cahn | Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 41

Now, thanks to interesting podcasts, including characters from German history as a whole and also Byzantine history! (More on this later.)

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From:

selenak

LOL, but you know, his older brother, her first son had died as an infant. There are a couple of heartrendering letters from a young Liselotte while this happens (i.e. her oldest kid falling sick, then dying) to her former governess, Frau von Harling, who was still working for Aunt Sophie of Hannover (only not yet of Hannover - they're living in Osnabrück still), now as governess of Sophie Charlotte "Figuelotte", future mother of FW.

St. Cloud, 14th September 1775 (kid is sick, but not dead yet):

(...)But I have gone sour on all these divertisments, for this evening when I returned, I found my oldest son deathly ill, he had a terrible fever, horrible dysentry, and everything he was fed, he threw up again. You can, my dearest Frau von Harding, imagine how I felt. I took this so to heart that I've nearly gone sick myself. "Oh," I said to Monsieur, "If only I were lord and master here, I knew what I would do." "What?" he said. I replied: "I would send my two children to Osnabrück to be raised there and would plead for Frau von Harling, who was governess to me and now is for my aunt's children, that she should care for them, then I would know with certainty my children would remain alive." For tell you the truth; I don't trust in the local method of raising children at all,; but it is my misfortune that I can't do what I want there, which will make me cry a lot more. Today my boy is, thank be to God a little bit better. I beg you, tell me what you think of this, for there is no human being alive knowing more about children than you do.

Her oldest dies on March 16th 1776, and she writes to Frau von Harling again:

(...) Regarding my great misfortune, I knew you would be sad on my account and have to admit that I can hardly stomach it, for it has been too much for me. You are of probably right, my dearest Frau von Harling, when you say that the older one gets the more one experiences the world's misfortunes one is subjected to, for even now, when I haven't recovered from this misery, Monsieur is with the army and has scared me a thousand times, for as I've been told by everyone, he has been so daring during the two sieges of Condé and later of Bouchain which he has started and thankfully finished in a short while most happily. And now I have another worry: we've learned that many people in the army have fallen sick, and as Monsieur tires himself out no less than all the others and often doesn't get off his horse for 24 hours and doesn't sleep, I'm afraid he will finally fall sick as well, for as they say the campaign will continue a good while longer, and the King doesn't consider a return yet. (...)
I wish with all my heart we will soon get a good peace, for I am so thoroughly sick of the war as if I'd been fed it with spoons, as they say at home. (...)
I wish I could send you my remaining boy de Chartre in a letter, for then I'd know he'd remain alive, but as it is I am nothing but afraid for him, and I wish I was one year older, or three, or four, so I could see this child weaned off completely, for in this country they just don't understand how to do it and don't want to be told and so they send a lot of children in the other world, so many that one can't tell and I don't know whether they do it because things are so crazy in this one that they want to spare the poor children the trouble to observe this world's misery; but I believe they act from sheer stupidity and neglect, for which I have a very strong example. Please give my compliment to your lady (Sophie) and my little goddaughter (Sophie Charlotte).

And that's the emotional background for Liselotte's embarassing Mom thing.

Edited Date: 2023-02-22 06:19 am (UTC)

From:

cahn

Oh Liselotte :((((((

What does she mean about how they don't understand how to wean children? Don't you just start feeding them solid food? Did her older one die of food poisoning or something?

From:

selenak

Honestly, I have no idea. The one thing I know about 17th and 18th century noble child rearing that was damaging to small children doesn't apply to this case, because the kid was living with Liselotte in the same household if she could see him in the evening. Because what a lot of nobles and rich burghers who wanted to be elevated to nobility did was basically hand over the baby to the wetnurse (often a farmer's wife) to rear him or her in the countryside for the next three years. Now, the problem here was that in a country where the population is steadily getting poorer, the wetnurses get tempted to accept not just one baby but several in order to make more money, and sometimes even hire even more poor sub wetnurses. (And let's not forget, all these women have their own babies, too, that's why they can be a wetnurse!) So there isn't enough milk for any of the babies, who get fed with water to make up for the missing milk instead. => lots of dead children. But like I said, this might apply if you're a noblewoman, a Countess de This and That, who is lucky if she can get a room in overcrowded Versailles, not if you're Madame with your own royal residence Saint-Cloud and with the wetnurse being directly under your and your staff's supervision. There's an earlier letter from 1774 when Liselotte is pregnant with child No.2, the future Regent, and talks about child No.1, the doomed oldest boy (at this point not yet ill, where she describes ihm in a way that shows she sees a lot of him, so even if there is a wetnurse and a governess and maids and what not, she clearly was in the nursery a lot:

