I'm going chronologically, therefore a look at the correspondence with the husband first. There are 43 letters at Trier (42 from Fritz, 1 from Camas), dated from June 1734 to March 1740.
The early ones are mostly short and deal with military recruitments (a topic that keeps coming back throughout the years), except for this postscript to the very first one: I will finally depart on Thursday and leave this unfortunate land [to join the military campaign against France]. It seems to me that since you are no longer here with Madame, we are missing someone in the house; and it occurred to me more than once to want to invite Madame de Camas. You see by this that you are not forgotten. Your health has been drunk to here, and I drank to it with all my heart.
Fritz reports from the 1734 campaign, casting himself as the eager student of military matters and humble manners - You see by that, my dear Camas, how much I pay attention to your lessons; after practicing them, they can make me deserve the praise you give me. - and in later years, there's some talk about siege and salary plans, plus reactions to promotions and reviews on both sides. In short, quite a bit of shop talk, which illustrates that Camas was an experienced military man. (According to wiki, he came from a Huguenot family and joined the Prussian army at age 13. As mentioned, he lost his arm at age 18 (during the War of the Spanish Succession), got a prosthesis and kept rising through the ranks until he died in 1741 (of fever). During this correspondence, he was stationed at Frankfurt (Oder).)
As of this Ruppin letter from December 1735, Fritz starts talking more about non-military things as well, and gets creative with his metaphors: You know that my occupations are only fixed to three objects, namely, the service, reading, and music. This is what alternately keeps me throughout the day, except for two hours which must be given both to dinner and to digestion. [...] It is a foreshadowing of death to me when a hussar comes to bring me the order to leave. Do not cry out, I beg you, at this comparison; I will demonstrate it to you just in every way. Death is, according to what theologians say, a separation of the soul from the body, and a general abandonment of all our honours, our goods, our fortune, and our friends. Freedom is my soul; I see myself more honored here than in other places; I have friends that I only see here. So the comparison is fair; and to push it even more, my return conforms to the dogma of the rehabilitation of all things, and between [my return] and my departure, I appear before the tribunal of a judge ready to condemn us and unwilling to absolve us.
Not the last time he'll compare FW to a (vengeful) God in these letters. Nonetheless, he has to leave for Berlin and that's where, only two weeks later, he writes about the mystery affliction, quoted and discussed above.
FW is a frequent topic in general, as Fritz very openly reports ups and downs (which I was roughly familiar with through the Wilhelmine correspondence), whereas friends and other family members get basically no mentions.
Forced hunting excursion in December 1736: The devil, who never sleeps, has put an end to the hunting of wild boars; he gave the master a cold, which confused all the designs of the planned murders. However, I had a commission to kill nearly two hundred of these miserable boars. I acquitted myself of it as a not very cruel person; taking pity on their sufferings, I shortened their martyrdom as much as I could. I confess to you that I do not feel any inclination for hunting; this passion is precisely the opposite of mine.
Interesting detail from December 1737 - Camas was a guest at Wusterhausen and Fritz thinks it would have been a bad idea to write to him there: It is a mark of caution in a young man not to blindly follow his inclinations, and to know how to restrain his inclinations when he foresees that the consequences they draw after them might be detrimental to someone. It was by such prudence that I refrained from writing to you during your stay at Wusterhausen. I feared that our correspondence might have augured badly; moreover, it seemed to me that you would be sufficiently occupied over there with the attentions you owe the King, with the hunts, with the tobacco parliaments, with the dissipations from the neighborhood, etc., that my letters would only steal whatever little time you had left. I know how to impose silence on myself, and I am currently enjoying the pleasure of breaking it.
[That said, when Camas is there again almost a year later, he gets a "stop inventing eloquent excuses for your laziness and write more often" letter afterwards, clearly in jest, but Fritz still makes sure to tell him it was a joke in the next one.]
Familiar FW whiplash a year later (which I'd encountered before, see #7), where he goes from
I feel the feelings of filial love redouble in me when I see feelings so reasonable and so just in the author of my days. (December 1738)
to this state of things in January 1739:
All these beautiful appearances of grace, benevolence and gentleness have disappeared like a dream. The King's temper was so soured, and his hatred against me manifested itself in so many different forms, that if I had not been what I am, I would have asked for my leave a long time ago; and I would like a thousand times better to beg my bread honorably elsewhere than to feed myself on the sorrows that I must devour here. The relentlessness of the King to denounce me secretly and in public is no longer something that is whispered to each other; it is the talk of the city, everyone witnesses it, and everyone talks about it; and what is most curious is that I still do not know my crime, if not that of being his heir apparent. [...]
