![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnLast 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.
Re: Leining to Fredersdorf: Letter 1
Date: 2023-04-14 06:06 am (UTC)Okay, bureaucratic Rokoko German to the max, and to be fair, Fritz' repeated invectives on the German language are probably due to the fact that this kind of German - along with servant talk and army jargon - is one he most often hears. (Given he reads no fictional German prose or poetry.)
So, here's what I got:
Illustrious Sir, honored Secret Councillor!
Sir, I cannot hide the good fortune to which his Majesty our gracious King has raised me, but want to announce it as you've always shown friendship towards me: that his Majesty has been so gracious as to raise me to your Grace's position, and I do not doubt you will participate in my happiness. However, I thoroughly lament and note the news that you are so very ill as to make it possible I could lose your Grace and your friendship.
And as I have not yet aquainted myself with all the circumstances, but your Grace as an old professional knows all about it, I flatter myself that your Grace due to our old friendship will be so kind as to enlighten me as much as possible. In this expectation, I have hte honour to call myself with gerat respect, your Grace -
P.S. In three dayys, I 'll have know the complete report on the cause of my promotion, mon tres cher compere, and will send it then, as Carl is still pondering and hasn't decided yet whether he wants to become a lackey again.
As you can see, I've made some educated guesses about the undecyphered words out of the context, and welcome any alternative guesses. (
The recipient DOES NOT sound like someone who was dismissed on April 9 in disgrace. He sounds like someone who stepped down voluntarily before April 3 because he was dying.
Indeed. Now it's of course possible that between April 3rd and April 9th Fredersdorf's dastardly deeds come light, but given that the deeds Emmi Wegfraß means - i.e. Fredersdorf's behaviour in the colonists' affair - has been known at least for a year already, and that the beginning of April coincides with the Glasow affair coming to light, I'm going on a limb here and conclude that what Leining is referring to is in three days he'll have the complete report on what exactly Glasow did. Especially since I looked up my Glasow post at Rheinsberg, and the summary of the content of the letter as given by the Prussian State archive is:
On April 3rd 1757, Johann Wilhelm Leining informs Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf in a letter that he has succeeded the recipient in his office and "caracteur", and thus is the new Geheime Kämmerer. (Secret Chamberlain). (Letters to the Secret Chamberlain Fredersdorf, GSTA PK, BPH Rep 47, Nr. 644.) This meant the administration of the royal purse now was up to Leining, who therefore has a few questions for his predecessor. Moroever, the writer saw himself confronted with an extraordinary problem:one of the King's valets, Glasow (complete name most likely: Christian Friedrich Glasow) had made himself a signet by using a wax copy of Fredersdorf's. In order to clear up the extent of the fraud, thorough investigations began. Among Glasow's papers, various bills were found, though it is not clear whether they had already been paid. Secretary Gentze who used to work for Fredersdorf and now for Leining, thinks he can recall that atleast some of the bills were paid by using money form the royal purse in September 1756. Therefore, the new Secret Chamberlain asked the old one with the plea to "check the purse bill from September a.p. (= 1756) as well as of the succeeding months, and to kindly tell the results to me (i.e. Leining). (archive signature of the letter follows).
Presumably the Glasow part is in the second postcript you haven't decyphered yet.
Anyway: even accounting for the possibility that after April 3rd, some sort of bombshell drops re: Fredersdorf, this is a letter written to a man who knows he's dying and whose bad state of health is known to the letter writer. At the very least, this proves that Fredersdorf, as of April 1757, knows this is not just his by now standard bad health he's dealing with, he's nearing the end line of his life, and if Leining knows his state is that bad, you can bet Fritz does, too.
ETA: another reminder from the Glasow post, Henckel von Donnersmarck - writing in his diary at the time - gives April 2nd as the day when Glasow was arrested. So Leining writes this letter to Fredersdorf the very next day. Now, Glasow was arrested in Saxony where Fritz and the army are, but the distance to Berlin even for the 18th century isn't so long that a good courier couldn't make it on the day of the arrest with orders to Leining to investigate.
Daughter of ETA: also, Henckel von Donnersmark thinks that Glasow "got rid of Fredersdorf" and got favoured by Fritz this much because he's hot. The entry in question, betraying that Henckel von Donnersmark either is making a very good guess re: Fredersdorf's life span or adding the following Glasow background to his diary entry some months after the fact:
Glasow had been so favoured that he'd become the tyrant and supreme master of the Royal Household. Promoted from simple soldier to Chamber Husar, he soon won the affection and the trust of his master, got rid of the treasurer Fredersdorf who thus was dismissed shortly before his death, and became Hofmarschall, stable master, treasurer, valet and the spoiled child of the monarch. He had the most pleasant facial features of the world, blond hair and beautiful colouring, an advantageous figure, in short, everything that pleased.
