Sabrow sees Gundling marrying Anne de Larray - who is the daughter of another historian (who lived in England for years) - in 1720 as Gundling managing to create something of a parallel world for himself to escape in. The wedding itself is one of the few time where he gets the better of his tormentors, who had prepared a laxative for him to drink on his wedding night so he wouldn't get off the loo. He evidently by now had seen something like this coming and thus avoided it happening by simply playing sick two days before and on short notice getting special permission to marry Anne in his bedroom, which meant they had the wedding, and the wedding without the awful society that would have awaited them if everything had gone as planned. How do we know this actually happened? Because in this case, not only do both Fassmann and Loen report it but the book of marriages of the French Community (Anne was a Huguenot from the French Colony) notes down as well that the marriage has been concluded "en chambre" before it was supposed to happen. The Berlin Address Book shows Gundling had his own house by how, and the court registers that those titles FW kept heaping on him actually came with salaries and money. And then there was that stupendous output on books during the 1720s, which are part of Sabrow's element that Gundling can't have been the non-stop alcoholic of legend. He says of course he drank, but doubts it was more than FW and Gumbkow did, not just because writing those books demands a great deal of focus and concentration (in addition to which Gundling actually did his job as Head of the Academy, as much as that was meant to be a humliation on FW's part, but he threw himself into it, initialilzing projects, publishing anthologies with essays from the members) , but also because Gundling had an autopsy. According to Wilhelmine's letter to her sister Friederike in April 1731, the autopsy showed Gundling died of "an ulcer and a hole in the stomach". Now, later 18th century writers interpreted that to mean he drank so much that his stomach burst, but that's scientific nonsense, says Sabrow. Perforation of he stomach usually happens if an ulcer isn't treated in time and eats its way through the various layers of the stomach. Basically, he thinks Gundling was undoubtedly a heavy drinker in our terms, but like FW himself (and Grumbkow, and Seckendorff) evidently not to a degree where it would have incapacitated him from working. Which he did, till the end. One of the projects he wrote about was btw something we'll see again later with Fritz and Fredersdorf - trying to foster a Brandenburg silk industry by growing mulberry trees in Brandenburg.
As I said elsewhere, he took that position that was supposed to be FW's ultimate joke on scholars seriously. Three days afterthe appointment, he called the Academy council together for a "session extraordinaire" as it says in the protocol in order to find out what had become of Leipniz' correspondence, and how far the translation projects of the society had come. Writes Sabrow: If Gundling was in Berlin - as opposed to Potsdam or Wusterhausen - he showed up regularly at the council sessions, not just in the first time of his presidency. That he didn't take his presidential duties seriously anymore after the beginning is a far spread assumption, but it doesn't hold up next to the careful protocols of the Academy Sessions: the last council session presided over by Gundling took place on August 16th 1730 and agreed on two suggestions the President made for new members of the Academy. The majority of the routine sessions did happen without the President, who came in person when the acceptance or refusal of new members were debated, or important decisions about projects were made. However, like his predecessor Leipniz he supervised the work of the society during the time of his absence via letters from Potsdam and Wusterhausen, letters through which he at times completely dominated the council sessions, aas an example from the year 1725 demonstrates: "Secretary reads from President Gundling's two writings of May 5th and May 7th in which the later talks about payment of the seal for the medical surgical college, for the building of the society courtyard, because of the changes of the handymen, because of the materials for the print of Neumann's work at Potsdam needed, and what the change of Mr. Schütz and the replacement of his position in the obervatory can be reported, and demands to know what of the above has been done, and replied do."
