he actually write "no court jester was ever so expensive" (which brought me up short when coming across it, because for Fritz to use the jester simile when his father isn't dead for a year (and Gundling for nine years, while his successors are luckily still alive but no thanks to FW)
Oh, whoa! I had forgotten this, and likely when it came up before I hadn't quite internalized all the Gundling etc. context. FRITZ.
But yeah... I get the impression -- which could be totally incorrect, of course -- that at least in these letters Voltaire didn't actually make up anything from whole cloth, though he certainly did a lot of misdirection as to how much blame he should actually get for the whole thing even just given the limited amount (though much more than several months ago!) I know about what actually went down.
(Who employed this technique, named insinuatio, a lot; for example, reading Tacitus, you're totally left with the impression he's saying Tiberius and his mother Livia ordered and/or sponsored the death of Germanicus, but if you check the lines word by word, he's never claiming that they did directly. He's just reporting rumors and, well, insinuating.
Oh WOW. Thank you for the clarification! (Classics salon: also the best! ;) )
Conversely, I don't think many a French admirer would have been cool with Fritz' observation that if Voltaire had had armies at his disposal, he totally would have used them to go after his literary enemies. Which, yes.
OMG HE SO WOULD
They did see each other very clearly, these two. And that's why I'm shipping them.
*nods* Yes! It's really something, that they could say such scathing things of each other because they did see each other so clearly (and did in fact love each other so much, at least in the friendship sense). I ship them too, as you know :D
Though it's interesting that Voltaire when reworking and rewriting the letters didn't simply use another correspondant for this last letter
It's pretty clever; he passes it off as how agitated he is and wondering if it was a dream, and honestly I would have missed it if I hadn't known about Pamela:
I think it's a dream; I believe that all this happened in the time of Denis of Syracuse. I wonder if it is really true that a lady from Paris, traveling with a passport from the king her master, was dragged through the streets of Frankfurt by soldiers, taken to prison without any form of trial, without a chambermaid, without a servant, having at her door four soldiers with bayonets at the end of the rifle, and forced to suffer that a clerk of Freytag, a villain of the vilest kind, spend the night alone in her room. When Brinvilliers was arrested, the executioner was never alone with her; there is no example of such barbarous indecency. And what was your crime? for having run two hundred leagues to bring a dying uncle to the waters of Plombières, whom you regarded as your father.
(May I also just say here that OMG to Voltaire doctoring all these letters to make it look like he's like a father figure to Mme Denis. GAH Voltaire! That and I bet he had daddy kink going on :P )
Your version for mods was another bit that made me scream in delight, btw.
<3 :D It was so perfect I knew it had to go in!
And it bears repeating - titling this entire endeavour "Pamela" is hilarious by itself, due to Richardson's "young virtuous and naive middle class ingenieu"/"debauched aristocratic bastard" constellation in the original Pamela.
:D And this is the sort of thing I'm probably missing all over the place! :D
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Re: Pamela
Oh, whoa! I had forgotten this, and likely when it came up before I hadn't quite internalized all the Gundling etc. context. FRITZ.
But yeah... I get the impression -- which could be totally incorrect, of course -- that at least in these letters Voltaire didn't actually make up anything from whole cloth, though he certainly did a lot of misdirection as to how much blame he should actually get for the whole thing even just given the limited amount (though much more than several months ago!) I know about what actually went down.
(Who employed this technique, named insinuatio, a lot; for example, reading Tacitus, you're totally left with the impression he's saying Tiberius and his mother Livia ordered and/or sponsored the death of Germanicus, but if you check the lines word by word, he's never claiming that they did directly. He's just reporting rumors and, well, insinuating.
Oh WOW. Thank you for the clarification! (Classics salon: also the best! ;) )
Conversely, I don't think many a French admirer would have been cool with Fritz' observation that if Voltaire had had armies at his disposal, he totally would have used them to go after his literary enemies. Which, yes.
OMG HE SO WOULD
They did see each other very clearly, these two. And that's why I'm shipping them.
*nods* Yes! It's really something, that they could say such scathing things of each other because they did see each other so clearly (and did in fact love each other so much, at least in the friendship sense). I ship them too, as you know :D
Though it's interesting that Voltaire when reworking and rewriting the letters didn't simply use another correspondant for this last letter
It's pretty clever; he passes it off as how agitated he is and wondering if it was a dream, and honestly I would have missed it if I hadn't known about Pamela:
I think it's a dream; I believe that all this happened in the time of Denis of Syracuse. I wonder if it is really true that a lady from Paris, traveling with a passport from the king her master, was dragged through the streets of Frankfurt by soldiers, taken to prison without any form of trial, without a chambermaid, without a servant, having at her door four soldiers with bayonets at the end of the rifle, and forced to suffer that a clerk of Freytag, a villain of the vilest kind, spend the night alone in her room. When Brinvilliers was arrested, the executioner was never alone with her; there is no example of such barbarous indecency. And what was your crime? for having run two hundred leagues to bring a dying uncle to the waters of Plombières, whom you regarded as your father.
(May I also just say here that OMG to Voltaire doctoring all these letters to make it look like he's like a father figure to Mme Denis. GAH Voltaire! That and I bet he had daddy kink going on :P )
(original French text: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Correspondance_de_Voltaire/1753/Lettre_2624 )
Your version for mods was another bit that made me scream in delight, btw.
<3 :D It was so perfect I knew it had to go in!
And it bears repeating - titling this entire endeavour "Pamela" is hilarious by itself, due to Richardson's "young virtuous and naive middle class ingenieu"/"debauched aristocratic bastard" constellation in the original Pamela.
:D And this is the sort of thing I'm probably missing all over the place! :D