18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 35

[cahn]

In the previous post Charles II found AITA:

Look, I, m, believe in live and let live. (And in not going on my travels again. Had enough of that to last a life time.) Why can't everyone else around me be more chill? Instead, my wife refuses to employ my girlfriend, my girlfriend won't budge and accept another office, my brother is set on a course to piss off everyone (he WILL go on his travels again), and my oldest kid shows signs of wanting my job which is just not on, sorry to say. And don't get me started about Mom (thank God she's living abroad). What am I doing wrong? AITA?

Comments

Re: Medici coloring

[mildred_of_midgard]

It occurs to me that a number of people are blond(e) as children and dark-haired as adults. There's a certain gene that doesn't get activated until puberty. Possibly Marie de Medici was one of those? That would explain her being painted as a blonde as a child, well before Henri IV was a bastard to her. And then at age 15 she moved to a place where people, or at least her new husband, preferred blondes, so maybe she insisted on continuing to be depicted as the blonde she used to be (and possibly colored her hair?).

This is all reminding me that Elizaveta of Russia was a blonde who dyed her hair black (in contrast to the Ekaterina show, which made her a redhead).

Since his mother so clearly prefered his younger brother Gaston, I was hoping he'd have had at least a memory of an early childhood as his father's fave, but evidently not.

Schultz says Henri IV was very affectionate with his kids, Louis XIII included. But since Henri had had the whip used on him a lot as a kid, he made sure the kids' caretakers used the whip on them. And since Louis XIII was *very* stubborn, he got the whip *a lot*, because Henri said there was no better tool for child-raising.

But he let little Louis accompany him on hunting trips (bring your kid to work day, apparently) and apparently their relationship was warm and close, whipping notwithstanding, until Henri's assassination. Mom, not so much.