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: Stuart Cousins at Versailles: The Sequel

[cahn]

Alas, James does not wow Versailles the same way. (Antonia Fraser points out that it was also a question of age; James was fifty-five, this was his second (and final) full exile, not counting the shorter ones, and he was set in his ways.

Ha. I can't help thinking it was also due to personality :PP That's neat about Mary Beatrice -- I got no sense of her at all from Jude Morgan.

'I hope, Monsieur, never to see you again. Nevertheless if fortune so wishes it that we meet again, you will find me the same as you have always found me.'

Louis! That is indeed... very him.

Re: Stuart Cousins at Versailles: The Sequel

[selenak]

Mary Beatrice: Well, Morgan's pov character hardly interacts with her at all, and this is a first person written fictional "memoir", so he can't provide an impression of what she is like, since at that point his relationship with her husband has become mutual open loathing. (Incidentally, the author of the non-fictional Monmouth biography I've read after the novel thinks he and James actually got along well early on and didn't become hostile until latern - hence, for example, James being on good terms with his cousins - but at the point of James' second marriage, they definitely had arrived there, so in this case, fiction definitely matches what we know of the facts.)

I can't help thinking it was also due to personality

Probably. As Antonia Fraser said, James didn't improve with age.