Caroline Fredersdorf: He wasn't dismissed, he retired, and died in der Gnade seines großen Königs, so there!
Re: Leining to Fredersdorf: Letter 1
Date: 2023-04-14 12:46 pm (UTC)I know, I'm so excited! (Also due to
My German is weak, my French is weak, my Danish is weak, my handwriting deciphering is weak...but the one thing I have in spades is initiative! I would love to be able to not have to depend on Prinzsorgenfrei for decipherments (aside from visiting Aurich), as I have a ton of material, and there's only so much you can ask someone else to do on your own research projects. (I have offered to pay, but still, time is time and Prinzsorgenfrei has their own thesis and soon MA to work on.) So it's very promising I was able to do this much of this letter all on my lonesome! (With the help of the cheat sheet for the alphabet that Prinzsorgenfrei shared long ago, of course--that thing has been a lifesaver.)
What happened was I ended up ordering all the Peter Keith protocols and the Leining to Fredersdorf correspondence, about 80 double-sided pages each, in January, because Prinzsorgenfrei said they had interest in and *might* have time for browsing through and looking for anything relevant to my research. I still hesitated over whether to pay for all the Peter Keith stuff, because Hinrichs and Kloosterhuis have been over that material with a fine-toothed comb, and I figured anything interesting had been published. Still, Peter wasn't Kloosterhuis' main interest, and I'm addicted to book-buying, so I got it.
Only after the material arrived last month did it occur to me that duh, published material was the answer to my prayers, because you may recall that back in the day, I asked Prinzsorgenfrei for transcriptions, because I knew the only way I was going to learn Kurrent was with a side-by-side transcription. So I started reading the inventory of Peter's rooms (which was good, as I caught a small mistake in my essay). And after finishing that, I found FW's 1730 letter to Pastor Müller in both facsimile and transcription form on the Prussian archive website page to help you learn handwriting, and I practiced on that. And while I was doing all this practice, every day I went and looked at the Leining letter to see if I was up for tackling it yet, and yesterday I was. I didn't think I'd get as far as I did, but by 9 pm I was like, "Sweet! I have enough I'm sending it directly to salon without going through Prinzsorgenfrei." (The difference between this and the Peter Keith letter is I don't want to publish it verbatim, I just want to cite it in defense of my argument. So not knowing every word and character is fine.)
I would like to save Prinzsorgenfrei for the things I really need and can't figure out on my own. And we're getting closer!
Meanwhile, thank you for the translation. Between the undeciphered words and the Rokoko German, that is better than I would have done, which was why I left it for you.
Also, re: "Your Grace" for "Euer Hochwohlgeboren" - I'm not completely happy with it, as "your Grace" implies nobility. Technically, so does Euer Hochwohlgeboren, but de facto, this is used to just signify superior position - for example, in the famous opening letter that starts the Goethe/Schiller correspondence, Schiller adresses Goethe as "Euer Hochwohlgeboren", and later once they've become closer completely skips it.
I noticed that! I'd made the educated guess it was just an honorific and didn't have to mean literal nobility in every case. I was going to say so, but I ran out of time before bed, and I can always count on you to say the things I thought about saying. ;)
Presumably the Glasow part is in the second postcript you haven't decyphered yet.
I don't see his name, but I do see it on the first page of the following letter, so we'll see how far I get today. If not today, hopefully this weekend!
Anyway: even accounting for the possibility that after April 3rd, some sort of bombshell drops re: Fredersdorf, this is a letter written to a man who knows he's dying and whose bad state of health is known to the letter writer.
It also proves what we already knew from the summary, namely that April 9th is not the date he was dismissed, as his position has already been given to Leining. Even if the whole "bad health" thing is a cover-up for embezzlement (which would be VERY strange given his death 9 months later), whatever that April 9 document is, it's not a cabinet order dismissing Fredersdorf. I really wish Wegfraß had given an exact citation. It's hard to refute something I haven't seen. But what I suspect is that it contains a mention of the fact that Fredersdorf no longer works in this position, and she's extrapolating from that to the Kiekemal affair, the same way she extrapolates from the lack of correspondence between Fritz and Fredersdorf (but WHY?? given we know correspondence was destroyed and also there was a war on!).
Now, Glasow was arrested in Saxony where Fritz and the army are, but the distance to Berlin even for the 18th century isn't so long that a good courier couldn't make it on the day of the arrest with orders to Leining to investigate.
