18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 36

[cahn]

Starting a couple of comments earlier than usual to mention there are a couple of new salon fics! These probably both need canon knowledge.

felis ficlets on siblings!

Siblings (541 words) by felisnocturna
Chapters: 2/2
Fandom: 18th Century CE RPF
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great, Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, August Wilhelm von Preußen | Augustus William of Prussia (1722-1758), Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia (1709-1758)
Summary:

Three Fills for the 2022 Three Sentence Ficathon.

Chapter One: Protective Action / Babysitting at Rheinsberg (Frederick/Fredersdorf, William+Henry+Ferdinand)
Chapter Two: Here Be Lions (Wilhelmine)

Unsent Letters fic by me:

Letters for a Dead King (1981 words) by raspberryhunter
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 18th Century CE RPF
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great & Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig von Preußen (1726-1802)
Characters: Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig von Preußen | Henry of Prussia (1726-1802)
Additional Tags: Epistolary, Love/Hate, Talking To Dead People, Canonical Character Death, Dysfunctional Family
Summary:

Just because one's king and brother is dead doesn't mean one has to stop writing to him.

Comments

Re: Lehndorff Diaries: 1785

[mildred_of_midgard]

So, do you think Voltaire called Fritz the French equivalent of Hanswurst or Alexander?

Lol! Well, maybe one in a particularly bad mood, one in a somewhat better mood. If it's Voltaire and Fritz talking about each other, it has to be a mixture of admiration and resentment, after all!

(Alexander: Hanswurst or no Hanswurst? Debate.)

LOL. Well, you're the one who actually knows about Hanswurst, but if I just go by Wikipedia, "a half doltish, half cunning, partly stupid, partly knowing, enterprising and cowardly, self indulgent and merry," I don't see a whole lot of Alexander in there. Heavy drinking notwithstanding, cowardly and self-indulgent are right out. Stupid, well, he had some stellarly bad ideas, but probably not in the sense that I associate with German comedy (which I hasten to add, I have seen literally zero of). Enterprising and cunning, yes, very much.

Doltish, well, admittedly the sources are skewed by millennia of admiration, but I don't know if even his enemies would have picked that particular insult. OTOH, I haven't looked at the sources in 3 years, so I could be forgetting something Demosthenes said!

(But nothing will beat Heinrich in tight pants, obviously.)

Obviously!

That it is. FW really did a number on him.

Lehndorff's account of his death is also telling in this respect. "If I pull myself together through my partial paralysis, I can sign three more letters before I die!"

Because the way I remember it from various MA biographies is that he was a known ladies' man and she couldn't stand him

Uh, yeah, the way I remember it is that she refused to speak to him, and that La Motte won him over precisely by convincing him that MA was secretly signaling him and then finally agreeing to meet with him. If they'd had a good relationship, she wouldn't have been able to pull this off!

(Speaking of Joseph, a repeated theme of Lehndorff's political musings is "WTF is going on in Austria, WTF is Joseph up to?!?" But he never arrives at any conclusions beyond "nothing good, clearly, what a chaos".)

LOL! Well, I imagine Joseph had a *lot* of contemporaries confused.

Re: Lehndorff Diaries: 1785

[selenak]

Uh, yeah, the way I remember it is that she refused to speak to him, and that La Motte won him over precisely by convincing him that MA was secretly signaling him and then finally agreeing to meet with him. If they'd had a good relationship, she wouldn't have been able to pull this off!

Exactly. That entire con depended on Rohan not talking to or corresponding with real MA at all. Refreshing my memory on the internet reminds me he used to be a the French ambassador at Vienna for a short while, and MT hadn't liked him then, either. (A prince of the church who was an open lothario, you bet she didn't.) Incidentally, one of the things I recall from the biographies was that the eventual letter from MA that LaMotte forged was signed "Marie Antoinette de France", which as real MA pointed out she'd never have signed as. (Her signature, as can be seen in the documents preserved, was either simply "Marie Antoinette" or "de Autriche-Lorraine", but not "de France".)

Now I did know that public opinion in France considered the Cardinal innocent and the victim in all this (with the only disagreements being whether he was Jeanne La Motte's or Marie Antoinette's victim), so I wasn't surprised Lehndorff heard a Rohan-sympathetic version of the story, but what did surprise me was that the version Lehndorff heard declared him not just innocent in this affair (which he was in the sense that he really was deceived), but a royal favourite and a capital fellow all around. Then again, Lehndorff is a friend of hyperbole, and it's just an even more dramatic fall if Rohan goes from hero to zero instead of decadent sponge of the church to zero.

Re: Lehndorff Diaries: 1785

[mildred_of_midgard]

but a royal favourite and a capital fellow all around. Then again, Lehndorff is a friend of hyperbole

AW: Achilles. 'Nuff said.