All this, of course, doesn't change the fact that to most people, the idea that the King's favourite chew toy now held of the office of the great Leipniz was, depending on whether they were more FW or more Fritz minded, either the ultimate joke on scholars or an unbearable humiliation of science and learning. There were still some scholars taking him seriously, but usually they were the ones living far from Prussia and only knowing Gundling via his books. To most, and certainly to all who joined the Academy in Fritz' time, he was FW's fool and joke on scholarship. And for all the times when he was treated like a guest, sitting at the King's table with his family, there were ten times when he was abused in the most horrible way. Including, sadly, his time of dying, as I wrote and translated before. But before that happened, something else did, which also forms a part of Sabrow's argument that Gundling was both compos mentis and at least partially successful in carving out an FW free parallel existence for himself: when his brother Hieronymous died in 1729, Hieronymus' last will named Gundling as the guardian for his children and executer of his last will. Now, Hieronymus, as mentioned, had been unhappily married and trying to get a separation from his wife Augusta, who supposedly openly cheated on him and was living in Berlin. Surely, asks Sabrow, if Jacob Paul in 1729 had been the non-stop drinker of legend, his brother - who had a great many friends and colleages in Halle whom he could have asked to become guardians -, would not have entrusted either the children nor the family fortune for safekeeping to him? Augusta (who had left her husband and children two years earlier which she could since she was the niece of one of the most influential Prussian trademen) sued, at which point her brother-in-law demonstrated that fool or not, he actually could wield what influence he had on FW in a devastating way in this one very personal matter. Augusta was arrested in November 1729 for loose living (remember FW's NO WHORES doctrine?) and put into Spandau. Gundling punching downward or just fuflfilling his brother's last will? You decide. In any event, Augusta remained in Spandau where she died a year after her brother-in-law.
Sabrow ends the biography with a pointed comparison of FW/Gundling to Fritz/Voltaire, complete with the quote from Fritz from November 1740 when he's haggling about Voltaire's travel expenses, along the lines of "rarely has a fool been paid so well", and a 1753 quote from Fritz where he again uses the term fool - "how much noise a fool can make in good society!" I partly agree and have written about some eerie parallels elsewhere, though of course a key difference between the two pairings is that Voltaire didn't need Fritz, not financially (because he had money himself), and not professionally. (That Gundling didn't have a "proper" university degree automatically limited the professional possiblities to him outside of Prussia even before FW destroyed his reputation.) This gave him a confidence that Gundling didn't have, and the ability to go tit for tat in the battle of pamphlets and insults. And as humiliating and frightening as the entire Frankfurt episode must have been, it was an episode, which Voltaire got out of to be Voltaire for decades more, his reputation unchanged. (I.e. if you admired him before, you admired him afterwards, and if you hated him before, well, you certainly didn't feel sorry now.) Moreover, no matter how often Fritz would rail about Voltaire being the scum of the earth as a human being, he never put down Voltaire's work, he kept his admiration for it from first to last. That's simply a different foundation than FW being at best impressed by the manfuctoring suggestions and maybe by Gundling's greater knowledge of the world (since he had travelled in foreign countries) and ability to read and interpret the world's news for him, but having nothing but contempt for the core of what was important to Gundling, his work as a scholar.
In conclusion: still a harrowing tale, and infuriating in that for such a long time, it was written off as mildly embarrassing to FW at best, not as the testimony to cruelty it is.
Martin Sabrow's Gundling Biography: II
As I said elsewhere, he took that position that was supposed to be FW's ultimate joke on scholars seriously. Three days afterthe appointment, he called the Academy council together for a "session extraordinaire" as it says in the protocol in order to find out what had become of Leipniz' correspondence, and how far the translation projects of the society had come. Writes Sabrow: If Gundling was in Berlin - as opposed to Potsdam or Wusterhausen - he showed up regularly at the council sessions, not just in the first time of his presidency. That he didn't take his presidential duties seriously anymore after the beginning is a far spread assumption, but it doesn't hold up next to the careful protocols of the Academy Sessions: the last council session presided over by Gundling took place on August 16th 1730 and agreed on two suggestions the President made for new members of the Academy. The majority of the routine sessions did happen without the President, who came in person when the acceptance or refusal of new members were debated, or important decisions about projects were made. However, like his predecessor Leipniz he supervised the work of the society during the time of his absence via letters from Potsdam and Wusterhausen, letters through which he at times completely dominated the council sessions, aas an example from the year 1725 demonstrates: "Secretary reads from President Gundling's two writings of May 5th and May 7th in which the later talks about payment of the seal for the medical surgical college, for the building of the society courtyard, because of the changes of the handymen, because of the materials for the print of Neumann's work at Potsdam needed, and what the change of Mr. Schütz and the replacement of his position in the obervatory can be reported, and demands to know what of the above has been done, and replied do."
