cahn | Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 20

From:

1753, March 20: Lehndorff's hopes about his cousin are fading, and he's seeing the property he was expecting disappear into the hands of his rival. So the One Who Got Away still isn't married yet!

I was very surprised to have missed this, checked in my Lehndorff copy, and immediately realised why I had missed it in my original reading. To wit: the word used here is "Vetter", which means male cousin. The (old fashioned) German word for female cousin is "Base". (Current day German uses the French derived "Cousin" and "Cousine" all the way.) Therefore, I did not connect this with Fräulein du Rosey but assumed Lehndorff had been expecting a legacy. This said, I think you are actually completely correct, and that Schmidt-Lötzen, who, let's not forget, translated this entire text from the French (except for the passages or individual words in German which he always indicates as such), made a mistake in his decyphering of Lehndorff's hand writing. "Cousin" and "Cousine" in a hand written centuries old text are easy to mistake, and it certainly fits if he's talking about the One Who Got Away here.

Reisewitz: loses his head, dumps water on his boyfriend Heinrich instead of on the fire, which gave it time to spread. I guess that shows some priorities!

Reisewitz: Indeed, which is why I find it so unfair Lehndorff keeps bitching about me in Volume 2 and doubts my dedication to the Prince! I may have started to weasel his money away, but I clearly cared for his life! Besides, I'm sure you guessed that Mr. "Beautiful as an angel in his riding pants" kept staring at soaked to the skin Heinrich. "Kept my cool", hah. Yeah, he was "observing", alright. I'd call it drooling.

Omg, it continues. The tears, the speechlessness, the broken heart, the vows of eternal devotion, the sleeplessness!

I know you've told us about this very episode, selenak, but it really is something reading it for oneself.

Isn't it just? Lehndorff is clearly the contemporary of Lady Mary and Hervey in full Algarotti fever. A Rokoko courtier who doesn't love in hyperbole does not love. But what really makes the passage as more than youthful hormones speaking is the knowledge that thirty years later, he still sounds like that when writing about seeing Heinrich again. (Despite, as you'll see as you continue in 1753, going through his first cycle of "OMG, he doesn't care! It's all over between us, I can see that now!" in the same year which he periodically will keep going through until Hotham arrives.)

Speaking of Fredersdorf the village vs Fredersdorf the person, did you notice the reference to Fredersdorf's fiancee near the end of 1752?

Edited Date: 2020-10-20 07:30 am (UTC)

From:

selenak

First of all, while looking for something else in the Volz edition of the Fritz/Wilhelmine correspondance,

mildred_of_midgard, I tracked down a Fritz-to-Wilhelmine letter quote referring to Suhm which uses actually both nicknames for your favourite envoy:

Ruppin, 25. März 1736: "The circumstances of Diaphane or Diablotin have been ordered somewhat for the better, so he can dedicate himself more to philosophy now."

Secondly, trying to track down the poem Luise Gottsched wrote about and to Émiilie, I both was reminded again she was possibly the coolest female figure of the early German Enlightenment (she died in 1763, right after the 7 Years War had ended) and also that Orieux was right, if Émilie had come with Voltaire on his German trip in 1743, she'd have been enthusiastically welcomed. She had fans here! Not least because she was practically the only person who did not see Newton and Leipniz as an either/or and instead worked to unite the approach of both in her theories. No less a person than Christian Wolff said, after reading her "Institutions", that "it is as if I hear myself talk". (Which, okay, ego much, but still.) And he did want to meet her. (He did not want to meet Fritz.) The "Intitutions" made such an impression that Émilie became the first woman to be presented with "Die Münze der Minerva" (Luise Gottsched was the second). As for Luise Gottsched, or "die Gottschedin", as she's nicknamed to differentiate her from her husband, Gottsched the pusher-for-German-language, she was the first female German writer to write comedies and a tragedy, in addition to writing poetry. She translated, among otherworks, Voltaire's Alzire and Zaire as well as Émilie's letter exchange with Mairon (aka the one where Émilie pwned the "now listen, little woman, you don't understand science" Academy Secretary (which btw makes for a wonderful scene in Gundermann's drama about her), which Émilie had published in the next edition of the Institutions; the Gottschedin's German translation of Émilie's Mairon-pwning is here. And she also translated one of Madame de Graffigny's plays. Now because she really wrote a lot, I haven't been able to find more than a quote from the Émilie poem so far, but I did find the Ode to MT she wrote after having been received by her, which is lengthy and contains a passage that can be summarized thusly:

"XXX reason why you're cool, MT: you speak all the languages of the people you rule. Fluently. Including German, so when you meet your subjects, like myself, you can actually talk to them in their own language. Unlike some people who only can sneer."

The quote from the Gottschedin's poem to Émiilie which I did find already goes thusly: „Du, die Du jetzt den Ruhm des Vaterlandes stützest,
Frau, die Du ihm weit mehr als tausend Männer nütztest,
Erhabne Chatelet, o fahre ferner fort
Der Wahrheit nachzugehn.“

Ii.e. "On whom the fame of the fatherland rests now/ Woman who is of more use to it than a thousand men/ Noble Chatelet, oh, do continue/ To seek out truth!"

Now from these lines it's not apparant whether Luise Gottsched means by the Vaterland Émilie's patrie or her own country (perhaps because Émilie is rehabilitating Leipniz who gets attacked internationally now by Newtonians), which is one of many reasons why I want to read the complete poem, but under the assumption that she means France, let's see :

You who provides your country's claim to fame
More so than thousands of the men whom I could name,
Woman! Oh noble Chatelet, proceed
To seek the truth, wherever it may lead!

From:

iberiandoctor

It's not me ;) Not to say I won't treat, though, if I have the bandwidth (and if I do, I hope I can count on you to help beta!). I told Selena I could bring porn and pining, anyway ;)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Two more, even though this is clearly very detrimental to my German productivity :'-D.

A few steps to the side, Fritz visits the Antinous statue! (About which I have also written fic, lol.)

Mimi burning the manuscript of Suhm's translation of Wolff and celebrating madly over the ruins! No, I don't know what species of monkey she is. My current favorite (as a wild animal, not as a pet!) is the capuchin, but that's a New World monkey, and I don't know how common that would have been in Europe in the time. A vervet is at least a smallish Old World monkey, and common as a pet now (which I repeat is a bad idea!), although again, I'm not sure about the 18th century.

Yes, I'm trying to help you improve your animal drawing skills. :D :D

Happy to trade ego boosts in return for art!

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I'm not doing Krockow commentary (no time!), just reading for German practice, but I had to raise my hand and call on the teacher, as it were, for this one:

In Preußen, im Tabakskollegium Friedrich Wilhelms I. erkennt man rechts vom König den Kronprinzen Friedrich. Zwischen all den schwergewichtigen Männern wirkt er wie eine blasse Zierpuppe, und ängstlich klammert der kleine Zappelphilipp sich am Tisch fest. Seine jüngeren Brüder August Wilhelm und Heinrich aber, die dem gestrengen Herrn Vater vor dem Zubettgehen ihre Aufwartung machen, geben sich wirklich nicht als Kinder, sondern als winzige Erwachsene zu erkennen.

In short, in this picture, he claims it's Fritz sitting at the table, dressed in white, and clings to the table, and AW and Heinrich walking in to pay their respects.

Not that I trust Wikipedia, but if this is circa 1737, as we've discussed, 25-yo Fritz was happy to be far away in Rheinsberg! That should be AW at the table, and Heinrich and Ferdinand walking in.

So who's wrong: Krockow or Wikipedia?

In Wikipedia's favor: pace artistic conventions, by the time Heinrich was old enough to walk, Fritz had surely reached adult height, or close enough.

The

rheinsberg image that

selenak shared with us doesn't tell me whether her That's tiny AW sitting on the table, and Ferdinand and Heinrich coming to wish their father good night. Since it's painted in 1737, Fritz thanks his lucky stars he's not there but in Rheinsberg. description is based on memory or on the claims of the Wusterhausen curators.

From:

selenak

So, Dirk Fahlenkamp's Fritz and Fredersdorf book: is essentially, though it doesn't say so, a reedition of Richter's letters (which he duly notes are his one and only transcription used) - an edition with really great annotations, presented not as footnotes but as main text. Also he has a bit of a thematic reordering going on, i.e. first we get the majority of letters, which are medically themed, and then we get a collection of the alchemy themed and then one of the musically themed letters (i.e. Fredersdorf (i.e. Fredersdorf as manager and agent of the opera and orchestra musicians, basically). Aside from the undeniable fact that medical problems really take up a great deal of the existing Fritz/Fredersdorf correspondance, you can also tell that our editor/author has already written a book about 18th century medicine. The bibliography also lists several more. If you need to look up any threatment method our heroes might have used, or did use, this is your book to consult.

Speaking of the bibliography, I'm grateful there is one at the end, because Fahlenkamp doesn't use footnotes. This is a problem regarding one particular point, to which I'll get soon; anyway, the bibliography means I can at least make two guesses as to where he might have the intel from. But first time more overall observations: one of the attractions of the book is that he was also able to look up and scan some of the original letters, including our very favourite one about telling Frederdorf to be at the window so Fritz can see him when riding out but not to open it and have a fire burning (April 1754), and my sneaky second fave, Fritz kidding Fredersdorf about only drinking the elixir he sends him and nothing else or he will lose "the male power of love" for life. Other illustrations include photos of Zernikow and the mulberry trees (mine are just as good), of the landscape of Gratz, Fredersdorf's home town in Pomerania, of the registry listing Fredersdorf's baptism (as with Shakespeare and many other non-nobles, we don't actually know Fredersdorf's exact birthday; we do know on which day he was baptized, because that's the kind of information which was registered, and the relevant church archive survived), and of the golden snuff box with the bullet in it that saved Fritz' life in the 7 Years War. Fahlenkamp also provides information for just about everyone ever mentioned in the letters, and going by the bibliography, I can see that he used the same "Fritz and music" books I had read for the musicians, for example.

On the downside: given just how much we've ready by now, there is very little information here I hadn't seen before. For example, Fahlenkamp duly provides both versions of the Fritz/Fredersdorf origin story, i.e. either Fredersdorf was summoned to Küstrin to cheer up the Prince, or Fritz spotted him in Frankfurt an der Oder during the concert the students had prepared for him as a christmas gift, and while hinting the first one is his personal favourite doesn't pretend one is better sourced than the other. OTOH, he's an unquestioning believer in the authenticity of Catt. (At which point I feel like exclaiming "Koser, thou hast lived in vain! Am I the only one who ever reads the goddam preface?!?) There is some new stuff, including the frustratingly not annotated whomper I mentioned. And I was reminded of things I had read in Richter's edition but either not registered or forgotten. when reading the Richter edition. Plus, of course, Fahlenkamp isn't a nationalistic homophobe writing in 1726 insisting on Fritz' fatherly love for Fredersdorf, Wilhelmine being a hysterical woman, and the German national destiny.

Now, here are the new-to-me or brought-back-to-my-memory items:

- when Fredersdorf was born, Gartz actually was still a part of Sweden; Fredersdorf became a Prussian subject only at age 12, courtesy of FW having taken part in the Great Northern War which Sweden lost (which meant they had to hand over Southern Pomerania to Prussia); it's a river town, located at the Oder, with some very slight hills around

- Fredersdorf was the seventh and youngest child of town musician Joachim Fredersdorf and, so Fahlenkamp claims, "his wife Anna Christiane Fredersdorf born von Frederborn". I'm assuming this is from the baptism registry. Colour me confused, because no one, not even the early 19th century letters edition which makes Fredersdorf the son of a Frankfurt merchant, mentioned his mother having been nobilty; and it would be stunning messalliance for a noble lady to have married the town piper. I therefore tentatively suggest that "Frederborn" might be her place of origin, i.e. she's from F., not a "von F."; but it's just a theory

- Fahlenkamp has a transcription of the entire donation documement of Fritz giving Fredersdorf Zernikow, dated Charlottenburg, June 26th (

cahn, FW died on May 30th, so that really was barely a month later) , and while it's typical judical Rokoko German (just as much a headache to read as all the Katte interroggation protocols, though with a more fun subject), I chortled about the very start, which lists all of Fritz' new titles and goes about three quarters of a page, just like MT 's titles, only hers go with a litlte more terrritory. I'm also amused he' s listed not just as the Prince of Jülich and Berg (FW and Fritz wish!) but as the "Duke of Silesia" (Fritz, you hadn't even invaded yet!). I'll transcribe all the titles for your amusement below.