The prognosis I made for myself is unfortunate, but true; I should never expect to be able to live in peace with a father who is easy to irritate, and who is filled with fatal impressions. I must see him as my most cruel enemy, who spies on me constantly to find the moment when he thinks he can give me the blow of jarnac [an unexpected blow from behind]. You have to be on your guard without slacking off; the slightest misstep, the slightest imprudence, a trifle, a nothing magnified and amplified, will suffice for my condemnation.
Another year later, December 1739, it's a mixed bag: We are amphibians of joy and sadness here; on the one hand we have parties to entertain my sister [Charlotte just came to visit], and on the other we pity the King for the uncertain and failing state of his health. You can, my dear friend, roughly imagine the situation in which we are; however, it is a hundred pikes preferable to that of last year, which was desperate. I will hardly be able to send you news from here, except that the old etiquette is observed regularly, that it has been terribly cold here, that we dance a lot, that we speak even more, and that the we laugh and cry in turn. We have two new envoys here, Rudenskjöld and Valori. The first is a witty, clever man who has a lot of knowledge and world. The second is a fool, very coarse, and so deeply absorbed by the salacious, that the man of quality is totally lost in it; [...]
Onto happier content, there are a few gift-related letters, mostly food from Camas and wine and glassware from Fritz. In January 1737 for example, Fritz writes a note to thank Camas for sending him cheese, adding: You get too favorable an idea of my poor solitude; we are more in a convent than in the world. Philosophy, however, does not make us more austere than necessary, as you have guessed very well. A thousand compliments to Madame. (By the way, greetings to Madame are a very common occurrence.)
And this one from February 1738 made me smile, even with the chronic debt problems in the background: My dear Camas, I give you a thousand thanks for the cheeses, the pears, and everything that you took pleasure to send me. Your memory is dearer to me than all the treasures that could be given to me, and even if your letters were accompanied only by a sprig of straw, that very straw would please me if it came from you. Do not think that I appreciate the marks of friendship according to their value or their weight in gold; far from it, I can assure you that the love of poverty was never to such a high degree among the Romans as it is with me. Mark of that: I don't have a dime in the whole house, nor in my power. [...]
Lots of "wish you were here" variations as well, and when Camas visits Rheinsberg in June 1738, this is the result: I must have struck you as an intruder, and perhaps even an annoyance, the whole time you have been here. I hounded you, I persecuted you to possess you for a few moments, and this, sometimes, when you needed rest. I confess my wrong to you, and I admit it; however, in order not to deny this unfortunate character, I will sustain it until the moment of your departure.
Lovely take on his quiet Rheinsberg life, October 1738 (if, as always, struggle with the Stoics): I'm not sure, to tell the truth, what the weather is like here. The sphere of my activity extends only from my home to my library: the trip is not long, and there is no time to feel the weather on the way. As for hunting, there is a whole coterie here that hunts for me, and I study for them; there is something for everyone, and no one is hindered in their entertainment. We politicize little, talk less, and think a lot. It is not a question here of the Greek, Turkish, or Christian emperor; it is the contentment of mind and peace of soul which I try, with my little convent, to cement as best as we can. If we succeed, that is the criterion. At least we work on it, although, to tell the truth, the impassibility of the Stoics seems to me to be in morality what the Philosopher's Stone is in chemistry and the squaring of the circle in mathematics: it is the chimerical idea of a perfection or a tranquility that we cannot achieve.
Also in 1738: Voltaire gossip. Someone not Fritz is writing to him and Fritz has to know everything, because reasons: [...] remember, please, that you promised me a certain letter from a person whose good wit had in some way obscured common sense; I will not misuse it; it will only be to satisfy my curiosity, and to give me a little sermon on the foolishness that self-love can make same-minded people commit. The ridicule of others makes me tremble for myself, and I do not hear of any extravagance that, by looking back on myself, I do not fear being at risk of committing as well. [...] I would say much more if I did not fear to abuse your patience; I therefore expect from you all the correspondence of our heroine Don Quixote of the good wit, and the answers of Voltaire, if he does [answer], which can only be entertaining.
He gets the letter from Camas - unintelligible epistle of our very obscure beautiful mind [...], a masterpiece of extravagance - and a couple of months later has this to report: I had my spies on the campaign to find out the answer that the Solomon of Cirey gave the queens of Northern Saba [Madame Louise von Brandt and Madame de Wr...]. I learned that it was a very didactic reasoning on how to suppress and overcome passions. It is left to know if it was to the taste of our heroines in fine spirits; it's up to you to judge.
