18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 37

[cahn]

More diaries of our favorite 18th-century Prussian diary-keeper have been unearthed and have been synopsized!

January 18th: Blessed be thou to me! Under your light, my Prince Heinrich was born!

Comments

Re: The Man in the Iron Mask

[luzula]

(Lest we forget the Finnish sex machine. ;))

[ETA: [personal profile] luzula, if you're following along, context is here, tell us if you've heard this story before!)

Ha ha, no, I had not! Thanks for sharing, that's great. : D

But my eye was caught by this, because WHAT?
Gustav IV Adolf *in exile*: So, I'm not good enough because I'm possibly the son of a Finnish sex machine, but a French commoner who has "death to kings" tattooed on his arm is?

I mean, obviously I know about Bernadotte, but I did NOT know that he had "death to kings" tattooed on his arm? Awesome, if true. But do you have a source for this? I found a Swedish site saying that this is a myth, and that it arose from the 1833 play Le Camarade de lit, where this happens:

... The ex-grenadier reminds the King that he had once tattooed his arm with gunpowder. Carried away by old associations the King pulls up his sleeve and displays the indelible imprint of a Phrygian Cap and of a revolutionary motto, which is said to have been Mort aux Rois. The disclosure of this secret is the turning-point of the piece. The King is placed in such a dilemma by this compromising discovery that, in order to save himself from the necessity of abdication, he is compelled to give his consent to the marriage of the hero and the heroine, thus bringing the curtain down upon a happy ending to the play.

The same site does say that he said in a 1797 letter that he is a republican by principle and would fight royalists to his dying day, but only has a second-hand source for it that I can't access.

Re: The Man in the Iron Mask

[selenak]

No, I don’t have a source other than the legend for the “Death to Kings!” Tattoo, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it solely hails from a popular play. As we’ve seen all too often in this fandom, once an idea catches on, a lot of people centuries later regard it as fact.

I also wrote an emojii version of the Swedish Scandal for Mildred, which got reposted here:

https://rheinsberg.dreamwidth.org/33616.html#cutid1