- the document says Zernikow was given "in recognition of the tireless, diligent, devoted and loyal service" which Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf has given so far and will give in the future; Fredersdorf later is referred to as "our dear faithful", and I also find it interesting that the linguistically, the document doesn't just specify Zernikow will also go to Fredersdorf's descendant or otherwise heirs and their heirs, but says it will remain "his or her true property"; this is important because women inheriting isn't a given in German lands at this time (MT: Don't I know it!), but the document specifically says female heirs are just as valid

- the letter excerpts remind me that Seckendorff's biographer might be an outlier in considering Old Dessauer as the most evil man of his time, but Fritz and Fredersdorf aren't fans, either, for this is how they talk about his death:

Fritz: Eichel will send you the letter back. Get me two Pour Le Merité crosses and mail them to me; Old Dessauer has kicked the bucket.Now take care of yourself, Gott bewahre Dir!

Fredersdorf: The Old Prince will enjoy meeting all the devils he's always sworn by; and other than Geheimrat Deutsch, no one will wish him a good journey.

Fritz uses the term "verreckt", which isn't just slang for dying, but contemptuous slang, so maybe "has bit the dust" would be a better translation, I keep wavering between the two and defer to you two as the native speakers. Geheimrat Deutsch was a veteran official in the army supply line, who Fahlenkamp guesses might now afraid for his job. -

- Alkmene's fur was black (yay! actual intel!)

- Carel the page, who gets mentioned repeatedly in several of the later letters, was Carl Friedrich von Pirch, born on October 12th 1739, who was hired in 1754 as the King's page for ten Taler monthly salary (at last a Fritizian page salary! I always wanted to know); he remained with Fritz into the 7 Years War but managed to mishandle a loaded gun which exploded (this actually happened a lot, believe it or not, I remember it from Füssel's 7 Years War book) and thus got himself killed in 1757

- Fahlenkamp tells the same anecdote about Fritz not using spurs on horses and why that Mildred told us eons ago

- (Gaetano Appolline Baldassare) Vestris, male star ballet dancer (lived from 1729 - 1808), who was one of the divas Fredersdorf had to negotiate for, had such a healthy ego that he said "there are only three great men in Europe: The King of Prussia, Voltaire and I"

- Fahlenkamp employs the art of the very selected quote when claiming that our Lehndorff "maliciously describes Fredersdorf as 'a common man from the most backward Pommarania without any education'"; if you'll recall, the complete sentence goes " It is not a little amazing that a common man from the most backward Pommarania without any education could acquire such decency, grace of conduct and quickness of mind" (for the entire Lehndorff on Fredersdorf passage, see October 25th 1757); Fahlenkamp also quotes Voltaire's "He has a chancellor who never talks" etc. up to "and all these positions are fulfillled by a single man named Fredersdorf, who is also valet, chamberlain and cabinet secretary", but attributes this passage not to Voltaire (who gets quoted by name in other parts of the book), but to "a French envoy"; I'm side eyeing you now, Fahlenkamp

From:

selenak

As of June 1740, in the Zernikow transfer document:

"We, Friedrich, by God's grace King in (!) Prussia, Margrave of Brandenburg, Archchamberlain of the Holy Roman Empire and its Prince Elector; sovereign Prince of Orange, Neuchatel and Valèngin; in Geldern, of Magdeburg, Cleves, Jülich, Berg, Stettin, Pomerania, the Cassubes and Wenden, of Mecklenburg; Duke of Silesia as well as Crossen; Burggraf ("Count of the Castle) of Nuremberg; Prince of Halberstadt, Minden, Cammin, Wenden, Schwerin, Ratzeburg, Eastfrisia and Meurs; Count of Hohenzollern, Ruppen and of the Mark Brandenburg, Hohenstein, Tecklenburg, LIngen, Schwerin, Bühren and Lehdamm, Lord of Ravenstein, of the county Rostock, Stargardt, Lauenburg, Bülow, Orley and Breda.

Edited Date: 2020-10-22 10:24 am (UTC)

(deleted comment) (Show 19 comments)

From:

felis

Almost done with the Fritz/Voltaire correspondence and I noticed that the one time Voltaire actually tells Fritz that he's going to share one of his letters with someone is when he sends Catherine a complimentary poem Fritz wrote about her. (Fritz even gives his permission.) Ulterior motive - get Fritz and Catherine together against the Turks - being as it may, I'm amused. You didn't ask for Fritz poetry, Catherine, but you sure are going to get it!

But yeah, Voltaire as a crusader: not a twist I would have seen coming if I hadn't read

selenak's write-up beforehand. Now Catherine is his "true heroine" and Fritz still gets shit for his wars, ha. Their bickering about this topic was fascinating, Voltaire trying to get Fritz into the war for years while Fritz is getting more and more exasperated with that, especially because Voltaire is writing articles about the horribleness of war at the same time. And I love that despite his exasperation and shade throwing, Fritz never tips into "damn you, not talking to you anymore" again. On the contrary, see lines like I cannot help loving you, despite your little infidelities. or Stay young for a long time, hate me for a long time, tear apart the poor soldiers, decry those whoe defend their homeland, and know that this will not prevent me from loving you. He knows his Voltaire by now and has made his peace with that.

Voltaire on the other hand has NOT made his peace with Maupertuis, omg. Suddenly in 1775: This guy's research was complicated bullshit and you know it, Fritz! I'm only telling the truth! He was the worst and I'll die in deep sadness over the misfortune he caused me by alienating me from you [or "you from me"? hm]. Aw.
See also: The lovely lion/rat bit in 1759 - did you guys' bring that up in the context of the "would Voltaire save Fritz?" scenario? or the Disney one? I know I read about it before - with a Maupertuis cameo as the bulldog who totally recanted AND loved Fritz less than Voltaire himself did, so there.

Oh, and going backwards, I have to say that the Voltaire reaction to Fritz' suicidal letter was as striking as advertised. The multiple letters of tough intellectual appeals were really interesting, and then in between I also marked a line like a heart that never bared itself enough to you, because it felt like it slipped in almost despite himself. Plus, the way their correspondence started up again, i.e. Fritz using Voltaire quotes to deal with his situation and therefore presumably prompted to write to Voltaire directly after years of angry silence.

Apropos

selenak's write-up, thankfully she, unlike Pleschinski, mentioned that the "Duchess of Würtemberg", whom Voltaire meets and cries about Wilhelmine with, is Wilhelmine's daughter. Makes perfect sense of course, but I still didn't make the connection, because damn, all those titles and family ties and repeating names are hard to keep track of.
Loved the bit where Fritz tells Voltaire about building the Temple of Friendship - I go there often, to remember my losses [I think he means all of them, not just Wilhelmine - "mes pertes"] and the happiness I enjoyed back then.

Speaking of Wilhelmine - is her correspondence with Voltaire available somewhere?

And two other things I was wondering about:

- during the Seven Years War, Fritz writes that he gave himself a diet that seemed very severe to everyone around him - are there details on what exactly that entailed, maybe via de Catt?

- the following Voltaire quote, because I can't decide if it's a joke or if Fritz really did do that: I beg Your Majesty do with this jumble [an unauthorized edition of Voltaire's works] what I have seen you do to so many books; you took scissors, cut all the pages that bored you, kept those that could amuse you, and thus reduced thirty volumes to one or two: an excellent method for curing us from the furor of writing too much.
(Sidenote: in the same letter, Voltaire includes hand-kissing from afar, which is not a common line from him at this point anymore, so I found it noteworthy)

Oh, and finally, re: Fritz and dogs - in 1775, Fritz is revising his old memoirs and describes it to Voltaire as Je lèche mes petits. :D

From:

selenak

Clarification first: re: Boswell's journals: they keep being edited. What I had previously read was:
- "Boswell's London Journal" - the breakout first collection that made Boswell a postumous star of diary writers (edited by Professor Pottle)
- Boswell on the Grand Tour II (frustratingly, I had not gotten my hands on Grand Tour I - II covers his time in Italy) (Pottle edition)
- Boswell's Edinburgh Journal (editor Hugh M. Milne) and
- The Journals of James Boswell (editor John Wain; this is a "best of Boswell" collection through his entire life, and based on Pottle's first edition of the journals; that's where I had the Rousseau and Voltaire encounters quotes from, for example).
What I have now read: James Boswell: The Journal of his German and Swiss Travels, 1764, edited by Gordon Turnbull and James J. Caudle.
This , covering the same material as "Boswell on the Grand Tour I" did, is a more scholarly directed edition than Pottle's, which aimed at the general market. Hence Pottle translating all the French dialogue Boswell transcribed into English, between him and the German nobles (though he picks up some German to talk to soldiers and servants with) , and between him and Rousseau, and a bit between him and Voltaire, on their first encounter, whereas on the second Voltaire does talk English with him. In this edition, by contrast, both the French dialogue and the occasional German (phonetically spelled, i.e. Boswell must have picked up these phrases by ear), is kept in the language Boswell wrote them down in. Btw, seeing the English - which you already know - in the middle of the French really brings it home that Voltaire even in his old age was fluent (though at one point he asks Boswell to talk slower, though our editor notes this might also be due to JB's Scottish accent).
The editors also provide extensive footnotes on everyone mentioned, for which they quote out of Lehndorff's diaries (not just volume 1 but the other volumes as well!) a lot. (Sadly, if the two diarists met, neither of them wrote it down. Boswell did meet EC, though.) And they're good with thoroughness, so for example the time when Boswell hears the "Fritz: lots of sex with the ladies as a young men, now impotent as a result!" gossip, there's a footnote saying essentially: Frederick's sexuality: It's complicated, and source referencing various contradictory theories.
Now, on to the treasure trove, which this outing is. Apperantly at one point Boswell considered writing a travel book based on this, as he had done for the Hebrides and for Corsica, but the "Life" and various troubles ate up his time. It's a pity, because it really offers a lot, a great look at the German states directly after the 7 Years War, the various encounters with people both famous and now forgotten are always interesting, and there are very valuable details about travelling through the German states (and Switzerland) - the editors are good on this, too, pointing out that Boswell rents a coach when travelling with George Keith , Lord Marischal, but when travelling on his lonesome travels with the journaliere which is way cheaper and how non-nobles got along. (For example, that's his way of going from Berlin to Potsdam and back; at one point he shares it with the daughter of one of Ferdinand 's (as in the youngest Hohenzollern brother) cooks. Amusingly the editors point out that Boswell by managing to get himself invited a lot in the various towns and residences he visited saved a considerable sum of money for meals. (He also promoted himself to "Baron von Boswell" in order to score all these invites, though not when gatecrashing chez Rousseau and Voltaire.)

I tried to order the quotes by subject, starting with George Keith, Lord Marischal, whom Boswell brings to life in a way the various Fritz biographies I've read don't. George Keith, as a reminder, is distantly related to Boswell - a third cousin - which was Boswell's in. He's also not alone but in the company of his ward, a Turkish woman named Emetulla (Emet Ulla, Marie Emeté) de Froment. James Keith had rescued Emetulla as a child when his troops captured Ochakow during the Russo-Turkish war, and after James' death George Keith became her guardian. She had married one Denis-Daniel de Froment in the previous year, 1763, but had gone with George Keith to Scotland and was now returning with him to Prussia. In future years, she'd divorce her husband, with Boswell acting as essentially her divorce lawyer in order to preserve the inheritance she got from the Keiths to her and not let her husband have it. And yes, of course Boswell flirts with her a lot in this journal.

(She wasn't the only Turk whom George Keith had inherited from James Keith: there was also one Ibrahim, whom Boswell meets later ("he was to be a painter, but became a hypochondriack & has a pension from My Lord" and "Old Stepan the Calmuc", who used to be valet de chambre to first James, then George Keith, "but drank so that he was no longer to be trusted & now also has a pension".)

Oh, and another recurring thread: religion, because Boswell was another child of deeply Calvinist parents who was plagued by religious fears throughout his life.
All quotes from the year 1764, remember.

June 23: My Lord also talked of the Scots Highlanders with respect and affection, as the most brave and most generous People upon earth, and abused the harsh absurdity of our Government, for taking their cloths from them and extirpating their language by which means they will be at last reduced to a level with the other Inhabitants of Scotland; and so we shall lose the best Militia upon earth. The proper method was surely not to destroy the HIghlanders, but to render them attached to the Government, which would be no difficult matter, as the Chiefs are no longer disaffected. WE came at night to Herford. I found myself a new man. My ideas were altered. I had no gloomy fears. I talked with Madame de Froment, who had been educated Mahometan & who still believed that the Great Prophet was sent from God. This opened my mind. I resolved to be prudent, nor to own my many waverings. I was quite happy. I determined to get free of the clouds which hung upon me. I determined to be manly and content.

