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.

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Peter Keith transcription

[mildred_of_midgard]

So prinzsorgenfrei and I struggled for a while with the transcription of the reply to Peter's "can I have some money?" question. My colleague from grad school who I reached out to finally had time to figure it all out, and she reached out to another colleague (more expert in paleography, I gather), who confirmed that the note in the margin is not by Fritz (that also becomes obvious once you can read it) but was added in the same hand at the same time. It's not a verdict, just a comment.

My colleague was able to get all but one word, and I'm pretty sure I got that one word, so here we go:

que quelque bonne volonte que le Roy saurait avoir pour luy+ (+dont L.M. luy avoit dise donne des marquez) d'autres depense indispensables l'oblegeraient cependant di luy dire qu'il faudroit qu'il pnd patience jusqu'au L.M. saurait trouver qlq. occasion favorable pour l'aider

She transcribed "occasion" as "ouailron" and said "not sure about that one." I spent an entire boring work meeting alternately staring at it, asking Google, looking at the Le dictionnaire de l'Académie française from various centuries, and so forth.

I finally decided to work backwards. I went to Google Translate, put in "opportunity" in English and asked it to tell me what possibilities there were in French (I love that it gives you multiple options), and "l'occasion" came up. I stared at the handwriting again, concluded that the dot on the i could be on the wrong side of the 's', and that the 'u' could totally be 'cc', and now I'm pretty sure that's it.

Teamwork!

So the important point here, and the reason I really, really wanted to read the marginal note, is that know we know it's *not* Fritz saying, for example, "Give him X amount of money next month." Which means that we have no evidence that the box of money that Fritz surprised Peter with a few months later, the one I wrote fic about, was not the first time he had given him money after Peter's request, which means I think that gift was not out of the blue, but was in response to Peter saying, "I borrowed a bunch of money to get back to Prussia when you told me to, can you please reimburse it?" Which says something about their dynamic at the time: this was Peter-initiated and not Fritz-initiated. (It also tells me Hanway, our source for that gift, probably didn't know Peter had asked for money and not been given it, which makes perfect sense, as that's not the sort of thing you might tell an old friend passing through that you haven't seen in 10 years!)

The gift in 1753 *seems* to be Fritz-initiated, in that Lehndorff says he was giving money to a bunch of officers, and Peter was one of them.

Detective work is so rewarding: for years we've known about the 1750 gift episode because of Hanway, but we didn't know about the first half of this episode! :D

ETA: Btw, said native French speaker colleague has been indispensable, but I'm sticking with my original reading of "S.M." over her "L.M.", even though I can see why she got an "L" out of that character--I'd read it as an "L" too without context. But "Sa Majesté" and "S.M." I've encountered a zillion times, and neither my searches of Trier nor my searches of my memory are returning any instances of "L.M." (There's a set of hits for "L. Motte de Fouque" in Trier, and that's all) or "Leur Majesté."

Son of ETA: I'm also planning on doing a thorough, character-by-character readthrough, and maybe restoring some of my original readings (like "sauroit" instead of "saurait"), but the important thing is that the stuff we couldn't figure out has been figured out!