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: Maria Theresia the TV Series: The End

[selenak]

I have to admit, this is weirding me out. Did they pick this name intentionally? Of all the possible names...!

She's at best an amalgan character anyway. For example, the favored former lady in waiting who together with her husband (most definitely not Kaunitz!) hosted Leopold's wedding in Innsbruck was Sophie Baronness Schack von Schackenburg, married Enzenberg. (Monika Czernin, the author of the Joseph biography "Der Kaiser reist incognito", published a collection of MT's letters to her over thirty years.) Otoh, the lady-in-waiting the fictional Elisa Fritz is based on at the start of the show is someone else altogether, whom FS was suspected to have had a fling with. It's in any case regrettable how they wrote her in the fifth part, because until then, she was an interesting original creation. She started out as a society queen flirting with FS, and then young MT had the original idea to go to her and say, look, you can be my friend, or you can have sex with flirt with my husband and hurt me, but not both, and I will say that I am loyal to my friends, come what may. Countess Elisa f. considered this, knew as a woman of the world that any affair with FS was bound to be over soon and would not get her much in the long run, and therefore decided to become MT's friend and advisor in how to win over/manage the nobility instead. She remained MT's loyal friend through all the series until the fifth part where she lets fictionalized Kaunitz talk her into the shady paper money scheme and then into an intrigue to make trouble between MT and FS so that both of them are recalled from Innsbruck with just a token protest, and then after FS' heart attack disappears from the show.

As to why they called her Elisa von Fritz, God knows. It's not even a likely sounding name.

FS (when they're alone): Look, I think the affair is a disaster, too, but you want to be a grandmother, don't you? Anything that helps Isabella getting in the mood...

Wow.

If you want to be generous, you can see series!FS is clearly a believer into the "multiple orgasms make a woman more fertile" theory which was actually a thing for centuries. But I suspect it's just that the series writers, having introduced him as the most tolerant and open minded person of the ensemble, not just when it's his own sex life at stake, don't want to make him look like a hypocrite to modern viewers.

Btw, when did historical Fritz write/say that? I assume it was during the 1740s?

As far as I recall, though with our luck, it may be one of those apocryphal sayings attributed to him later in various biographies.