June 25, they are in Hannover the city, and George Keith alludes to an ongoing British fear, that Hannover would get British money through the royals: My Lord joked on the tea spoons, which seemed of Gold. Ay ay the money of old England in the Hannoverian Dominions. He assumed the character of Dictionary Johnson, in order to joke in this manner. He talked of somebody having stolen gold spoons. Very natural said I. Hear the Scotsman said he.

June 30th, now they are in Magdeburg: In the afternoon My Lord was very chatty. He told me that the Marquis d'Argens was a good-natured amiable man, and much liked by the King of Prussia. He is now old. He has married an actress, whom he keeps in great subjection. He has made her learn Greek, & I don't know how many things, merely to make her of use to him in his studies. He is a miserable Being, he is Hypochondriack & terrified of death. He had worn a flannel underwaistcoat four years & durt not take it off, for fear of catching cold. The King drove out one fear by another & told him that if he persisted to wear that waistcoat, his perspiration would be entirely stop'd & he must inevitably die. The Marquis agreed to quit his waistcoat. But it had so fixed itself upon him, that pieces of his skin came away with it. My lord as usual laughed at Religious gloom. I told him he had the felicity of a sound mind, which everybody has not. Good heaven! how fortunate is one man above another!

Tuesday July 3rd: Boswell and George Keith have now arrived in Potsdam: My Lord Marischal carried me to the Palace where he has an appartment assigned him by the King. He seemed just like one who comes to a good friend's house in the country, when the friend is of somewhat higher rank than the guest. Just as I come to Englintone. It was fine to see the old Scots Nobleman lodged in the Palace of Prussia, just as if he had been in the Abbey of Holyrood house.

Sanssouci description be found below, but first, on with the Lord Marischal quotes:

Monday July 23rd: Lord Marischal dined with us at Froment's. He & I talked of Jacobitism, as how there was something pathetic & generous in it, as it was espousing the cause of a distressed & ancient Royal House. My Lord however owned that they deserved to lose the throne of Britain. I own so too. I am sorry for them. I wish to forget them; and I love from my Soul 'Great George our King'.

(Burnet is Mitchell's secretary, of whom more below in the Mitchell section. Macpherson is a Highlander soldier in Prussian service whom Boswell h as befriended.)

Wednesday 5 September: Some days ago I wrote to My Lord Marischal that Mr. Burnet and I intended this day to have the nor of eating an Olio with his Lordship. At six we set out in a clever chaise. The day was good. My spirits were fine. (...) We found all well at Potsdam. My Lord gave us an Olio which I found excellent. After dinner we went & saw the Garden and House at Sans Souci. I looked with pleasure at the King's study, which is elegant, and has its books finely bound, as at Potsdam. In his bedchamber I found some verses at a table. We then went to the Gallery, where I saw the noble room and rich pictures with true relish. We then looked at the foundation of the house which the King is going to build for My Lord, which makes his Lordship very happy. AT night Macpherson and I dressed ourselves in the highland dress, of which Macpherson had two suits, and a fine frolic did we make of it. We wrote a card 'To The Right Honourable George Earl Marischal of Scotland', 'Two Highland Gentlemen Mrssr. Mcdonald & Mcintosh beg leave to have the honour of paying their respects to the Earl of Marischal. They ask pardon for troubling him at so untimely an hour.' The direction and the word 'untimely' were exxcellent. Away we went, & Scott & Burnet behind us, past the sentinels & went to My Lord's apartment in the Palace. I asked the Servant in German for My Lord & delivered the Card. His Lordship made us welcome. We stood just within his door, bowing much. He cried, 'Come in, Gentlemen, come in'. He advanced & immediately knew us, & asked how Cows sold. He took our joke in good part. We marched home again. Going & coming we were followed on the street; for, we spoke a barbarous language. I did at least; for I made it up. I supped on Sowans hearty, & were canty Chields. Burnet had a bed, & in te same room the HIghlanders lay on straw. This did I talk. Thus was I merry.

The Union is of course the one between Scotland and England.

Thursday 6 September. I rose stout & well. After breakfeast I disputed against the Union. Burnet was my Antagonist. After much warm disputation, I said, 'Sir, the love of our country is a sentiment. If you have it not, I cannot give it you by reasoning. I waited on Lord Marischal. (...) He was more affable than usual. I owned to him that I was afraid I could not do great things as a Scots Lawyer, & could wish to be in some other employement. As for the army (said he) it is too late. Then 'My Lord, might I not be employed abroad?' Sir you must begin as Secretary, & if you are not with a man to your mind, you are very unhappy. Then if you should be sent envoy if you are at a place, where there is little to do, you are idle & unhappy. If you have much to do, you are harrassed with anxiety. Well then My Lord, I would get into Parliament. No Sir. You would be obliged to stick to a Party right or wrong, thro ' thick & thro' thin. Or you must be singular & thought absurd. My Lord, if you go on, you'll chace me out of existence altogether. What say you to my following the law in Scotland moderately? jogging on between the Parliament House & Auchinleck, and sodoing pretty well. Indeed Sir I'm for your jogging on. Your Father will see that you do your best. He has a great liking for you, and you 'll very well together. Then My Lord will you write to him, that in the meantime he may allow me to travel a year? I will.

His Lordship then gave me my route by Switzerland, Italy and France. I was very happy, quite in the humour of revering the Old Earl. I thought on the Abbey of Holyrood-house. I thought of worthy Johnston. I talked with my Lord against the Union & how we had lost our spirit. I said You find Scotsmen in the HIghlands. But very few south of Tay. I ought to be valued, My Lord, as a rare Scot. He took down from his book-case the history of Robert the Bruce in old verse & made me a present of it, writing upon it 'Scotus Scoto' and saying now you must read this once every year. I had almost cried before the good old man. We dined with his Lordship. After dinner Burnet & I set out. He was excellent company. His stories flew thick. He insisted I should supp with him. I did so & merry we were. Yet, my gloomy eye saw the situation of an envoy in an unpleasing light. I am an unhappy dog.

Boswell, you would not have been a good envoy. (And for different reasons as to why Lehndorff would not have been.) Cultural attaché, yes.

Thursday 20 September:
All the morning was employed in writing. I dined Froment's, & after dinner we all walked. Madame la Turque said to me Vous avez un penchant vers la Melancholie. Il vous faut beaucoup de changements. I aid: Quelle donc doit etre mon pais? She replied 'Europe. Et qui doit etre ma femme? Froment exclaimed Un Chariot de Poste. Very ludicrous & well applied.

Saturday 22 September:

I past part of the morning with his Lordship, who gave me his good advices with an accuracy & a vivacity that amazed me. He is absolutely free of affectation, which I cannot understand; for I am sadly plagued by it. He joked with me, & said Well, Colonel! may you not only conquer Portugal, but Africa; and so triumph over the Moors. I took leave of him with a most respectful and affectionate embrace saying 'My Lord, you may always reckon upon me as upon a most faithful servant. My heart was big when I took my last adieu of the venerable Scots nobleman. I yet hope to see him again. I almost cried. AT this moment the tears are in my eyes. I dined at Froment's & took leave of my poor Turk with regret. WEll, she & I have past curious hours together. Honest Scott said If I come within sixty miles of you, I shall see you. Macpherson & Froment woked with me till I was out of the Gate, & then took leave. All these circumstances makr my being regarded. I mounted the post wagon. I found it cold & really hard enough. Courage!

Edited Date: 2020-10-24 04:25 pm (UTC)

From:

selenak

Reminder: The Prince of Prussia is future FW2, AW's son.

Potsdam: July 3rd: At ten (Lord Marischal) carried me to the Parade, which was full of Prussian officers, all bold looking, all gay, all well-dressed. He presented me to the Prince of Prussia, calling me 'd'une tres bonne maison et fort galant homme' . (...) I then waited on Mr. Catt Reader to the King to whom I had a letter from M. de Zuyl He was sick & could not go out with me; but he was civil. I found him dry & even insipid. Madame de Froment & I dined téte á téte, after which we went & were shown the Palace which is magnificent. the King's Concert-Room is very elegant. We looked thro' a glass door & saw his Bedchamber, & a neat little library. All his books were bound in red turkie & handsomely gilt. They made me think of my dear Temple. They would have pleased him much. In the Antichamber were a good many books ,but our conductor would not allow us to lift any of them, for, he said, the King knew the exact place of every one of them. I saw Oeuvres of Voltaire, & a fine quarto edition of the Oeuvres du Philosophe de Sans-Souci. (...) I was in a humour of gallantry tonight. I was pleased with the romantic idea of making love to a Turk. However I talked morality at last & thought myself a Johnson. She seemed too indolent in body & too vivacious in mind to be a very rigid Lady. Besides her ideas were quite different from mine. Her Religion was of a kind very different from mine. Bless me. What are mortals!

Boswell sees Fritz, from a distance, the one way everyone could see him without getting an audience, attending a parade. Note that this was the year when Heinrich pissed him off by not saluting properly.

I rose fresh as a Ro on the Braes of Lochaber. I find that if I had got a Commission in a Highland Corps, I should have been as stout a Donald as the best of them. I waited on my good Lord Marischal, whom I found contented and as cheerful as ever. I then went to the Parade. I saw the King. It was a glorious Sight. He was dressed in a suit of plain blue, with a star, & a plain hat with a white feather. He had in his hand a cane. The sun shone brihgt. He stood before his palace, with an air of iron confidence that could not be opposed. As a loadstone moves needles, or a storm bows the lofty oaks, did Frederic the great make the Prussian officers submissive bend, as he walked majestic in the midst of them. I was in noble spirits & had a full relish of this grand scene, which I shall never forget. I felt a crowd of ideas. I beheld the King who has astonished Europe by his warlike deeds. I beheld (pleasant conceit!) the great defender of the Protestant Cause, who was being prayed for in all the Scots Kirks. I beheld the Philosophe de Sans Souci. I have really a little mind, with all my pride. For I thought one might well endure all the fatigues of war, in order to have an opportunity of appearing grand as this Monarch.

(Boswell will change his mind on this once he comes to Dresden; stay tuned.)
Friday 21 September:

The whim struck me to put on a blue bonnet, and appear quite a Scots Gentleman. I went in this dress to the parade of the Prince of Prussia. The Prince observed me & asked Scott Qu'est-ce que ce petit bonnt que porte ce monsieur la? Scott said: C'est le bonnet que portent les Gentilhommes Ecossois. The poor Prince did not like it much, nor could he think that he was a Lord's son who wore it. No matter - I was pleased, and boldly did I march upon the Parade before the Palace, where I again saw the King. But he did not look towards me. However I was pleased to have shown the first blue bonnet on the Prussian Parade.

And that's why your friends won't introduce you to Fritz, Boswell. Otoh, he gets to hang out with "Blancho", who the footnote tells me is the Swedish Ambassador Karl Julius, Count von Bohlen, and on Tudesday, September 4th, shares this spicy bit of gossip:

He entertained me much; being a fellow of knowledge and clear expression. He said the French music was a contrast to the French temper. The French are gay. their music is grave. A Frenchman never looks so serious, as when he sings a song. He said the King of Prussia had been sadly debauched in his youth: for he sued to go to the common bawdy houses as well as to divert himself with the Ladies of the Court. He is now (said Blancho) quite impotent.

Now I would say that Blancho clearly reads anonymous trashy pamphlets, but if I recall correctly the one in question while drawing the STD in his youth => now has to bottom, not top correlation does not claim brothels as well as ladies of the court for young Fritz. This strictly het version, which is exactly the one Zimmermann will provide after Fritz' death, is also interesting because it's not that Boswell censors himself when there's non-het gossip to be had. Elsewhere, with no Fritzian connection, he notes down that such and such is suspect of having "Italian habits", which the footnote says means "is gay".

On Wednesday, September 26th, Boswell, now in Anhalt, hears the story of Voltaire, Fritz and the laundry, in this form: M. Lestock. Gouv: de Prince spoke well - Le Roi de Prusse venoit un jour. Que faites vous Voltaire? Sire, j'arrange votre linge sale.

Which is a bit different to the version we know, but like the many versions of the last Fritz/Katte exchange, there's a shared core. Since Boswell is currently at a minor German court whose prince (AnhaltSophie's brother, married to Mina's sister and driving her to an early grave) isn't even in residence, it really must have spread far and wide.