Regarding my little Rauschenblattenknechtchen - this is a German Baroque term I've never come across before but which she uses for babies occasionally, literally "Whisperyleavesservant", which makes no sense - he deserves the name by deed and is a terrible savage, laughs a lot and wants to be carried from one place to the next, will only now after Easter get a frock because in this country, they have the children wrapped up an awfully long time; then we will see whether he'll learn to walk soon or whether he won't. He doesn't have a single tooth yet. Please, write to me how much Milady-Kent-Powder one could give him if, which God may prevent, he has a fever once he teethes? How much is too much? Because he's less than a year. Thanks be to God, he is a cheerful child, but can't do much yet but piss the way the eleventh Prince ( one of her Hannover cousins) did when he was that age.
Enough now of him. Regarding the other little madcap, who is halfway on his way by now, he's causing me a lot of bother, for I'm sick as a dog every day after the meals, for two full hours.

"Wrapped up" vs frock I take to refer to diapers vs clothing, only what was done back then weren't diapers in the way we know them, but the babies being literally tightly wrapped up:

You can see why doing this for up to a year didn't strike Liselotte as very healthy.

Re: weaning in particular, though, like I said, I don't know something that could apply in Liselotte's circumstance. I don't know what Milady-Kent-Powder is, either.

From:

cahn

The funny thing is, it turns out that babies really do like to be wrapped tightly like this for sleep, so -- just for sleep -- it's actually something that I did with my own kids -- I had a bunch of velcro swaddles like this, and they were MAGIC. But I wouldn't have wrapped my kids like this when they were awake and up to a year! (I think it was actually just a few months until the arms came out -- once the kid could roll over.)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I don't know exactly what Liselotte's talking about, but I know of a relevant passage from Horowski, about how James II's son (future "James III" to Jacobites and father of BPC) almost died. Remember that he's the "warming pan baby," i.e. everyone wants to believe that he's not really the son of James and his wife.

A cynical contemporary wrote that the people would not believe in the authenticity of this child unless he died, and for a horrible few weeks it seemed as if the hypothesis might be put to the test. The king's personal physicians had just found out that milk was extremely dangerous for babies and had to be replaced with a combination of bread soup and sweet white wine, which was then labeled "Dr. Goddard's Drops" - a product made from sal ammoniac, dried snakes and a hanged man's skull. Only after the intervention of the Pope, Louis XIV and the Queen did the well-meaning and unsuspecting doctors finally agree to prescribe the milk of a well-born woman for the month-and-a-half-year-old prince (that the Queen could breastfeed herself, would not have occurred to anyone) before they then had to agree to the replacement of this lady by the evidently more competent wife of a tiler.

Now, judging by Louis XIV's reaction, this is *not* what they were doing at the French court, but it does tell you something about the state of medicine and royal babies at the time. Never underestimate 18th century medical incompetence!

(I endorse your time machine and encourage you to yell at doctors galore, and the people who listen to them!)

From:

selenak

On that note, reminder that "milk is actually bad for babies!" was a story evidently still making the rounds in the 1780s because that's what non-royal, non-noble Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart believes when becoming a Dad according to his letters to Leopold, and he has to be collectively talked out of his idea of child nourishment by his wife and mother-in-law.

From:

cahn

and had to be replaced with a combination of bread soup and sweet white wine, which was then labeled "Dr. Goddard's Drops" - a product made from sal ammoniac, dried snakes and a hanged man's skull.

AGH!

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Yes, the author of the book I'm reading does provide the background. For some additional heart-breaking quotes:

The death of a child at the end of the 17th century was usual, but this sudden death had deeply affected the princess, who claimed to have almost lost her reason. As she wrote some time later, "I don't believe you can die of excessive grief, because if you did, I wouldn't be here. What I suffered cannot be described." And more than forty years later, in 1719, she still underlined: "I cried for my son for six months, I thought I was going mad."

But I can still imagine embarrassed!Philippe pointing out that the other moms who've all lost babies aren't doing this!