaire arrives.

June 1: Freytag has Voltaire's room searched. Voltaire says he doesn't know where the book is, somewhere in Leipzig or Hamburg, but not with him. He gives his word of honor to send for it and not to leave Frankfurt until it arrives and he hands it over.

June 18: Voltaire's luggage arrives, but Freytag's not clear on what exactly Fredersdorf wants him to look for. So he asks Voltaire to wait three days until he can get clarification from Potsdam.

June 20: Voltaire tries to blow town, is caught, this is when things get bad for him and Madame Denis.

July 7: After much kerfluffle, the trunk is obtained by Freytag, Voltaire leaves town.

I do feel like Wilhelmine could have handled this better. And since it's not clear to me that Voltaire refused to hand over the poems in the first place, it's quite possible that this would have been a non-issue.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Shoot, I thought I had included that in the links. But yes, we think the diminutive is from his height, the "devil" from his predecessor Manteuffel, and that it changed with time--but caveat that this is all speculation.

My even more speculative explanation for "Diaphane" is supported by the description of Keyserlingk's appearance as "the sun breaking through the frosty winter fog." <3

(Funny enough, googling told me that Diablotin was also the name of a French chocolate candy. :P)

I agree with Selena: obviously there's a sweetness connection. ;)