When Boswell arrives at Dresden, he is well and truly shocked by the scars from the war, and his Fritz opinion plunges downwards. No more hero of the Protestant faith, for:

Tuesday 9 October:
I strolled about & viewed the city. It is finely built of freestone. It gave me great pain to see the ruins made by the Prussian bombardments. I hated the barbarous hero. He was under no necessity to bombard Dresden. It was from mere spite that he did it.

From:

selenak

Naturally, Boswell visits the British envoy and his father's old pal in Berlin. Belle de Zuylen is a Dutch intellectual and writer whom Boswell flirted with when studying law at Utrecht. She flirted back but didn't take him seriously (wise her!), and definitely had no intention of marrying him.

I waited on Mr. Mitchell and found him a knowing amiable easy man. He was very polite. Te talked of Mademoiselle de Zuylen 'Elle a beaucoup d' esprit.' Oui said I trop d'esprit pour les Hollandais. And who was in the room but Mr. Verelst the Dutch envoy! Mr. Mitchell turned it off with a smiling reply. 'Monsieur, c'est un beau compliment que vous faites au Ministre d'Holland.' Blockhead that I was. Let never Man blunder out reflections against any country, when he does not very well know his company.

Joseph Yorke: British envoy to The Hague. Should have replaced Mitchell as British envoy to Prussia mid war, but Fritz wouldn't have it.

July 14: I rumbled in the Journaliere to Berin haivng for company amongst others Mademoiselle Dionsicus, daughter to the cook of Prince Ferdinand of Prussia. I talked words of German to this lass. I dined at Froment's, & after dinner went to Mr. Mitchell's. We talked of Sir Joseph Yorke, whom he calls Sir Joe. I told him that he seemed so anxious lest people should not know that he was Ambassador, that he held his head very high & spoke very little. And as i the infancy of painting people generally wrote 'this is a cow'. So from Sir Joe's mouth commeth a label with these words 'I am an Ambassador'. What a difference between this buckram knight & the amiable Mr. Mitchell.

Post-War, Fritz gave Monbijou to Louise to live in. As Schönhausen was getting renovated, EC is with her sister.

July 15: I dined at Mr. Mitchell's. He has an elegant house and a good table. He is polite and easy. His servants are good people, civil and attached to their master. After dinner, I played at billiards with Mr. Burnet, Secretary to Mr. Mitchell, a very good solid clever young fellow. At six the envoy carried me to Monbijou the campagne of the Princess of Prussia. Here I was presented to the Queen with whom the King has never lived. she has been handsome, and is very amiable, altho' she stammers sadly. I was presented to I don't know how many princes and princesses. I was akward, though not afraid.

Lawyers: Mitchell and Boswell's dad both had studied law, if you'll recall. So had Boswell, though he hadn't been too keen originally, he'd dreamt of being a soldier, romantisizing the profession.

Friday 27 July: I dined with Mr. Mitchell, who always give me agreeable views. He said that in living every man must be his own director; for, our tastes are extremely different. He said if lawyers had a fixed salary, they surely could not drudge as they do. But the little refreshing presents keep them alive. He counselled me much to pursue the law in Scotland as I might by that means attain a useful and honorable station. Yet he owned that some people could not follow that profession. I said nothing but had a secret satisfaction to find that my aversion to the law was not absolutely absurd. At six we got into his excellency's coach. I told him that the Abbé Jerusalem had wished to dispute with the King of Prussia, on Religion. Indeed said Mr. Mitchell they had better save themselves the trouble; for, the King has heard all the Abbés arguments, and the Abbé has heard all the King's, and after they have said a great deal, each will retain his own opinion. Then, Sir, said I, you think truth is at the bottom of the well. Yes, said he, and I suppose will remain there some time. We went to Monbijou and payed our respects at court. Dull enough.

So much for royal glamour. :) (Lehndorff agrees, of course.) The next person we've heard of Boswell meets through Mitchell is Formey, aka the writer of all those Academy obituaries, including Peter Keith's.

I dined at Mr. Mitchell's, where was Mr. Formey perpetual Secretary to the Academy of Sciences at Berlin. He was facetious, but vain. He talked of his books, & he talked of his lectures. He said quand vous entender le tambour a neuf heures au soir, vous pouvez dire Formey ies tdans son lit. He told us Mr. Gualteri a French Minister here was so hypochandriac that he caused tie his legs together at night, lest he should get up, and do himself some mischief. How strange a distemper is this!

In time, Boswell finds out Mitchell can get depressed, too:

September 5: We talked of Spleen. Burnet said that Mr. Mitchell was sadly distressed with it; that sometimes he would sit without speaking a word, & say Well I could not have thought that this could get so much the better of me. All this was really owing to his being costive, to prent which he took every proper method. He had his own box, which was constantly tied behind the coach, and with Mr. Locke's regularity did he attempt the necessary operation.

From:

selenak

Boswell doesn't just meet exiled Scots and German nobility, though. He befriends a couple of families which I had to skip, and also, being a good tourist, checks out more than palaces and parades.

Here's Boswell at Wittenberg being Boswell, and I just had to share:

I saw the Convent where Luther lived, and I went to the old Church in which he first preached the Reformation. It has been miserably shattered by the Bombardments. But the Tomb of Luther is still entire as is that of Melanchthon just opposite to it. They are nothing more than two large plates of metal fixed on the floor. The y have inscriptions in raised letters. (...)

I was in a true solemn humor, and a most curious and agreeable idea presented itself, which was to write to Mr. Samuel Johnson from the tomb of Melanchthon. The woman who showed the church was a good obliging body, and very readily furnished me with pen and ink. Tht my paper might literally rest upon the monument or rather the simple epitaph of this great & good man, I laid myself down & wrote in that posture. The good woman & some more simple beings gather'd round & beheld me with wonder. I dare say they supposed me a little mad. Tombs have always been the favourit resort of gloomy distracted mortals. I said nothing of hot-headed Luther. I only mentioned the mild Melanchthon, and that at his tomb I vowed to Mr. Johnson an eternal attachment. This letter must surely give him satisfaction. I shall not send it till I see if he gives me a favourable answer to my last two letters.

At Leipzig, Boswell meets Gottsched (alas, Luise Gottsched the Émilie fan had already died):

Lying on the floor did me much good. I sprung up cheerful. Experience shall ever be my great 'Guide! (...) I went and saw the fair where there is a concourse of all nations, even of Turks. Such a scene gives me agreeable agitation of ideas. (...) We dined together with some more Germans in a house on the Horse market, where we were mighty well. I then went and called on the Professor Gottsched, one of the most distinguished Literati of this Country. It was he who set agoing the true cultivation of the German language of which he has given an excellent grammar. He has also written several pieces both in verse and prose. I found him a big comely man, wiht an ease of manners like a man of the world. Altho I had no recommendation, he received me with perfect politeness. We talked of Scotland, of it's language and the difference between it and English. I mentioned to him my plan of a Scots dictionary, & promised to show him a specimen of it. He said the preface to Johnson's dictionary was one of the best pieces he had ever read. Said he: Il connait le suject au fond. He advised me tait upon Mr. Bel Professor of Poetry. I did so, & found him a lively Hungarian, with a degree of French manners. He had a very good Library. I should have mentioned that Gottsched & I were quite easy together in a few minutes; and I was at once among his books. Both he and Bel promised to be of what service they could to me, during my stay there.

Bel and Gottsched make it possible that Boswell visits the Leipzig University library, which impresses him. Otoh, hte only literary celebrity he meets, Gellert, does not.

I resolved to have a noble library at Auchinleck. I saw here a volume of original manuscript letters of famous learned men in Germany. I saw Luther's bible, which the verse of St. James says that the three which bear record in heaven are one is not to be found. Bel sent my name to Gellert, a professor here, who apointed me to come to him at three. (...) They call him the Gay of Germany. He has written fables & little dramatic pieces. I found him a poor sickly creature. He said he had been twenty years hypochondriack. He said that during a part of his life, every night he thought to die, and every morning he wrote a famble. He said Ma Poesie est passée. Je n'ai plus la force d'esprit. He spoke bad Latin and worse French, so I did my best with him in German. I found him a poor mind, with hardly any science. His conversation was like that of an old Lady. (...)

I am very fond of Leipzig. The Professors here are easy men o the world. I said I regretted I had not stuided here myself. But, I would go home & marry & send a son. Give me your hand on that, said Bel. I gave it him that I would send my son to his care. Let me remember this. I supped with him in an easy way with his family. Is not this being treated with much Civility? If I ever laugh at Germans, I am a villain.

Monday, 8 October.

After sleeping all the night in a thick mist on the Postwagon, I awaked much out of order. My blood was quite stagnated, and my teeth were loose. I was alarmed. When we came to astation, I got down & danced with much vigor, which by degrees brought me to myself. (...) This day I had a pleasant drive between Meissen and Dresden. We went along the side of the Elbe. On each side of the river were beautiful rising grounds covered with vines. Pray may not we have the same in Scotland? Surely our climate differs little from that of Saxony. I saw too here & there old castles, Herrschaften's houses, seats of gentlemen. It pleased me. It was Scottish. In Brandenburg I don't remember to have seen any; and I believe they are extremely scarce. I got in good time to the beautiful city of Dresden, put up at the Hotel de Pologne, an excellent house, dressed in scarlet and Gold, & went immediately to call on Mr. Stanhope the British Envoy, for whom I had a letter from Mr. Burnet at Berlin. He was not at home. I returned to my inn & went comfortably to bed. This was a degree of luxury to me, for I had not been undressed for ten days. I am really campaigning in Germany! I like it much.

Mr. Stanhope the English Envoy is Mr. Philip Stanhope, illegitimate son of Lord Chesterfield, and the recipient of his letters that form the book on which Chesterfield's enduring fame rests.

I dined at Mr. Stanhope's. He is natural Son to the Earl of Chesterfield: but has received the education of an nobleman and been always considered, by My Lord his Father, in the best light. He is little & young, but much of a Gentleman. He abused the King of Prussia. He talked lightly of the Saxon Court, & said he tired sadly at Dresden. This was not quite the formed man. But, I liked him the better.

Monday November 12th: I have quite the disposition for travelling. When I find a court agreeable, I wish to remain there for life. I would be attaché. Were I but so fixed, oh how tired I would be. I must however learn to keep my place at Auchinleck. It is my duty as I am born a Laird. Were all the German Princes to go & live in the delicious Spain, their families would fall & I would find no courts.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Notes for

cahn. All dates 1753.

May 12: Princess of Darmstadt. Guessing this is this one, who was apparently so learned that Fritz promoted her to honorary man.

Per Wikipedia:

after her death, he sent an urn to Darmstadt with the text femina sexo, ingenio vir ('A woman by sex, a man by spirit').

Seems Wilhelmine's "thanks but no thanks" didn't make an impression on Mister Misogyny. ;)

Anyway, I recognize the Darmstadt name mostly because two of this woman's daughters show up in our fandom: one marries FW2 after MESSALINA Elisabeth gets a divorce, and she becomes the mother of FW3, and the other is the one who marries Catherine the Great's son Paul (future emperor), dies painfully in childbirth while Heinrich is visiting, and Heinrich comforts Grand Duke Paul with, "So sorry your wife just died in agony; can I interest you in a replacement wife with close ties to the Prussian royal family?"

May 16: Eva [Merthen] is the mistress of Marshall Keith. This is James Keith, who, a few years later, tells Fritz camping next to the Austrians is a bad idea and the Austrians deserve to be hanged if they don't take advantage, then Keith dies in the battle of Hochkirch that ensues because Fritz doesn't listen. His mistress is the one that Bisset, editor of Andrew Mitchell's papers, is ignoring when he's all, "La la, stoic Keith, so manly and chaste, no time for a family," when Eva and James had several kids and a lifetime partnership.

They met when James was serving in the military in Russia, and occupying Finland with the Russian army--that time HolsteinPete almost became King of an independent Finland that never panned out. (Bisset, iirc, wishes James had stayed in Russia and faced off against Fritz in the Seven Years' War instead of dying at Hochkirch.)

James Keith is the older brother of George Keith, Lord Marischal, Fritz's BFF late in life who got to build a house on the grounds of Sanssouci, and Fritz would meet up with him at the Chinese Teahouse when he got too old to climb the hill up to Sanssouci. George is the one who (supposedly) sent for the British envoy when dying because he wanted to snark about a Jacobite emitting his dying sighs at a minister of the Hanover king.

