cahn | Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 42

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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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From:

cahn

This is quite interesting! Let me agree that I'm glad you read it :)

I went away very soon after dinner to see Celia."

hee!

And SD was absolutely convinced G2 was cheating her out of something their Dad wanted to leave her by surpressing the Will. The footnote in the book doesn't mention it, but I bet both FW and Fritz thought so, too.

OMG, of course this dysfunctional family has will/estate issues. Of course! Tolstoy was wrong: all unhappy families are unhappy in the same ways :P (One of the many interesting things that popped up in my family trip last month was that when my mom's mother died a few years ago, there was apparently a big mess with her brothers and sisters and cheating my mom out of her fair share which I never even heard about at the time. On the other hand, in my dad's family, which is generally considered the more dysfunctional, this actually wasn't a problem really, as no one expected my dad's father/stepmother to leave him anything, and they didn't.)

ETA: Williams promptly seated himself at the foot, explaining in a loud voice he did not wish to associate with canaille... "which laughter according to the best of my observation made Count Podewils - Prussian foreign minister - rather angry than merry to my no small satisfaction".

OMG. This guy just seems completely clueless. In a really obnoxious way.

Edited Date: 2023-04-11 04:35 am (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Of course! Tolstoy was wrong: all unhappy families are unhappy in the same ways :P

Lol! Well, I think unhappy families are probably like Rachel's description of PTSD: there are about a dozen symptoms, and one person rarely has all of them, but once you've met a bunch of people with PTSD, you can see that they each have a different subset of a handful of those dozen symptoms. There are ways in which dysfunctional families are dysfunctional, and each unhappy family grabs a different handful of dysfunctions to operate on.

Inheritance has never been a thing in my dysfunctional family. It's not discussed, nor does anyone care, nor have I ever heard of anyone leaving anyone anything that was worth talking about. When I met my wife and she talked about inheritance in her family, it was like when you first talked about family reunions: "Oh, yeah, other families do that. I forgot that was a thing."

You have to go back 100 years in oral family history to get a story about inheritance disputes in my family.

From:

selenak

OMG, of course this dysfunctional family has will/estate issues.

What I was thinking. I mean, in a way, they're still at it, or were until very recently, with them sueing the state to get "their inheritance" back.

OMG. This guy just seems completely clueless. In a really obnoxious way.

I mean, I'm perfectly willing to believe he was lovely to Catherine and Poniatowski, but at the same time, I really can see why he failed as a diplomat pretty much everywhere else, not just with Fritz. Now you'd think that having succeeded to piss so many people in different countries off, he'd question whether it just might have had something to do with himself, not just them, but nooo.

(Though the second book points out he was explicitly sent to Vienna AFTER the Fritz disaster BECAUSE they wanted him to be "tough" towards MT and thought she had the previous British envoy, yet another Keith, wrapped around her finger. Basically:

Newcastle: You know, we really need someone to remind MT how she owes everything to Britain and how she should be grateful to us and listen to us.

Henry Fox: I know! That sounds like a job for H-W!

Though as Mildred would say, there's also the matter of the good and bad feedback loop. Obvious H-W had a terrible one with first Fritz and then tout Berlin. Yet H-W had a great one with Poniatowski, who was the youngest son in a big and larger than life family - his father had been 56 already when P was born - , was a mixture of lots of book knowledge and zero practical skills, with both too much (by doctors and teachers) and too little (by his parents) attention given to him, arrived in Berlin an unhappy 19 years old who didn't know anyone and thought the British man of the world envoy who gave him time and attention was just the coolest person alive. H-W had arrived there expecting to be appreciated as a wit and poet by Fritz and run diplomatic circles around him, and instead had ended up in a position where he was ostracized and didn't not get anywhere with his supposed task and no one seemed to appreciate him in the way he wanted to be appreciated, and there's this young man who FINALLY gives him nothing but admiration, whom he can mentor, and who is top Polish nobility to boot. And H-W had no son. Now he was unusually involved (for a man of his time) with his two daughters, even at a geographic distance, he did care about them, but he was the product of a patriarchy and so it would be very surprising if he hadn't wanted a son - and there was one, present where his daughter was absent, and without a mother to compete for him. They filled each other's emotional needs perfectly and would continue to do so.