In August 1739, Camas gets sick and Fritz worries: The second piece of news, which distresses me, which worries me, which alarms me, is the gout with which you are said to be tormented; I admit that I trembled at the mere thought of seeing such a brave officer become an invalid, such an honest man, such an experienced soldier, who, for having lost one of his limbs for the country, seems to deserve that human infirmities respect those whom he saved from a thousand dangers and a hundred battles. Your letter reassures me in some way, if it is not the effect of one of those generous efforts of friendship which puts aside pain and what can disturb common souls. I still fear for you, my dear Camas, and I reproach you for not having said two words to me about your health, which is dear to me, in a letter of four pages. You may think that I think only of myself, and that, intoxicated with my happiness [the first piece of news = FW just gifted him the Prussian stud farms at Trakehnen], I count my friends for nothing. Disillusion yourself, I beg you; no, I will never be indifferent to those with whom I am bound by the sacred knots of friendship. [...]
I'd love to include the four-page letter from Camas, or any letter from Camas, but I'm pretty sure Preuss edited even the single one that's available, only leaving a couple of lines of praise for the "Ode on Flattery" (written in the wake of a conversation they had about the topic), which is both ironic and not very interesting.
The final 1740 letters are short notes Fritz seems to have written while they were both in Berlin, sending some of his verses back and forth. For some reason, I found them oddly charming. The last one: My dear Camas, by asking you to lend me for a few moments the tale of the doctor which I gave you [a satire inspired by Superville], I will pay you the interest in advance through two Epistles. If I told you that the weather is fine outside, and that the walk is charming, you would be outraged; but telling you that I esteem you with all my heart cannot, I hope, be disagreeable to you. These are the feelings with which, in wishing you good night, I am all yours. Farewell. Federic
Finally, once he became king, he sent Camas on a diplomatic mission to Paris and while there are a couple of letters in the Political Correspondence from that time, they all contain only official politics, largely written by secretaries, and nothing personal. Camas did meet Voltaire, though, who gets the last word here, from a letter he wrote to Fritz in September: If kings are the images of the gods, and the ambassadors the images of kings, it follows, Sire, by Wolff's fourth theorem, that the gods are chubby, and have a very agreeable physiognomy. Blessed is this M. de Camas, not so much because he represents Your Majesty but because he will see you again!
Re: Camas Letters I - Colonel Camas (1734-1740)
The early ones are mostly short and deal with military recruitments (a topic that keeps coming back throughout the years), except for this postscript to the very first one: I will finally depart on Thursday and leave this unfortunate land [to join the military campaign against France]. It seems to me that since you are no longer here with Madame, we are missing someone in the house; and it occurred to me more than once to want to invite Madame de Camas. You see by this that you are not forgotten. Your health has been drunk to here, and I drank to it with all my heart.
Fritz reports from the 1734 campaign, casting himself as the eager student of military matters and humble manners - You see by that, my dear Camas, how much I pay attention to your lessons; after practicing them, they can make me deserve the praise you give me. - and in later years, there's some talk about siege and salary plans, plus reactions to promotions and reviews on both sides. In short, quite a bit of shop talk, which illustrates that Camas was an experienced military man. (According to wiki, he came from a Huguenot family and joined the Prussian army at age 13. As mentioned, he lost his arm at age 18 (during the War of the Spanish Succession), got a prosthesis and kept rising through the ranks until he died in 1741 (of fever). During this correspondence, he was stationed at Frankfurt (Oder).)
As of this Ruppin letter from December 1735, Fritz starts talking more about non-military things as well, and gets creative with his metaphors:
You know that my occupations are only fixed to three objects, namely, the service, reading, and music. This is what alternately keeps me throughout the day, except for two hours which must be given both to dinner and to digestion.
[...] It is a foreshadowing of death to me when a hussar comes to bring me the order to leave. Do not cry out, I beg you, at this comparison; I will demonstrate it to you just in every way. Death is, according to what theologians say, a separation of the soul from the body, and a general abandonment of all our honours, our goods, our fortune, and our friends. Freedom is my soul; I see myself more honored here than in other places; I have friends that I only see here. So the comparison is fair; and to push it even more, my return conforms to the dogma of the rehabilitation of all things, and between [my return] and my departure, I appear before the tribunal of a judge ready to condemn us and unwilling to absolve us.
Not the last time he'll compare FW to a (vengeful) God in these letters. Nonetheless, he has to leave for Berlin and that's where, only two weeks later, he writes about the mystery affliction, quoted and discussed above.