Interesting that Boswell says he admits the Stuarts deserved to lose the throne. Not surprising: it's a position that's hard to argue with, and there were lots of disillusioned Jacobites after 1746.

May 27: "Waiting life" = Wartensleben. Remember that most if not all of the Wartenslebens are related to Katte on his mother's side, as Field Marshal Count Wartensleben, an extreeemely prominent personage, is his grandfather, and he had something like 17 children.

June 1: Lehndorff goes to the parade. This is the annual military revue held in spring that FW (afaik) started and Fritz carried on, the one that AW and Heinrich are constantly stressing about their performance at, the one where Heinrich will initiate a year of silence with Fritz by refusing the ritual of presenting the spontoon (a type of pike) to his King and get back on speaking terms with him by duly presenting it the following year, and the one at which (according to the gossip that Stratemann hears), Hans Heinrich laid down his sword at FW's feet and tried to offer his retirement in 1731. (Yeah. It's FW he's struggling to forgive.)

June 4: Franz von Braunschweig/Brunswick, EC's youngest brother, who, like James Keith and so many others, will die at Hochkirch in 1758. (The same day of Wilhelmine's death.)

June 6: Marschall Kalkstein: this is Fritz's governor when he was a teenager.
Lol, Lehndorff meets a Frau von K., who married her husband for money and cheats on him, and is currently quite taken with the pale face and fox-red hair of Staatsminister Katte. This is one of the Katte cousins whom Lehndorff hates; a brother of the one who married Lehndorff's cousin.

June 14: Fritz spends the night 10 miles away, arrives at 5 in the morning. Note that this is because it's summer and he starts his day at 3 am.

June 17: Fräulein Morien: Pretty sure this must be the same one who ends up married to Kalkreuth as a result of his attempt to compromise Mina, and dies in childbed a year later. I've been seeing Frau Morien references and wondering how they were related, and then I seem to recall Frau Morien presenting her daughter to the princess (Mina, presumably), and so that must be her mother.

June 19: He is the croesus of this country who lives like a harpagon.

Croesus: Very wealthy king in ancient Greek times who was made famous by Herodotus, you may have seen "rich as Croesus" in English. Harpagon: the name of the protagonist in Molière's "The Miser."

June 22: "old coats": Altrock, proper name.

"musicians dressed as Pane" = Pans, in keeping with the pastoral theme.

July 5: Lol at banged up Lehndorff comparing himself with Don Quixote.

Okay, so I keep seeing the Reuss family mentioned, and I was recently reminded that all the princes are named Heinrich, something I had known but forgotten. So I googled them, and it's worse than I thought. 1) They're still doing it!, 2) it's not just a regnal name that the heir to the principality adopts. It's all of them! Per Wikipedia,

All the males of the House of Reuss are named Heinrich (Henry) plus a number. In the elder line the numbering covers all male children of the elder House, and the numbers increase until 100 is reached and then start again at 1. In the younger line the system is similar but the numbers increase until the end of the century before starting again at 1. This odd regulation was formulated as a Family Law in 1688, but the tradition of the uniformity of name was in practice as early as 1200. It was seen as a way of honoring the Hohenstaufen Emperor Heinrich/Henry VI, who raised Heinrich der Reiche/Henry the Rich (+1209) to the office of provost of the Cloister in Quedlinburg. [Reminder that Quedlinburg is where Amalie was abbess.]

And look at this twentieth century example!

Heinrich I married 15 September 1939 at Bad Doberan to Duchess Woizlawa Feodora of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (1918–2019), daughter of Duke Adolf Friedrich of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and his wife, Princess Victoria Feodora Reuss of Schleiz. His wife was the niece of his adoptive father Heinrich XLV.

They had six children (one daughter and five sons).

Princess Feodora Reuss of Köstritz (b. 5 February 1942), married in 1967 to Count Gisbert of Stolberg-Wernigerode, had issue.
Prince Heinrich VIII Reuss of Köstritz (b. 30 August 1944), married in 1973 to Baroness Dorit of Ruffin, had issue.
Prince Heinrich IX Reuss of Köstritz (b. 30 June 1947), married in 1984 to Baroness Amélie Besserer v. Thalfingen, had issue.
Prince Heinrich X Reuss of Köstritz (b. 28 July 1948), married firstly in 1976 to Baroness Elisabeth Akerhielm of Margrethelund, divorced in 1990, had issue; Married Secondly in 1991 to Countess Antoinette of Arnim, no issue.
Prince Heinrich XIII Reuss of Köstritz (b. 4 December 1951), married in 1989 to Susan Doukht Jaladi, had issue.
Prince Heinrich XV Reuss of Köstritz (b. 9 October 1956), married in 1999 to Anja Charlotte Nooth-Cooper, had issue.

Calm down, you guys!

July 11: Fritz is putting on Voltaire plays in Berlin while holding Voltaire prisoner in Frankfurt. Lehndorff: ???!

Lehndorff, you're not alone in your confusion.

Also, in case we haven't repeated this enough,

cahn, Frankfurt at this date is a FREE CITY totally not in Fritz territory.

July 14: Oh, he finally says the more he gets to know Countess Bentinck, the more impressed he is. It's been all trash-talking up to this point.

cahn, do I need to remind you, or do you remember who Bentinck is? She's come up quite a few times.

July 16: Fritz and Heinrich are getting along, this so so great, they deserve reciprocal love! AHAHAHAHAAAAAA lolsob, Lehndorff. Never change.

July 17: Es ist ein sehr gescheiter Mann, der aber unglücklicherweise Erica gleicht, und das reizt zum Lachen, wenn man ihn zum ersten Male sieht.

He is a bright man, who unfortunately looks like Erica, and that makes everyone laugh who sees him for the first time.

Anyone know who Erica is? It's kind of hard to Google.

***

That's all I'm going to do for today, 20 pages, as I want to try to do some Krockow later.

Edited Date: 2020-10-24 09:44 pm (UTC)

From:

cahn

Otherwise known as, why it is good that we're going through Lehndorff slowly :P Yeah, you thought I'd finished this a long time ago, didn't you? I still have not finished. (Yes, this is slow even for me, what can I say, I keep getting interrupted by having to read all the Megan Whalen Turner or do my Yuletide signup or something :P )

Marwitz: so Oster had implied earlier that Wilhelmine knew about Marwitz' affair with her husband way back when? But when it all comes to a head it doesn't sound like she knew about it years before then, to me.

I know all three of you (

selenak,

mildred_of_midgard,

felis) have been telling me about Voltaire and Wilhelmine, but I guess I still didn't really realize how much they liked each other until reading this, awwww!

-I am super excited because the fact that I was so slow reading this meant that I got to this section and actually caught the name, which I definitely wouldn't have without

selenak's wonderful writeup:

Voltaire, who wanted to stay at the Prussian royal court himself, offered his help. But it was not so easy even for him to convince great minds of the advantages of the Franconian province. For the time being, he was unable to fulfill Wilhelmine's dearest wish for an educated companion free of mischief.

Françoise de Graffigny, who was on friendly terms with Wilhelmine's chamberlain Carl Heinrich von Gleichen, would have been her first choice. The author of the well-read letters from a Peruvian woman had belonged to Voltaires County in Cirey-sur-Blaise in Champagne, while the latter lived there with his lover Gabrielle Émilie Marquise du Châtelet. In Paris she had a salon which Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and other great minds of the time attended. But Madame gave Voltaire a basket: “To put it briefly,” he wrote to Wilhelmine, “she doesn't want to leave Paris like I do to Frederick the Great.

(sie will Paris nicht verlassen, so wie ich Friedrich den Großen. I think I'd say "like I do for Frederick the Great"...? Also, what's the basket (einen Korb)?)

Madame Graffigny! :D Besides Wilhelmine's wanting her as a companion (and presumably being supported in this by Voltaire) being further evidence that she wasn't the conventional harpy that Zinsser and Bodanis paint her as, it's interesting to me here that Voltaire tries to get her for Wilhelmine, which seems to say to me that they weren't necessarily on terrible terms. Though I suppose it's possible that they were on bad terms and that's part of why she refuses?

* Lol at Wilhelmine getting Fritz's permission to go to Montpellier, in France, for the sake of her health, all the while knowing she's using it as a jumping off point for an Italy trip, but doesn't want to ask him for permission for that up front.

hahahaha this was great!

* Oster believes in the orange peel quote, sigh.

Oh well!
(lol, I can't tell my Prussian generals apart, but at least I know about the orange peel quote now! I feel like I know a very weird assortment of things...)

(92%, so really almost done at this point!)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

The Diderot biography I'm writing up here is Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely, by Andrew Curran.

I chose it because it was available on Kindle, cheap, and Amazon recommended it to me. ;) It was not as scholarly as I would have liked, but it was as good a starting point as any.

I haven't finished writing up the most important part, his work on the Encyclopédie, but that requires a little more precision, so I'm still working on it. For now, you can have the rest.

Personal life

Denis Diderot was born in Langres in 1713 to a bourgeois father, a cutler in a region famous for cutlery.

His parents quickly realize their son isn't cut out to be a cutler or anything like it, so they start preparing him for the priesthood. He becomes an abbé/abbot as a 12-year-old, but he has this little problem with authority and is constantly getting in trouble. My favorite story is that he liked tricking his teachers by working really obscure syntax into his Latin and Greek, waiting for them to correct him, then taking great pleasure in proving that he was right and they were wrong.

So he increasingly gets the sense that this isn't the life for him. He ends up in Paris studying philosophy, but scholasticism and orthodoxy also drive him crazy, so he drifts aimlessly for a while, studying but not pursuing a serious career. During this period, he meets and befriends Rousseau.

Meanwhile, Diderot falls in love with a beautiful but pious (?? your life choices, Diderot) woman named Toinette (short for Antoinette), who's the product of a noble family fallen on hard times and currently working as a laundress. He manages to court her by convincing her parents that he's EXTREMELY CHASTE, i.e. on the verge of becoming a priest. In a very similar way, he recently once swindled someone out of a bunch of money by pretending he was about to enter the priesthood.

That's Diderot for you.

He eventually gets permission from her parents to marry her, on the condition that his parents agree. So he leaves Paris and goes home for the first time in 10 years.

Parents most emphatically do not agree. Dad actually has him locked up! Historians think this was in a monastery. Dad then writes to Toinette's parents and says that he'll only agree to release his son if this wretched girl takes a solemn vow never to marry him.

But Diderot escapes through a window and walks halfway to Paris, 120 km, before meeting up with someone who can give him a ride the rest of the way. (If you think that's exciting, his mother once sent a servant to Paris to bring him some money, and the servant apparently walked the entire 230 km in both directions. No, footnotes aren't abounding in this volume, and even when they're there, a major source for Diderot's life is his granddaughter, which we've seen how even children can be woefully uninformed about the details of their parent's lives, so take everything with a grain of salt.)

Anyway! He makes it back to Paris, where he and Toinette get married, secretly, at midnight, in one of the few parishes where people could get married without their parents' permission. And even then, it was only legal after age 30!

The marriage is passionate at first, but Diderot seems to have been a man of great passions of medium length (like a few years), and he eventually moves on. According to some anecdotes, she had a terrible temper and could get physically violent with him and with neighbors, and he was afraid to confront her during later marital disputes (he would apparently hide in his study, write a letter to a mutual friend, and have the friend deliver the message to her) but take this all with a grain of salt.

So he's friends with Rousseau for a while, but like Voltaire and Maupertuis, they have a messy and public falling out. Like theirs, it was triggered by trivial-seeming outward events that exploded. However, in their case, it seems to have been a more drawn-out process, and less catastrophic (possibly because Louis XV wasn't the type to get involved in their ~~pamphlet~~ book wars). One example: they have a big fight over whether Rousseau should accept a pension from Louis. Rousseau says doing so would violate his principles. Diderot says he owes it to his dependents to be financially responsible. Per the author of the bio, they had a lot of these arguments that reflected fundamental differences about how to live in the world and what kind of compromises to make.

Shortly before Rousseau's Confessions was supposed to come out, Diderot has a suspicion they were going to 1) be a bestseller, 2) trash him (both true), so he pre-emptively decides to work in some Rousseau-trashing in his life of Seneca.

Using the Essay to strike before the Confessions appeared in print, he compared Rousseau to Seneca’s detractors, and inserted a series of footnotes into his text that accused his former friend of being derivative, an obfuscator, a hypocrite, and an intellectual thief whose best ideas were borrowed from Seneca, Plutarch, Montaigne, and Locke. There was, of course, no mention of Diderot’s own role in exacerbating Rousseau’s paranoia by being aloof, by neglecting him, and by often mocking his fears as unwarranted.

