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cahnAnd, I mean, it doesn't have to be just 18th century characters, either!
(also, waiting for Yuletide!)
(also, waiting for Yuletide!)
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Re: Diderot, Catherine, and Fritz
Date: 2021-12-14 02:53 am (UTC)Remember when I said
Fritz started writing anti-Diderot pamphlets, because of course he did.
? Our author provides more details:
By January the court [at St. Petersburg] was relishing a review, passed from hand to hand, of an unauthorized edition of Diderot’s collected works. Though anonymous, the review’s author appeared to be Frederick, still smarting from Diderot’s earlier stiff-arm when he directed his carriage to give Berlin wide berth. He lambasted Diderot’s plays, harrumphing that they “are not written so that they can be acted and are scarcely better suited to be read”—the first claim is not inaccurate, while the second is invidious—and sniggered over the “sublime tissue of nonsense” found between the covers of his early philosophical essay Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature.
And then this gem:
More sublimely nonsensical, it would turn out, was Frederick’s expectation that Diderot, in Grimm’s tow, would nevertheless honor him with a visit on his much-anticipated return to Paris.
Mildred: *spittake*
Fritz: I have a love-hate relationship with Voltaire, I don't see why I can't have one with Diderot!
As his homesickness deepened, Diderot had begun to make plans for his return to Paris. Determined to make the trip with Grimm, he was no less determined to avoid a layover in Berlin. Torn by his devotion to Diderot and his debt to Frederick, Grimm’s predicament seemed without issue. “I am more than a bit embarrassed over Denis’s intentions,” he confided to Nesselrode at year’s end. “As you can imagine, the last thing in the world I want is to cancel Berlin, but the last thing Denis wants is to place his foot there.”
Grimm and Diderot ended up traveling separately, so they could respectively go to, and avoid the hell out of, Berlin.
In his farewell letter to Catherine, Diderot shows that a certain other monarch is still on his mind:
After several jabs, some of them a bit awkward, at his arch-nemesis Frederick—“If we knew where the Fredericks are hatched, a good man would break all the eggs and replace them with Catherines”—Diderot again apologized for the “unheard-of stubbornness with which he tried Your Majesty’s patience.” With great panache, he finally swore that if his praise of Catherine ever rang hollow, he would agree to be declared the worst of ingrates. Soon enough, though he was not alive to hear it, this is precisely what Catherine would call him.
(Remember, he takes a copy of her work with his annotations when he leaves Russia, and she has his baggage searched and the document confiscated when he's in the Netherlands (iirc). Like Fritz/Voltaire if both parties were sane!)
But the hatching Frederick eggs made me laugh.
Re: Diderot, Catherine, and Fritz
Date: 2021-12-14 07:15 pm (UTC)Re: Diderot, Catherine, and Fritz
Date: 2021-12-14 07:27 pm (UTC)I was thinking of
And after all, the Fritz-Voltaire moving in together started *after* Voltaire had tried to spy on Fritz for France and Fritz had tried to get Voltaire exiled from France, and they knew this about each other and still decided
getting marriedliving together was just the thing!And if Diderot was okay with Catherine's brand of enlightened despotism, I bet Fritz was confused about what exactly Diderot found objectionable about his...
I've been trying to figure out what exactly's so much better about Catherine, because it sure isn't an absence of neighbor-invading or failure to treat her heir like shit, and the only things I can come up with are 1) more generous with her money, 2) less scapegoat-y (I think), 3)
understands that people are insulted when you insult themless sarcastic.But hey, (1) means she just bought Diderot's library for a huge sum of money and allowed him to keep it, in France, during his lifetime and gave him a salary as her librarian! This despotism is obviously more enlightened than "No court jester was ever so expensive" (Fritz about Voltaire in 1740, for those who've forgotten)!
ETA: Also,
Do not worry, Diderot, hatching Fredericks demand a very special constellation of parents and circumstances to become fully fledged!
made me laugh. :D It also made me think of this poem:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
(And that means try not to be as a father to your siblings and nephews either, Fritz.)
Re: Diderot, Catherine, and Fritz
Date: 2021-12-15 07:38 am (UTC)And yes, I was thinking of good old Larkin, too. Re: Diderot going with Catherine as his enlightened despot of choice, yeah, I think it's a case of money, dear boy. (Though Catherine being less prone to confuse friendly banter with insults probably didn't hurt.) Also, Russia is far away and wasn't France's enemy in the 7 Years War. Now I have no idea whether this would have mattered to Diderot, you know him far better than I do. But Maupertuis definitely got trouble from fellow French philosophes for not resigning from his Academy President office when the war began, and Voltaire got bad press for his entire thing with Fritz as well, despite the Frankfurt scandal.