FW is a frequent topic in general, as Fritz very openly reports ups and downs (which I was roughly familiar with through the Wilhelmine correspondence), whereas friends and other family members get basically no mentions.
Forced hunting excursion in December 1736: The devil, who never sleeps, has put an end to the hunting of wild boars; he gave the master a cold, which confused all the designs of the planned murders. However, I had a commission to kill nearly two hundred of these miserable boars. I acquitted myself of it as a not very cruel person; taking pity on their sufferings, I shortened their martyrdom as much as I could. I confess to you that I do not feel any inclination for hunting; this passion is precisely the opposite of mine.
Interesting detail from December 1737 - Camas was a guest at Wusterhausen and Fritz thinks it would have been a bad idea to write to him there: It is a mark of caution in a young man not to blindly follow his inclinations, and to know how to restrain his inclinations when he foresees that the consequences they draw after them might be detrimental to someone. It was by such prudence that I refrained from writing to you during your stay at Wusterhausen. I feared that our correspondence might have augured badly; moreover, it seemed to me that you would be sufficiently occupied over there with the attentions you owe the King, with the hunts, with the tobacco parliaments, with the dissipations from the neighborhood, etc., that my letters would only steal whatever little time you had left. I know how to impose silence on myself, and I am currently enjoying the pleasure of breaking it.
[That said, when Camas is there again almost a year later, he gets a "stop inventing eloquent excuses for your laziness and write more often" letter afterwards, clearly in jest, but Fritz still makes sure to tell him it was a joke in the next one.]
Familiar FW whiplash a year later (which I'd encountered before, see #7), where he goes from
I feel the feelings of filial love redouble in me when I see feelings so reasonable and so just in the author of my days. (December 1738)
to this state of things in January 1739:
All these beautiful appearances of grace, benevolence and gentleness have disappeared like a dream. The King's temper was so soured, and his hatred against me manifested itself in so many different forms, that if I had not been what I am, I would have asked for my leave a long time ago; and I would like a thousand times better to beg my bread honorably elsewhere than to feed myself on the sorrows that I must devour here. The relentlessness of the King to denounce me secretly and in public is no longer something that is whispered to each other; it is the talk of the city, everyone witnesses it, and everyone talks about it; and what is most curious is that I still do not know my crime, if not that of being his heir apparent. [...]
The prognosis I made for myself is unfortunate, but true; I should never expect to be able to live in peace with a father who is easy to irritate, and who is filled with fatal impressions. I must see him as my most cruel enemy, who spies on me constantly to find the moment when he thinks he can give me the blow of jarnac [an unexpected blow from behind]. You have to be on your guard without slacking off; the slightest misstep, the slightest imprudence, a trifle, a nothing magnified and amplified, will suffice for my condemnation.
Another year later, December 1739, it's a mixed bag: We are amphibians of joy and sadness here; on the one hand we have parties to entertain my sister [Charlotte just came to visit], and on the other we pity the King for the uncertain and failing state of his health. You can, my dear friend, roughly imagine the situation in which we are; however, it is a hundred pikes preferable to that of last year, which was desperate. I will hardly be able to send you news from here, except that the old etiquette is observed regularly, that it has been terribly cold here, that we dance a lot, that we speak even more, and that the we laugh and cry in turn. We have two new envoys here, Rudenskjöld and Valori. The first is a witty, clever man who has a lot of knowledge and world. The second is a fool, very coarse, and so deeply absorbed by the salacious, that the man of quality is totally lost in it; [...]
Onto happier content, there are a few gift-related letters, mostly food from Camas and wine and glassware from Fritz. In January 1737 for example, Fritz writes a note to thank Camas for sending him cheese, adding: You get too favorable an idea of my poor solitude; we are more in a convent than in the world. Philosophy, however, does not make us more austere than necessary, as you have guessed very well. A thousand compliments to Madame. (By the way, greetings to Madame are a very common occurrence.)
And this one from February 1738 made me smile, even with the chronic debt problems in the background: My dear Camas, I give you a thousand thanks for the cheeses, the pears, and everything that you took pleasure to send me. Your memory is dearer to me than all the treasures that could be given to me, and even if your letters were accompanied only by a sprig of straw, that very straw would please me if it came from you. Do not think that I appreciate the marks of friendship according to their value or their weight in gold; far from it, I can assure you that the love of poverty was never to such a high degree among the Romans as it is with me. Mark of that: I don't have a dime in the whole house, nor in my power. [...]