Unfortunately for Diderot, Rousseau dies just before the Seneca book appeared (and the Confessions wasn't published until years later), and now Diderot looks petty and mean-natured. Oops! What do you do in a situation like this? You issue a second, expanded edition, now on Claudius and Nero, and you double down on Rousseau by writing at even greater length about how terrible he was, that's what you do.

This new and improved, "Now with more Rousseau-trashing!" edition appears in the same year as the first volumes of the Confessions appear. Says our author Curran:

While both men had hoped to claim the moral high ground in their final public clash, the written accounts of this twenty-five-year-old dispute did little to settle who was at fault. Indeed, more than anything else, the combination of spite and regret that drips from both men’s pens is a poignant testament to what they continued to have in common: the fear of mutual slander and the searing pain of lost companionship.

Diderot himself dies only a couple years later. During his final illness, he has the same problem that Voltaire had with wanting a decent burial and being worried about not getting one. But whereas Voltaire was a big name with powerful friends, and at least still believed in God, built a church, and attended Mass (even if only mockingly) when it served his purposes, Diderot is less protected *and* was a straight-up atheist. And to her credit, his wife Toinette, who is notably pious herself, wants Diderot to be able to get the assurance that he would get the burial he wants without having to convert, if he's dead set on not converting, and does her best to make that happen.

Hilariously, at this time (late 1783/early 1784), Diderot is living in the same parish as Voltaire died in just 6 years earlier, and in an attempt to get him to die a good Catholic, who should the Church send to try to convert him in his final illness but Jean-François Faydit de Terssac, who tag-teamed with the more famous Abbé Gaultier to try to get Voltaire to convert on his deathbed.

Terssac: I failed last time, but now's my chance! Diderot, you should totally publish a last work recanting all your previous works, then you can be on good terms with the Church.
Diderot: Or I could move to a different parish. Byyyeeee!

So Diderot died a few blocks from the church that had agreed to bury Maupertuis, Helvétius, and the like. (We haven't talked about Helvétius, but believe me, if you'd read this book, you'd be very surprised that he managed a Catholic burial. We'll probably cover him at some point.) So Diderot managed to get buried there without much fuss.

Ghost of Voltaire: This is way less exciting than having the King of France authorize the placing of your embalmed, heart-less, and brain-less corpse in a carriage as though it were still living and taken out of Paris to be buried somewhere more sympathetic.

Ghost of Diderot: But way simpler, and therefore strategically superior, omg.

Ghost of Voltaire: Never let it be said that I took the easy route, even in death!

Diderot's death scene, btw, was oddly touching, so I reproduce it here:

The next morning Diderot felt better than he had for months. After spending the morning receiving visits...the philosophe sat down with Toinette to his first proper meal in weeks: soup, boiled mutton, and some chicory. Having eaten well, Diderot then looked at Toinette and asked her to pass him an apricot. Fearing that he had already eaten too much, she tried to dissuade him from continuing the meal. Diderot reportedly replied wistfully: “What the devil type of harm can it do to me now?” Popping some of the forbidden fruit in his mouth, he then rested his head on his hand, reached out for some more stewed cherries, and died. While having anything but a heroic death à la Socrates, Diderot had nonetheless expired in a way that was perfectly compatible with his philosophy: without a priest, with humor, and while attempting to eke out one last bit of pleasure from life.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

The art of thinking freely is apparently to publish your stuff anonymously, to ghost-write, and to not publish most of your stuff at all during your lifetime. Diderot was pinning a lot on posterity appreciating him; he even wrote notes in the papers he left behind directly addressing us. "O Posterity, my own times were so oppressive, but I just know you're going to appreciate me, please appreciate me! It's my last chance to believe I accomplished something with all my work."

After seeing what kinds of things he wrote, you begin to understand why secrecy was so important. But before we dive in, a little more personal background.

Diderot was influenced by Voltaire's description of English thinkers, taught himself English (apparently by studying a Latin-English dictionary!), and started to read Locke, Bacon, Newton, and the like himself. He gradually, unlike Voltaire, became an atheist.

Meanwhile, Diderot's younger brother, Didier-Pierre, decides to become as pious as his older, prodigal brother Denis is blasphemous. He actually becomes a priest, and is outspoken in his disapproval of Denis. The disapproval is mutual. During one of their conflicts later in life, Denis will write to his younger priestly brother, telling that he should imagine himself on his deathbed and look back on his life, and “you will see that you are a bad priest, a bad citizen, a bad son, a bad brother, a bad uncle, and an evil man.”

Tell us how you really feel, Diderot.

Oh, and Denis dedicates his first work, a translation of an English freethinker, to his brother, in an amazing act of fraternal passive-aggressiveness that Heinrich would appreciate.

So after publishing some unorthodox works, our Diderot ends up in prison. (Not the Bastille; it was full. The Vincennes, where the Marquis de Sade also did some time, many years later.)

At first, he denies all the charges. Then, after a few weeks, his jailer hints that he could be here for years, and winter is coming.

After an attempt to hold out, Diderot finally confesses and agrees not to do it again. He also promises to dedicate the upcoming Encyclopédie to d'Argenson, the really prominent politician who was the reason he was in prison. He's eventually released, after a few months in prison. Incidentally, the book tells me the governor of the prison was the Marquis du Châtelet. The year? 1749, the year of Émilie's death.

Having learned his lesson, he will be more cautious about what he publishes and attaches his name to, but will write incredibly prolificly (Curren keeps using the word "workhorse") and espouse such popular [irony alert] opinions as:

Theater: Classical French theater, you know, the Racine and Corneille kind that Voltaire is still producing, is overly affected, codified, and unnatural. Instead of stereotypes like "lover" and "domineering father", we need realistic, three-dimensional characters. Also working-class heroes.

During my one and only in-person meeting with Voltaire, shortly before he dies, we will argue about Shakespeare. I will [quoting the biography here] compare Shakespeare to the massive fifteenth-century statue of Saint Christopher that stood just outside the doors leading into Notre Dame Cathedral. While perhaps crude and rustic, this colossus was very much like Shakespeare...because "the greatest men still walk through his legs without the top of their head touching his testicles."

In case it's not clear, that means you and your stupid old-fashioned plays, Voltaire!

This meeting: *remains the only in-person encounter between Voltaire and Diderot, though the correspondence continues to be argumentatively friendly*

Sex: Incest, bestiality, and homosexuality are "natural", not sins. I myself experienced homoerotic attraction on at least one or two occasions, though I evidently never acted on it. No evidence I had any personal affinity for incest and bestiality, but I will definitely write unpublished fanfic where these things are presented positively. Also, free love, free love is cool!

Slavery: Go, future revolting slaves! Rise up and throw off your chains! (It's argued that Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian revolution just a few years after Diderot's death, read the anti-slavery book that Diderot co-authored.)

Regicide: Sometimes called for. Will of the people and all that. Go future French revolutionaries, who will totally disclaim any association with me and treat my memory like shit after my death! [Reason: he was too freethinking even for them, especially the atheism.]

Colonialism: Omg, the LITERAL WORST. All Europe is complicit, not just slave-traders and merchants! STOP IT.

American Revolution: If you guys just left off with the BLATANT HYPOCRISY of espousing freedom while owning massive slave plantations, you'd be the literal best. Wish I weren't too old to travel there! Good luck! Come visit me! (He may have met Franklin in person, we're not sure, but they definitely had a mutual friend and knew of each other.)

Education: Forget Greek and Latin, we need to educate the majority of the population so that they know what their rights are and will defend them against tyranny.

Louis XVI: The French Revolution is coming. Joseph's not the only one who can see the writing on the wall. You [tu] need to fix everything right now, or else you're going to go down in history as a do-nothing tyrant. (Yes, he tu-ed King Louis in an actualfax published work that Louis got to read or at least hear about before banning.)

God: What God? Pure materialism, yeah! I myself will turn down a meeting with Voltaire when he's famous and I'm still an up-and-coming young man, because I feel like he's going to use the opportunity to try to convert me to deism. But we'll definitely argue about the existence of a deity by letter!

Seneca: 18C contemporaries, I know you all think Seneca was the worst, because he was a blatant hypocrite about being a luxury-rejecting Stoic while accumulating a fortune and cozying up to Nero, but here's several hundred pages about how he was the best, and sometimes you have to cozy up to tyrants to get anything done, even though it's questionable that we got anything done with our respective tyrants. (Seneca had more influence initially, but then he had to commit suicide. Diderot had no influence ever, but at least didn't have to commit suicide.)

Yeah, one of these things is not like the others. More on Diderot and tyrants later!

Diderot: Notice how I only got imprisoned for my first couple of works, and I spent my whole subsequent life in France happily churning out prodigious amounts of controversial work without ever getting imprisoned or exiled again. Beat that, Voltaire!

Voltaire: Notice how no one ever accused me of being conflict-averse.

Edited Date: 2020-10-26 02:01 am (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Catherine the Great and Diderot come to each other's attention in Diderot's middle age, when she ascends the throne. Like Fritz, she tries to get a bunch of foreign intellectuals to join her court. Like Fritz, she's partially successful. Unlike Fritz, she actually pays.

Diderot and d'Alembert decline her offer, d'Alembert humorously. Some of us have seen this quote before, but I'll repeat it:

D’Alembert quipped that he would have made the trip to Saint Petersburg, but he was too “prone to hemorrhoids, and they are far too dangerous in that country.” This was, of course, a joke made at Catherine’s expense: the Russian government had announced to the world that her late husband had died from complications related to piles, although virtually everybody knew that he had actually been murdered shortly after the coup by Catherine’s lover’s brother.

Wikipedia disagrees that we know that this "actually" happened, but in terms of what d'Alembert believed, certainly.

So Diderot and d'Alembert settle on a compromise of trying to get other famous French intellectuals and artists to go to St. Petersburg without actually going themselves. Do as I say, not as I do.

But one day, Catherine discovers that Diderot is short of money and trying to sell his famous book collection. She agrees to buy it for the asking price, with two additional terms:

1) That the collection remain in Diderot's possession for his lifetime.

2) That he act as her curator of this collection and accordingly accept a stipend from her.

In other words, free gift. Woot!

Catherine: This is how I poach people from Fritz.

But then, the payment gets delayed, and eventually Diderot has to write to Catherine asking what's up with that.

Catherine: Sorry! Incompetent underlings, you know how it goes. But since I don't want this to happen again, how about I pay you for the first fifty years of your curatorship up front? Fifty years from now [Diderot was 52], we can meet again to renegotiate the terms. (Yes, she really wrote that last bit as a joke.)

Diderot: OMG, Catherine is the best! So enlightened, so generous! Maybe I should go to St. Petersburg--just for a visit, mind you--and I can be the intellectual who influences a powerful ruler and gets my ideas put into practice. It'll be just like Socrates and Alcibiades, Seneca and Nero, Voltaire and Fritz!

No, he didn't say the last sentence, but I was reading the previous part thinking, "...Why do I feel like this is going to end badly?"

So Diderot goes to St. Petersburg. On the way, this happens:

Fritz: You should totally stop off in Potsdam on the way! I'd love to meet you in person. *bats eyelashes*

Diderot: I will detour around Potsdam specifically to avoid meeting you. You can't fool me, Old Fritz, it's 1774 and I've heard about you!

Fritz: *writes sour-grapes pamphlet trashing Diderot's literary career*

Fritz: *sends numerous copies to St. Petersburg*

Me when I read that: OMG, of *course* he wrote a pamphlet, it's like a reflex at this point. Also, you're not exactly disproving his point, Fritz.

So then Diderot's in St. Petersburg, and it's all informal fun times with the Empress, who really likes him and spends tons of time with him, and they talk about his liberal ideas, and she's totally on board. (This is 1774, so in between Heinrich visits.)

Until he realizes that nothing is actually changing. She's happy to chat philosophy with him all day, but it remains theoretical.

Diderot: Why are you all talk? You could actually change things.

Catherine: [actual quote] All your grand philosophies, which I understand very well, would do marvelously in books and very badly in practice. In your plans for reform, you forget the difference between our two roles: you work only on paper which consents to anything...whereas I, poor empress, work on human skin, which is far more prickly and sensitive.

So Diderot, who's resented for his royal favor by the court nobles, who are all eagerly reading Fritz's pamphlet by now and making life hard on him, becomes disillusioned.

Diderot: Catherine, you're nothing but a despot masquerading as an enlightened monarch! I'm leaving.

