Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 42

[cahn]

Last post, we had (among other things) Danish kings and their favorites; Louis XIV and Philippe d'Orléans; reviews of a very shippy book about Katte, a bad Jacobite novel, and a great book about clothing; a fic about Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire; and a review of a set of entertaining Youtube history videos about Frederick the Great.

Comments

Re: Charles Hanbury-Williams Tells It All: II

[cahn]

She thinks all time lost that is not spent with books, or with such people as she has heard other people say are learned.

Gosh, he's got it in for her, hasn't he.

One would think that the wretched life that the King and Queen-Mother led under the late King of Prussia's reign (for he used one like a dserter in everything but shooting him, and the other like a kitchen wench), would have taught them humanity. Instead of which, they seem only to have learnt the art of making those under them as miserable now as they themselves were formerly.

Well. That bit is pretty accurate :P

Though I have to say, coming from a man who wrote the following lines, which you definitely won't find quoted in this biography, it's a case of pot and kettle:

LOLOLOL umm yeah.

Re: Charles Hanbury-Williams Tells It All: II

[selenak]

Gosh, he's got it in for her, hasn't he.

Definitely. Exposing "phoneys" who just PRETEND to be intellectual seems to have been a hobby of his, see the other times he does this. Bearing in mind his Eton education left him with not very good French - he's still apologizing to Catherine in his letters some years later that he had to basically relearn once he started being an envoy - and of course no German at all, so I bet Wilhelmine spoke better French than he did and since he brings up she spoke very quickly, he probably only understood half of it anyway. But I suspect he might have been additionally motivated to satirize her by the fact she was evidently Fritz' favourite sister. All this said, there are certainly similarities to Lehndorff's description of her during the same time, including the "she considers every day that is not spend with books wasted" - it's just that Lehndorff (while remarking on Wilhelmine using too much make up and "building altars to the King" and being something of a snob) has no doubt she really is that smart, which he finds somewhat intimidating. (He also years later when visiting Bayreuth after her death thinks she has awesome taste and grieves she's gone and this is a ghost town.)