Congratulations to the Royal Detective! Looks like "Liselotte was the only one to call Eugene gay" is another case of "Voltaire was the only one to ever call Fritz gay" no-homo'ing, verily. Though that biographer also sounds like a sexist ass. Reminds me of all the "Wilhelmine was clearly a hysterical woman and so can't be trusted" (which is different from "Wilhelmine is writing with temporal distance and of course has her own issues to channel, just like all the male memoirists). I'm currently listening to the part of the Byzantium podcast that deals with Alexios Kommenos and the first Crusade, and a primary source for Alexios is of course his daughter Anna Kommena, who has some claim to being the first female historian/chronicler ever (whom we know of and whose work still exists); according to the podcaster, Robin, both Edward Gibbon and a lot of other male historians until more recently also were all "Anna is an emotional female writing as an old woman, thus can't be trusted", whereas they had no problem trusting bishops who wrote from a thousand miles away and without Anna's claim to have witnessed some of the events she describes, and knowing a lot of players personally. (This is podcaster, Robin, has been consistently good about pointing out sources are of course ALL biased and having agenda, Anna of course included. Which doesn't take away from their value.)
the knight of Lorraine
LOL Google translate. The Chevalier de Lorraine, whose first name was "Philippe" which thus is not useable for either fanfiction or histories, least favourite person of both Philippe d'Orleans' wives, suddenly sounds like a fairy tale character.
the count of Guiche
Hang on, shouldn't he be already out of the picture if the Chevalier is around? I seem to recall de Guiche was the boyfriend who infuriated Philippe by also flirting with Minette, which means he can't overlap with the Liselotte years.
Ezéchiel Spanheim, soon to be representative of Brandenburg in Paris,
Was he working for the Great Elector or for F1?
The princess, ugly, frustrated in her marriage to Philippe d'Orléans, ill-suited to the court of France, nostalgic for her German origins, compensates for her discomfort with an often outrageous prolixity
As you say, what are the other sources compensating for, then? BTW, Liselotte repeatedly described herself as ugly as frankly as she describes most things in her letters ("my bearcat monkey face"), and since Eugene wasn't a favourite of her husbands, I still find it a mystersy as to why this should bias her remarks about him. (I mean, it doesn't mean she knows all about Eugene's intimate life, either, just that she reports the gossip as she's heard it, whether or not it's true.) Otoh, do you know whom she had very strong (hostile) feelings about? Louvois. As in:
I believe that M. de Louvois burns in hell because of the Palatinate; he was terribly cruel, no one can deny this...
(In a letter of 28 January 1708 to her aunt Sophie. cahn, as Louis' secretary of war, Louvois of course has a great deal of responsibility for the scouring of the shire, err, the Palatinate, Liselotte's home which Louis shamelessly claimed in her name. The ultimate responsibility is with Louis, but blaming the King who can lock you up in a nunnery is always dicy. That Liselotte thought the devastation of her home by French armies to be horrible is another reason why the English wiki argument from their Eugene entry - that Liselotte "badmouthed" him by describing him as gay due to feeling offended by his victories over French armies - never rang very plausible to me.
The small meetings in which one regularly finds the Choisys or the “Madames Simone” become a sensational affair when Louis XIV forces his fifteen-year-old son, the Count of Vermandois, to make revelations. He formed among his relatives a homosexual circle that almost all the young princes of the blood and their close friends are part of
That's one way of putting it. With the caveat that wiki is not necessarily reliable, here's the same story on Liselotte's wiki entry:
Simultaneously, Liselotte was drawn into a larger court scandal through her wardship of Comte of Vermandois, whose mother had left court to become a nun. The young comte had become embroiled in a secret homosexual 'brotherhood' of French nobles and courtiers, which required members to "swear an oath to renounce all women." Several incidents were reported in which women were sadistically tortured, and it also was reported that a poor waffle seller was raped, castrated and killed by courtiers.*Though the Duke of Orléans didn't belong to this brotherhood himself, many of his favorites did. In June 1682, it became known that the 'brotherhood' included the Prince of la Roche-sur-Yon and the young Comte of Vermandois, among other notable figures at court. Louis XIV punished his own son severely and sent him to war, where he died shortly afterwards at the age of 16. Liselotte later recalled: "The Comte de Vermandois was very good-natured. The poor person loved me as if I were his birth mother...He told me his whole story. He had been horribly seduced." One of his 'seducers' is said to have been the Chevalier de Lorraine—her husband's lover and her avowed enemy.