Me: Diderot, it's called "enlightened despot" for a reason.

Diderot: *leaves Russia, detours pointedly around Fritz again*

On his way back, he tells Catherine that he has a copy of her (published, at least) book expressing her political thinking, and he's going over it with a red pen with an eye toward publishing his commentary. She has her people break into his room, go through his things, and filch the copy.

It's like Fritz and Voltaire if both had been sane!

Now totally disillusioned, Diderot starts writing more incendiary stuff, much of which (like the "regicide is totally cool") doesn't get published until after his death. One thing that does get published is a satirical manual on ruling (the "mirror for princes" genre) that's full of advice to monarchs, like "only form alliances in order to sow hatred" and never, ever "raise one’s hand without striking." Curran says this satire was aimed mostly at Fritz, but also partly at Catherine. I immediately want to call it the Anti-Anti-Machiavel.

On the flip side of Fritz being terrible, Diderot's co-author, the one who, unlike Diderot, *did* put his name and picture on one of the most incendiary books, the "slavery is bad, colonialism is bad, Europeans are complicit, btw Louis [tu] the French Revolution is coming for you" book, predictably had to flee the country, and he ended up taking refuge in Prussia in 1781.

Fritz: See? "Enlightened" *and* "despot." Why choose, when you could be both?

Oh, speaking of which, the author of this book would have me believe that Voltaire was advocating for Diderot and company to take refuge not just in Cleves in 1766, but in *Potsdam*...in 1758. For those of you who are weak on dates, in 1758, Prussia and France were at war with each other in the Seven Years' War. Citation: letter from Voltaire to the Count de Tressan on February 13, 1758.

Zomg, wait. That's three months after Rossbach!

felis or

prinzsorgenfrei, do either of you have university access to E-Enlightenment? If not, I'm going to ask Royal Patron (a rl friend of mine with university affiliation), and if he doesn't,

gambitten is getting a direct message. ;)

cahn: let me know if you want a refresher on Rossbach.

Oh, also, in February 1758, Voltaire has only been speaking to Fritz again for about 6 months. I reeeeally want to see this letter.

Edited Date: 2020-10-26 03:57 am (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Only about 12 pages today, because Diderot and Krockow and other things, and besides, you're still reading Oster! ;) All dates 1753.

July 31: "Fat Cross" = "Fat Kreutz"

Weird because Google got that it was a proper name on the 29th. Oh well.

Also, ever since I read the "Kaphengst has a double chin = divine retribution", I've been planning to include a part in my future hypothetical "Kaphengst is spectacular in bed" fic where Heinrich actually likes the added weight. Now that I've encountered more fat-shaming from Lehndorff, I'm even more determined. ;)

August 1: "as the can snakesall the way around it" = "as the Dosse [the river] snakesall the way around it"

August 4: This is where I admit I looked at "[we dress up as] Pilger" and thought, "...Mushrooms?" Then I had to look at the translation, where "pilgrims" made a whole lot more sense. Finally, I had to google the German for mushrooms, and it turns out to be "Pilze". #GermanStudentAnecdote :)

August 5: AW gives his field preacher the text for a sermon, namely Song of Solomon chapter 4, verse 1. New International Version translation:

How beautiful you are, my darling!
Oh, how beautiful!
Your eyes behind your veil are doves.
Your hair is like a flock of goats
descending from the hills of Gilead.

Btw, I'm totally betting Song of Solomon/Song of Songs was AW's favorite book of the Bible. :P

August 7: "Since we had new opening credits every mile" = "Since we had a fresh team of horses every mile"

Btw, in a text like this, I'm assuming a "mile" is the old-fashioned "German long mile", which is about 5 of our American miles. In case it's confusing why they're changing horses every mile.

Also, it's Prussia, so don't forget the roads are terrible. ("The worst of all roads: those that lead to Prussia," as Algarotti put it, both literally and, most likely, metaphorically.)

August 8: Ha, I was just thinking, "I can see why

selenak was wondering how Lehndorff found the time to hang out with the Divine Trio so much," and then I got to the "The Queen gave me a hard time--no rose without thorns!" line that I was telling Royal Patron about last week when I was describing the Lehndorff diaries to him.

:D

August 10: Let's play "fill in the blank"!

Lehndorff writes: "I receive letters from the most splendid of men, and I answer him," and the editor adds a footnote explaining, "Naturally, ______ is meant."

You get one guess whose name goes in there. ;)

August 10: You know Darget and Valori by now, right? Let me know if not!

August 10: "there is a regularity in their [her] behavior and nature that is very seldom found in the grown-ups."

While this may also arguably be true :P, I'm going with "among the great" here for "bei den Großen."

August 14: "There is nothing in the world more terrible than an old drool" = "lickspittle, toady"

August 23: In the evening I go to Monbijou, where Prince Friedrich von Württemberg can always be found, the lover of Princess Dorothea von Schwedt.

Friedrich von Württemberg: Remember Wilhelmine's daughter's husband, the Duke of Württemberg, whom she eventually left? That's Karl Eugen. This is his younger brother, who will end up becoming the Duke of Württemberg when Karl Eugen dies with only daughters.

Dorothea von Schwedt is the daughter of Wilhelmine's sister who ended up with the Schwedt husband.

August 23: "It is a good game this prince will make." = "It is a good marriage partner this prince will make."

Edited Date: 2020-10-26 03:59 am (UTC)

From:

gambitten

So! I'm back! I've finished my exams for this year and want to spend my weekends more productively, so I'll be trying to contribute every Sunday from now on. Elsewhere in the week I'll be scarce. Over the past months I've come across many recent or upcoming scholarly works that would be of interest here, so I'll list them off.

Upcoming:
Upcoming Andrew Mitchell PHD thesis:

There's been some lamentation recently that not much recent scholarly work is available for this lad. Well, I'm happy to point you in the direction of this English-language 2019 PHD thesis entitled 'Andrew Mitchell, ‘new diplomatic history’, and cultural networks in Britain and Europe'. It will be publicly available from this link from the 15th of February 2021 onwards. It looks to have new research on Mitchell's early life, and focuses on the relationship he forged with Friedrich in his role as a diplomat. Some quick excerpts, but see the whole introduction via the link:
"This thesis examines the career of British diplomat Andrew Mitchell (1708-1771) in the context of ‘new diplomatic history’.(...) It is interested in the lives of diplomats outside of signing treaties, attending conferences, and paying court to rulers and kings. Therefore, this thesis utilises Mitchell’s cultural pursuits – defined as his interests in science and literature – to place new emphasis on his political career in London, and his diplomatic mission to Prussia from 1756-1771. The key aim of the thesis is to argue that Mitchell’s diplomatic mission was predominantly carried out as a form of cultural diplomacy, in which Mitchell forged strong links with Prussia’s ruler, Frederick II (the Great) through their shared intellectual and cultural interests.(...) Chapters 2 and 3 provide both new research and evidence on Mitchell’s early life and greater context for the argument that Mitchell carried out cultural diplomacy."

Upcoming PHD thesis focussed on FW as a father:

This German-language PHD thesis which alternatively goes under the titles '"Terrible man" and "Dear Papa": Friedrich Wilhelm as a father' or 'When is a man a man? Drafts of masculinity by Friedrich Wilhelm' has been worked on by Sören Schlueter since at least 2017. It focuses on the relationships between FW and all of his children, and definitely looks to be the most in-depth research done into this topic. Schlueter gave a short lecture back in April 2017 on the relationships FW had with his youngest children and the roles he ascribed to them, which was later adapted into the chapter 'From "nuns" and "cadets". On the father role of Friedrich Wilhelm I' in the 2020 scholarly book Mehr als nur Soldatenkönig. (Sidenote: there's no eBook version of this so I couldn't check out the chapter rip) I have no idea when this PHD will be completed, but it's something to keep on the radar.

Upcoming book about FW:
Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, who released the recent and extremely long German-language biography of Maria Theresa in 2017, has since been working on a book about FW titled Cruelty, Discipline and Despair: Friedrich Wilhelm I and the Prussian Myth. It focuses on how FW was perceived by his contemporaries and how perception of his rule and behaviour changed in the subsequent centuries as the darker aspects of his character were played down. The author very recently (three weeks ago) made a 5 minute English-language video talking about her book. I assume it will come out in 2021.

Upcoming book based on a PHD thesis on Friedrich and Catherine's relationships with philosophers:

This 2019 PHD thesis by Shi Ru Lim entitled 'Philosophical Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Frederick II, Catherine II, and the philosophes' looks to "revise existing pictures of the power dynamics between eighteenth-century Europe’s intellectual and political elites". She is currently revising it to publish as a book.
"This thesis offers a re-reading of the intellectual and historical significance of the relationships that Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia maintained with a number of leading French philosophes. It makes four overarching points. Firstly, these long-standing relationships were more than assertions of ‘soft power’ and vehicles by which rulers and philosophers cultivated their celebrity and posthumous glory. They were also sites of intellectual contestation, where all participants engaged seriously with contemporary ideas. Secondly, the philosophes exercised considerable power and enjoyed remarkable success in persuading Frederick and Catherine of the value of their philosophic causes and agendas. Thirdly, their exchanges and their contexts show that these causes and agendas were firmly rooted in the philosophes’ political thinking, and revolved around determining the terms of the relationship between philosophy and government. Fourthly, the most important aspects of Frederick and Catherine’s relationships with the philosophes—the correspondence and other negotiations that undergirded them—all took place in a space between, yet inadequately captured by conventional conceptions of the public and the private."

This looks like it will be a nice companion to Avi Lifschitz's first modern English edition of Friedrich's philosophical writings available this December.

Current or past sources:

Prussian Secret State Archives
About Lieutenant von der Groeben:
I noticed that in Tim Blanning's Fritz biography, he mentions some 'unpublished letters to a Lieutenant von der Groeben(...) [which] indicate that he continued to maintain intimate relations with young officers of his regiment'. In Frank Göse's newly released Friedrich Wilhelm biography he also mentions these letters but gives a few more details: "In any case, letters to a young lieutenant von der Groeben from the mid-1730s contain unambiguous - all the way down to anatomical details - allusions to a homoerotic relationship." He doesn't quote from the letters but gives their exact location in the archives. [GStA PK, BPH, Rep. 47, J, Nr. 371, unpag.] I finally figured out how to search on the online archives and came up with this page. While none of the letters here are 'page 371', all of them are for Hans Heinrich von der Gröben in 1734 and some of the numbers are around 371. I suppose the only way to see number 371 would be to pay 15 euros for it to be digitised and have the image to download, which I would do, but I'm not German and I don't understand the form.

Another interesting part of the archives I found is here. According to the database, BPH, Rep. 47, Nr. 644 is:
"Court affairs, personalities, embezzlement of Glazow, news from the king and the army
Contains:
- Correspondence of Chamberlain Fredersdorf with Chamberlain Leining, Secretary Gentze, Chamberlain Glasow, Chamberlain Anderson as well as with Baron v. Trackenberg, b. from Kameke (widow)

Leining was the successor to Fredersdorf's 'secret chamberlain' position. I know we've spoken about Glasow and the Fredersdorf embezzlement situation a lot, but to be honest, I can't remember what the different stories were. I'm not sure if you all have looked through this overview published in 2018 using information from the archives in the Fritz box bill project here, but if you haven't, that looks to be the most reliable source. It says that Glasow copied Fredersdorf's wax seal and used it mark invoices...? My German isn't good enough to understand, haha.

There are more current books and papers that I need to link to, but I'll leave it here for now since I need to do some work. Part 2 will be on Sunday probably!

Edited Date: 2020-10-26 07:12 pm (UTC)

From:

felis

Guys, forgive me if this is old news, but I got the book version of "Solange wir zu zweit sind" today, the Fritz/Wilhelmine letter compilation that

selenak mentioned the audio version of in her write-up of their correspondence, and it contains this new-to-me Pesne painting of what the editors say is Biche:

(This really looks like a clipping from a bigger painting, and possibly like a photo of a lost one at that, but since the only source given is "archives of the editors" I have no idea which one that might be, or which year it was painted.)

From:

selenak

So, I'browsing through the memoirs of the Princess Dashkova because reasons, and what do I find but the following passage. Context: our memoir writer is the younger sister of (P)Russian Pete's mistress, Elisabeth Woronzowa, but also a friend of his wife Catherine, and will take an important part in the coup against (P)Russian Pete, with the result of her father and brother not talking to her for years. (Since they thought her sister had a genuine shot at beoming Czarina, if, that is, Peter divorced Catherine. Since Peter I. had done just this with his first wife, it certainly wouldn't have been unprecedented.)

