These letter excerpts are all golden. Fritz/Voltaire: the ship where canon is better than anything fanfiction can come up with, and I say that as someone who's written about them!
There is a comedy by the King of Prussia called The Fashion Monkey;
There literally is, and it's fascinating Voltaire remembers, because he wasn't there at the time it got performed. (And I doubt there were any later performances.) It recently came up in the Manteuffel & Wolff dissertation, because Fritz wrote it to diss his Rheinsberg court preader and Wolff fan Dechamps who'd dissed Voltaire. (Reminder for cahn from my write up: In 1741, (Dechamps) attempts to strike out against Voltaire in a major way and gets busy writing Cours abrégé de la philosophie wolffiene en formé de lettres, in which he says that Voltaire was just a rude religion mocker with the ability of making some neat verses, and an ugly, grimacing dwarf of a man to boot. Also, the works of the great Wolff naturally can't be understood by such a creature. Dechamps dedicates this to his two students and sends a copy directly to Fritz as soon as it's printed. The reaction doesn't take long. On November 1742, a one act play gets performed in Charlottenburg, Le singe de la Mode, in which a stupid provincial nobleman is looking for books to feel the shelves of his new library with. He discovers that the volumes best suited for this purpose are hundreds of copies of Dechamps' Cours abregé, which he can get to a bargain price since no one wanted to buy or read them. The author of this play: Fritz. How does Dechamps find out? From little Ferdinand.
As you, felis, pointed out, the play was performed on the occasion of Keyserlingk's wedding. For Voltaire, who wasn't there and only heard about it via mail, to still recall something Fritz wrote to satirize someone else on his behalf nearly two decades later is something else again. :)
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timeasmymeasure
Re: Voltaire: will you stay or will you go?
Date: 2021-03-29 05:40 am (UTC)There is a comedy by the King of Prussia called The Fashion Monkey;
There literally is, and it's fascinating Voltaire remembers, because he wasn't there at the time it got performed. (And I doubt there were any later performances.) It recently came up in the Manteuffel & Wolff dissertation, because Fritz wrote it to diss his Rheinsberg court preader and Wolff fan Dechamps who'd dissed Voltaire. (Reminder for
As you,
Re: Voltaire: will you stay or will you go?
Date: 2021-03-29 08:36 pm (UTC)Re: Voltaire: will you stay or will you go?
Date: 2021-03-29 08:44 pm (UTC)