All this, of course, doesn't change the fact that to most people, the idea that the King's favourite chew toy now held of the office of the great Leipniz was, depending on whether they were more FW or more Fritz minded, either the ultimate joke on scholars or an unbearable humiliation of science and learning. There were still some scholars taking him seriously, but usually they were the ones living far from Prussia and only knowing Gundling via his books. To most, and certainly to all who joined the Academy in Fritz' time, he was FW's fool and joke on scholarship. And for all the times when he was treated like a guest, sitting at the King's table with his family, there were ten times when he was abused in the most horrible way. Including, sadly, his time of dying, as I wrote and translated before. But before that happened, something else did, which also forms a part of Sabrow's argument that Gundling was both compos mentis and at least partially successful in carving out an FW free parallel existence for himself: when his brother Hieronymous died in 1729, Hieronymus' last will named Gundling as the guardian for his children and executer of his last will. Now, Hieronymus, as mentioned, had been unhappily married and trying to get a separation from his wife Augusta, who supposedly openly cheated on him and was living in Berlin. Surely, asks Sabrow, if Jacob Paul in 1729 had been the non-stop drinker of legend, his brother - who had a great many friends and colleages in Halle whom he could have asked to become guardians -, would not have entrusted either the children nor the family fortune for safekeeping to him? Augusta (who had left her husband and children two years earlier which she could since she was the niece of one of the most influential Prussian trademen) sued, at which point her brother-in-law demonstrated that fool or not, he actually could wield what influence he had on FW in a devastating way in this one very personal matter. Augusta was arrested in November 1729 for loose living (remember FW's NO WHORES doctrine?) and put into Spandau. Gundling punching downward or just fuflfilling his brother's last will? You decide. In any event, Augusta remained in Spandau where she died a year after her brother-in-law.
Sabrow ends the biography with a pointed comparison of FW/Gundling to Fritz/Voltaire, complete with the quote from Fritz from November 1740 when he's haggling about Voltaire's travel expenses, along the lines of "rarely has a fool been paid so well", and a 1753 quote from Fritz where he again uses the term fool - "how much noise a fool can make in good society!" I partly agree and have written about some eerie parallels elsewhere, though of course a key difference between the two pairings is that Voltaire didn't need Fritz, not financially (because he had money himself), and not professionally. (That Gundling didn't have a "proper" university degree automatically limited the professional possiblities to him outside of Prussia even before FW destroyed his reputation.) This gave him a confidence that Gundling didn't have, and the ability to go tit for tat in the battle of pamphlets and insults. And as humiliating and frightening as the entire Frankfurt episode must have been, it was an episode, which Voltaire got out of to be Voltaire for decades more, his reputation unchanged. (I.e. if you admired him before, you admired him afterwards, and if you hated him before, well, you certainly didn't feel sorry now.) Moreover, no matter how often Fritz would rail about Voltaire being the scum of the earth as a human being, he never put down Voltaire's work, he kept his admiration for it from first to last. That's simply a different foundation than FW being at best impressed by the manfuctoring suggestions and maybe by Gundling's greater knowledge of the world (since he had travelled in foreign countries) and ability to read and interpret the world's news for him, but having nothing but contempt for the core of what was important to Gundling, his work as a scholar.
In conclusion: still a harrowing tale, and infuriating in that for such a long time, it was written off as mildly embarrassing to FW at best, not as the testimony to cruelty it is.