Anyway, Dashkova talking, "he" is Peter, at this point still Grandduke, but his aunt is in ill health: He astonished me with a remark very characteristic of the simplicity of his head and of the goodness of his heart, but which, bye the bye, was expressed with so much more point than was found in the usual tenor of his conversation, that I never ceased to wonder, until I chanced to discover the person who had adroitly inserted it in to his brain for the occasion.
"My child," said he, "you would do well to recollect that it is much safer to deal with honest blockheads, like your sister and myself, than with great wits who squeeze the juice out of the orange, and then throw away the rind."
I affected neither to understand the import nor the application of his words, and merely reminded him, in reply, how distinctly his aunt, the empress, had signified her wishes that we should play no less attention to the grand duchess as to his imperial highness. Here I must take an opportunity of rendering justice to my sister the Countess Elizabeth, who sufficiently understood our differences of character never to expect those attentions from me which her situation procued her from the rest of the court.

Well! On the one hand, it would be just like (P)Russian Pete the fanboy to learn a Fritz quote by heart and use it in conversation, which would indicate that by the early 1760s, which is when this conversation takes place, the story of Fritz having said this about Voltaire was making the rounds through Europe and beyond. This would predate the publication of Voltaire's memoirs and is of course completly independent from his rewriting of his letters to Madame Denis. Which would argue that at least the rumor of Fritz having said this was nothing something Voltaire had to invent from the letters and the memoirs.

On the other hand: Princess Dashkova does not write this story down when it happened, she recounts it decades later when Catherine, Voltaire, Fritz et al are already dead. By which time, of course, Voltaire's memoirs were published, and being an eager reader of Voltaire (who met him later and felt let down by Denis being "an ordinary woman, and this the niece of Voltaire!"), she certainly must have read them.

Which means the answer as to whether Peter actually said this to a young Dashkova, thereby using a quip attributed to his hero, is... maybe?

From:

selenak

Speaking of doctoral thesis(es), considering we’ll have a month of complete lockdown in November, it’s a good thing I raided Stabi these last weeks for books. Among these was a thesis on Heinrich’s development as a military leader from 2000 by one Bernhard Mundt. Now, Ziebura’s Heinrich bio was published in 1999, and since he mostly quotes from the Chester Easum bio from the 1940s, I first thought he hadn’t read it, but no, turns out he did. The majority of the thesis is about military stuff, mind, but he does do a relatively thorough “his life so far” before we get to the war. (This includes among other things a rather adorable letter to kid Ferdinand in German and French both.) And the chapter on Heinrich’s marriage, a footnote to which is the only place Ziebura’s biography is mentioned, would do all those 19th and 20th century historians on Fritz proud, though to be fair, Mundt is equal minded in his denial. We get this, slightly paraphrased and summarized:

“So, at this point Fritz thought it would be good for Heinrich’s character if he settled down and married. (See letter to Wilhelmine about this.) I know SOME PEOPLE have claimed Heinrich felt pressured into the marriage, but I disagree. The only evidence for this are some cryptic hints in Lehndorff’s journal. I’m not claiming Heinrich was in love with Mina, mind, just that he saw marrying her just as Fritz saw marrying EC, as his ticket to more personal freedom and a better budget. Which was a good thing to him! Ergo, he didn’t feel pressured by Fritz.
Now, Pangels claims Heinrich didn’t love Mina because he had an affair with Countess Bentinck. I don’t think so, having read Bentinck’s letters. Ziebura, otoh, claims Heinrich was gay, by TOTALLY MISINTERPRETING the emo style of the Rokoko. There is no proof for Heinrich’s supposed gayness other than some letters that feel to us gay, but aren’t, they are just Rokoko emo. Lehndorff’s diaries, you say? I’m only footnoting volume 1, though am also mentioning dozens of references to Lehndorff in Heinrich’s unpublished letters to Ferdinand in the Prussian State Archive, so sure, he was a friend. An utterly platonic one with an emo diary style.That’s all. In conclusion: there is no more evidence that Heinrich was gay than that he had sex with Bentinck. Not gay, do you hear me?”

And this is Mundt on the brothers: “Evidently, being raised together formed a close bond between Ferdinand and Heinrich, and AW and Heinrich. This is the only explanation as to why he kept being close to Ferdinand for all their lives, despite it being more and more evident Ferdinand was a mediocre loser once they were grown up. As for AW, evidently the fact that AW was kind to him when they were kids and that he tried to mediate in the first few conflicts with Fritz blinded Heinrich to AW’s serious character flaws, namely, his passivity and phlegma, culminating in Heinrich blaming Fritz instead of AW for the big bust up. Granted, Fritz had flaws, too, but he wasn’t the one at fault in this situation, and if Heinrich wasn’t so regrettably biased in AW’s favor, he’d have seen it. I mean, there are no letters where Heinrich critisizes AW - why? Why not? This is a constant source of frustration to me, reader, because I do so wish Heinrich had been into Fritz as his fave instead of those two losers.”

And now for a not paraphrased but literal quote of how Mundt describes a certain letter. “Friedrich tried to relate the sad news to Heinrich as sensitively and delicately as possible.” (Very selected quotes follow.)

That sure is... one interpretation. I mean, Mundt, I ship Heinrich/Fritz, too, but you’re the type of shipper who rerwrites the characters into some weird bland versions in order to make it happen, and just, no.

(Incidentally, the letter of doom was thankfully not how Heinrich found out about AW’s death. It’s dated way too late for that. At this point, Heinrich had already fired off his first seething letter to Ferdinand on the topic. As far as I know, he, like Fritz himself, got the news directly from Amalie.)

One last Mundt masterpiece: When relating of how Heinrich during his January 1759 trip to Berlin kept hanging out with Amalie all the time, and also visited Louise and AW’s kids repeatedly, but avoided Mina as much as he could (though she did get an expensive new year’s present, which I hadn’t known before): “It cannot be denied that the spouses were no longer close”.

I dare say, Mundt. I dare say.

Edited Date: 2020-10-28 08:39 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Finished Krockow yesterday, moving on to Horowski (but mostly Yuletide fic :P).

* Remember how the Hohenzollerns are Calvinists while the majority of their subjects are Lutherans? Krockow tells me how this came to pass:

The Hohenzollerns, however, were no longer Lutherans since 1613, but Calvinists. There were extremely earthly reasons for this change of faith; in the inheritance dispute over areas on the Lower Rhine, Elector Johann Sigismund wanted to win the House of Orange as an ally. The opposing party, also Lutheran, became Catholic to get the emperor on their side.

In case you thought that was about principle, or anything.

FW: But Luther was right about predestination!

* Speaking of FW, another chaaaarming quote from him:

Later, during Friedrich's imprisonment in Küstrin, when it was said that the Crown Prince was ill and might die, the King remarked coldly: "As it is predestined, will everything go; if there were anything good about him, he would die, but I am certain that he will not die, because weeds don't die."

Quoted for A+ parenting, but also, "Wie es prädestiniert ist, wird alles gehen." Okay, FW!

Unrelated: ZOMG I don't care when he met Fredersdorf, I need a hurt/comfort where Fritz is sick at Küstrin and might die and Fredersdorf is *there* for him. <33

* I hadn't realized this, but after East Prussia surrendered to Russia in the Seven Years' War and paid homage to Elizaveta, Fritz held a grudge and refused to go there ever again, for as long as he lived. This was so surprising that I went and checked out my fanvid (I love that works as a reference!), and sure enough! His political and personal correspondence on Trier have no record of him going to East Prussia. Only West Prussia after the acquisition.

* This one's for

cahn, who will understand why I find this funny. Krockow's talking about Prussian cost-cutting when building palaces (apparently, the parquet floor at Rheinsberg was originally plain wood!), and he said, "There was talk of a marble hall, but actually, it was the reverse: imitations were slapped on."

Paper and duct tape! (My previous landlord was clearly a good Prussian.)

* Krockow also points out that Rheinsberg was under renovation the entire time Fritz lived there (remember, the "Fritz as rising son" ceiling design FW wasn't supposed to see wasn't finished until 1740), which means all the intellectual and artistic activity was taking place in a noisy environment.

My first thought was: considering all the anecdotes I hear about Fritz having to hold concerts in the woods and in vaults/caves to escape his father's spies, the noise probably helped with his stealth flute practice! (Now that Katte wasn't there to stand guard. :()

* Heinrich was at Mollwitz? I'd forgotten that.

* My command of German nuance isn't good enough to tell if Krockow is being tongue-in-cheek when he says it can't be doubted that ghosts exist at Rheinsberg and enumerates examples. I love a good Rheinsberg ghost story as much as the next person, but ghosts aren't real, people!

* Keyserlingk: Frederick perceived his appearance as "the sun breaking through the frosty winter fog." So Fritz used this metaphor of at least one of his friends! Total support for my "Diaphane" headcanon (which I haven't encountered anywhere else). :D

* Krockow cites the anecdote that Fritz tried to wean himself from sleep, which his body responded to with colic and cramps. I assume this had to do with excessive consumption of coffee. I wish he'd cite a source!

* "historical argument"

Yep, that's the entire note I left in my file as I was reading this. I have no idea anymore what I meant to talk about with this one. Curse you, past self! (In my past self's defense, I was typing on my phone with a bluetooth mouse, no easy task.)

* Krockow believes in the "she cried but she took" quote from Fritz about MT.

* Oh,

cahn, I thought of you immediately. One of our sources for Heinrich's trip to Paris is someone he met there who says that although he was a mediocre violin player, he never missed a chance to practice, and was never intimidated by the presence of virtuosos from performing and never turned down an invitation to perform. That's an interesting piece of characterization!

* Heinrich initially planned to spend the rest of his life in Paris, and even after the French Revolution broke out, he would gladly have stayed and watched, but friends talked him into leaving, thus forcing him back into frustrated retirement in Prussia. :/

* Amalie/Trenck probably belongs to the stuff of legend, but the suspicion was evidently enough to accuse Trenck of high treason and to persecute him relentlessly. Friedrich had him illegally arrested abroad and chained in inhumane conditions for almost a decade. Only an intercession from Maria Theresa saved the unfortunate. Amalie is said to have tried to poison herself and, as a contemporary witness writes, became terribly ugly about it.

Somebody hasn't read Volz. Also, Amalie trying to poison herself: I missed that. I'm not seeing it in either of our

rheinsberg entries. Seems suspect.

* Krockow reminds me of the existence of Blaineville, Heinrich boyfriend who committed suicide, and about whom we know very little except that he was an actor. Quoting

selenak previous comments as a reminder:

The actor Blainville, a particular favourite of the Prince's, committed suicide after an intrigue of his colleagues had managed to temporarily remove his lord's favour from him. The Prince supposedly never got over this loss. (I don't recall Ziebura's Heinrich biography having much more on Blainville, presumably because Lehndorff doesn't even mention him. Maybe Blainville came to the scene after the printed diaries end, i.e. post Lehndorff's resignation as chamberlain, or maybe he simply didn't register much with Lehndorff.) Note that none of the other boyfriends get accused, even implicitly, of murdering Blainville! (I really can't wait to find out whether Hahn gave Blanning any reason for this.)

Heinrich employed a troupe of players [at Rheinsberg] - till the end of his life - which in the last fifteen years of same was the sole remaining ensemble of French players regularly performing in any German state. He often was on stage as well, and basically was a producer/director once Blainville had committed suicide (Blainville was the director before that time).

Incidentally, also worth exploring: Heinrich's actors at Rheinsberg. There's the tragic one, Blainville, who committed suicide, true, but most seem to have been glad to have found a place to stay, especially when less and less people in Germany wanted to see French plays in French, and going back to revolutionary France wasn't really an option for most of them.

Edited Date: 2020-10-30 04:02 am (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Practicing German today instead of participating in salon, but pausing briefly to share the following episode reported by Horowski:

It's January 1733, so Christmas 1732 has just happened, Wilhelmine is in Berlin, Fritz is in Ruppin, Fritz is engaged but not yet married, and it's Carneval season.

So what does Fritz dress up as, as an act of silent protest against his upcoming wedding, in his Ruppin Carneval festival?

A widow.

You couldn't make these people up.

(No specific source given, but sources given in this passage have been letters between Fritz and Wilhelmine, so it might be one of those.)

And yes, Witwe, not Witwer. In addition to the normal penchant for crossdressing during festivals like these, I assume the mourning attire for women was more elaborate?

Edited Date: 2020-10-30 11:32 pm (UTC)