Lots of "wish you were here" variations as well, and when Camas visits Rheinsberg in June 1738, this is the result: I must have struck you as an intruder, and perhaps even an annoyance, the whole time you have been here. I hounded you, I persecuted you to possess you for a few moments, and this, sometimes, when you needed rest. I confess my wrong to you, and I admit it; however, in order not to deny this unfortunate character, I will sustain it until the moment of your departure.
Lovely take on his quiet Rheinsberg life, October 1738 (if, as always, struggle with the Stoics): I'm not sure, to tell the truth, what the weather is like here. The sphere of my activity extends only from my home to my library: the trip is not long, and there is no time to feel the weather on the way. As for hunting, there is a whole coterie here that hunts for me, and I study for them; there is something for everyone, and no one is hindered in their entertainment. We politicize little, talk less, and think a lot. It is not a question here of the Greek, Turkish, or Christian emperor; it is the contentment of mind and peace of soul which I try, with my little convent, to cement as best as we can. If we succeed, that is the criterion. At least we work on it, although, to tell the truth, the impassibility of the Stoics seems to me to be in morality what the Philosopher's Stone is in chemistry and the squaring of the circle in mathematics: it is the chimerical idea of a perfection or a tranquility that we cannot achieve.
Also in 1738: Voltaire gossip. Someone not Fritz is writing to him and Fritz has to know everything, because reasons: [...] remember, please, that you promised me a certain letter from a person whose good wit had in some way obscured common sense; I will not misuse it; it will only be to satisfy my curiosity, and to give me a little sermon on the foolishness that self-love can make same-minded people commit. The ridicule of others makes me tremble for myself, and I do not hear of any extravagance that, by looking back on myself, I do not fear being at risk of committing as well. [...] I would say much more if I did not fear to abuse your patience; I therefore expect from you all the correspondence of our heroine Don Quixote of the good wit, and the answers of Voltaire, if he does [answer], which can only be entertaining.
He gets the letter from Camas - unintelligible epistle of our very obscure beautiful mind [...], a masterpiece of extravagance - and a couple of months later has this to report: I had my spies on the campaign to find out the answer that the Solomon of Cirey gave the queens of Northern Saba [Madame Louise von Brandt and Madame de Wr...]. I learned that it was a very didactic reasoning on how to suppress and overcome passions. It is left to know if it was to the taste of our heroines in fine spirits; it's up to you to judge.
In August 1739, Camas gets sick and Fritz worries: The second piece of news, which distresses me, which worries me, which alarms me, is the gout with which you are said to be tormented; I admit that I trembled at the mere thought of seeing such a brave officer become an invalid, such an honest man, such an experienced soldier, who, for having lost one of his limbs for the country, seems to deserve that human infirmities respect those whom he saved from a thousand dangers and a hundred battles. Your letter reassures me in some way, if it is not the effect of one of those generous efforts of friendship which puts aside pain and what can disturb common souls. I still fear for you, my dear Camas, and I reproach you for not having said two words to me about your health, which is dear to me, in a letter of four pages. You may think that I think only of myself, and that, intoxicated with my happiness [the first piece of news = FW just gifted him the Prussian stud farms at Trakehnen], I count my friends for nothing. Disillusion yourself, I beg you; no, I will never be indifferent to those with whom I am bound by the sacred knots of friendship. [...]
I'd love to include the four-page letter from Camas, or any letter from Camas, but I'm pretty sure Preuss edited even the single one that's available, only leaving a couple of lines of praise for the "Ode on Flattery" (written in the wake of a conversation they had about the topic), which is both ironic and not very interesting.
The final 1740 letters are short notes Fritz seems to have written while they were both in Berlin, sending some of his verses back and forth. For some reason, I found them oddly charming. The last one: My dear Camas, by asking you to lend me for a few moments the tale of the doctor which I gave you [a satire inspired by Superville], I will pay you the interest in advance through two Epistles. If I told you that the weather is fine outside, and that the walk is charming, you would be outraged; but telling you that I esteem you with all my heart cannot, I hope, be disagreeable to you. These are the feelings with which, in wishing you good night, I am all yours. Farewell. Federic
Finally, once he became king, he sent Camas on a diplomatic mission to Paris and while there are a couple of letters in the Political Correspondence from that time, they all contain only official politics, largely written by secretaries, and nothing personal. Camas did meet Voltaire, though, who gets the last word here, from a letter he wrote to Fritz in September: If kings are the images of the gods, and the ambassadors the images of kings, it follows, Sire, by Wolff's fourth theorem, that the gods are chubby, and have a very agreeable physiognomy. Blessed is this M. de Camas, not so much because he represents Your Majesty but because he will see you again!