*This gruesome story is used in Anne Golon's Angelique novel, though in there Monsieur does participate. These were the first homosexual characters I encountered in fiction at age 9 or so, and I don't think I encountered any sympathetically written gay characters - in historical or centemporary fiction - until when I was 13 and read The Mists of Avalon (and then the Darkover novels). (Insert obvious comment about MZB's later discovered rl terribleness here, but those books were quite eye opening to young me back then.)
Anyway, raping, castrating and killing a guy and torturing women is quite different from organizing consensual m/m orgies, so I hope that it either didn't happen this way or that young Eugene did not participate.
Incidentally, Mildred, if you can get a digital copy of Voltaire's "Age of Louis XIV" in either English or German for me, I would be very grateful, and since this is supposed to be one of his big oeuvres, I would also do a write up for you.
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Re: French gossipy sensationalism
Date: 2023-01-20 08:55 am (UTC)the knight of Lorraine
LOL Google translate. The Chevalier de Lorraine, whose first name was "Philippe" which thus is not useable for either fanfiction or histories, least favourite person of both Philippe d'Orleans' wives, suddenly sounds like a fairy tale character.
the count of Guiche
Hang on, shouldn't he be already out of the picture if the Chevalier is around? I seem to recall de Guiche was the boyfriend who infuriated Philippe by also flirting with Minette, which means he can't overlap with the Liselotte years.
Ezéchiel Spanheim, soon to be representative of Brandenburg in Paris,
Was he working for the Great Elector or for F1?
The princess, ugly, frustrated in her marriage to Philippe d'Orléans, ill-suited to the court of France, nostalgic for her German origins, compensates for her discomfort with an often outrageous prolixity
As you say, what are the other sources compensating for, then? BTW, Liselotte repeatedly described herself as ugly as frankly as she describes most things in her letters ("my bearcat monkey face"), and since Eugene wasn't a favourite of her husbands, I still find it a mystersy as to why this should bias her remarks about him. (I mean, it doesn't mean she knows all about Eugene's intimate life, either, just that she reports the gossip as she's heard it, whether or not it's true.) Otoh, do you know whom she had very strong (hostile) feelings about? Louvois. As in:
I believe that M. de Louvois burns in hell because of the Palatinate; he was terribly cruel, no one can deny this...
(In a letter of 28 January 1708 to her aunt Sophie.
The small meetings in which one regularly finds the Choisys or the “Madames Simone” become a sensational affair when Louis XIV forces his fifteen-year-old son, the Count of Vermandois, to make revelations. He formed among his relatives a homosexual circle that almost all the young princes of the blood and their close friends are part of
That's one way of putting it. With the caveat that wiki is not necessarily reliable, here's the same story on Liselotte's wiki entry:
Simultaneously, Liselotte was drawn into a larger court scandal through her wardship of Comte of Vermandois, whose mother had left court to become a nun. The young comte had become embroiled in a secret homosexual 'brotherhood' of French nobles and courtiers, which required members to "swear an oath to renounce all women." Several incidents were reported in which women were sadistically tortured, and it also was reported that a poor waffle seller was raped, castrated and killed by courtiers.*Though the Duke of Orléans didn't belong to this brotherhood himself, many of his favorites did. In June 1682, it became known that the 'brotherhood' included the Prince of la Roche-sur-Yon and the young Comte of Vermandois, among other notable figures at court. Louis XIV punished his own son severely and sent him to war, where he died shortly afterwards at the age of 16. Liselotte later recalled: "The Comte de Vermandois was very good-natured. The poor person loved me as if I were his birth mother...He told me his whole story. He had been horribly seduced." One of his 'seducers' is said to have been the Chevalier de Lorraine—her husband's lover and her avowed enemy.
*This gruesome story is used in Anne Golon's Angelique novel, though in there Monsieur does participate. These were the first homosexual characters I encountered in fiction at age 9 or so, and I don't think I encountered any sympathetically written gay characters - in historical or centemporary fiction - until when I was 13 and read The Mists of Avalon (and then the Darkover novels). (Insert obvious comment about MZB's later discovered rl terribleness here, but those books were quite eye opening to young me back then.)
Anyway, raping, castrating and killing a guy and torturing women is quite different from organizing consensual m/m orgies, so I hope that it either didn't happen this way or that young Eugene did not participate.
Incidentally, Mildred, if you can get a digital copy of Voltaire's "Age of Louis XIV" in either English or German for me, I would be very grateful, and since this is supposed to be one of his big oeuvres, I would also do a write up for you.