Even better, the location of the letter, next to the date, is Lockewitz, which Wikipedia tells me is now in Dresden, and that "Frederick II of Prussia made Lockwitz his headquarters for a month in March 1757." So Leining is with Fritz when all this is going down. In fact, glancing through the locations on the upcoming letters, it looks like he stays near Fritz: he's in Leitmeritz in July, which, as we all know, is where Fritz was when he heard about AW's retreat.
I think Leining is administering the royal casket not from Berlin but from wherever Fritz is, and he's writing to Berlin to ask Fredersdorf to look into the archives there. I could be wrong, but both parts make sense.
an old professional
Oh, *that* makes sense! It was looking like "practious" to me, which I couldn't figure out, so I just left a bunch of Xs, but I suppose that could be "practiour" or even "practicur", which is close to "Praktiker", and these people switch back and forth between French and German and Frenchified German and Germanified French.
ETA: Yep. I just saw him write "Secretair" in the second postscript, and his 'c' in French does look exactly like an 'o'. So that's practicuX, where the final letter doesn't look like his other final 'r', but could easily be an r, and the ink is partially missing anyway. So we'll say it's an 'r', and good guess, Selena!
See, the larger the sample size, the easier the decipherment. You should have seen how many Xs there were in my first passthrough of the letter! I thought I was going to have to ask Prinzsorgenfrei for help. Then I went back over it, and was able to fill in a bunch of characters I had subsequently figured out, and went back over it again and filled in a bunch more, and so on about 5 times. (My technique, btw, is to count the number of lines in the page I'm deciphering, pre-fill my text editor with that many lines consisting of "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX", and then gradually replace Xs with characters (including spaces). This allows me to go, "Is this an 'r'? Let me see where he's written an 'r' before," then trace those previous 'r's back to the handwriting and stare at them for a comparison. It's slow, but it works!)
Son of ETA: That final letter looks a lot like his final 'r' in "Kammerier", so I'm going with "Practicur."
I thoroughly lament and note the news
One thing I want to point out here, because it's relevant to our argument, is that what you've translated "note" is "sehe mit betrübnis".
teach your classinteract with you again." So it's not *necessarily* that we can take Leining's dismay at face value. But I suspect the strongest evidence is yet to come: why would Fritz authorize Leining to allow Fredersdorf to investigate embezzlement if he himself had been convicted of embezzlement?Wegfraß is just WRONG, and we're going to prove it. :P
Okay, off to decipher more and further the cause! Stay tuned!
Re: Leining to Fredersdorf: Letter 1
Date: 2023-04-14 01:48 pm (UTC)Da Eü. Hochwohlgeb. bey den jetzigen zeiten Ihren
Secretair Mr Gentze doch nicht nöthig haben,
und den armen [Jeusen] [günte] versorgt zu sehen
über dem da Er Eü. Hochwgb. FrancaysXX CoreX
[pandenz] geführt, so haben mich Sr. Mayt. an
gerathen einen Menschen hierzu mich an zu
nehmen; als ersuche Eü. Hochwohlgeb. mich
diesen Menschen gütigst zu überlassen.
As you can see, I'm struggling with proper names, "günte" makes no sense (I would like it to be "gut"), I'm not sure about "pandenz", and I want "als" to be "also" (for all I know, that squiggle is how you write 'so'). But I've got the gist of it: Leining is asking if he can take over some of Fredersdorf's staff, since Fredersdorf doesn't need them anymore, and so they (or at least the one guy) can be provided for.
Nothing about Glasow here, but according to the box bills summary, Gentze will play a role in the investigation!
ETA: Btw, now that I've seen "Er" and "Eu" written next to each other, the thing I was transcribing as "Er. Hochwohlgeboren" ("Er." as an abbreviation of "Euer") is now clearly "Eü. Hochwohlgeboren"; they're quite different.
I also can't quite tell what the squiggle at the end of some of the abbreviated "Hochwohlgeb" etc. is, so I'm just transcribing it with a dot to indicate that there's some abbreviation going on here. It might be an 'n', who knows. Capital letters and final letters, as Prinzsorgenfrei has warned me, are a bit of an "anything goes" situation.
Re: Leining to Fredersdorf: Letter 1
Date: 2023-04-14 03:47 pm (UTC)As Your Grace won't be needing your Secretary Mr. Gentze in these current times, and will want to see poor Jeusen Günte (?) provided for, through whom your Grace has conducted your correspondance, His Majesty has advised me to take a man into my service; so I beseech Your Grace to kindly let me have this man.
As you can see, I'm guessing "correspondence" for "coreX(pandenz)", especially considering we know Gentze is the secretary. Jeusen Günte defeats me so far. We should get someone here who is good at scrabble. :)
Anyway, worth repeating: this is not how you write to a man who is curerntly in disgrace for embezzlement.
Re: Leining to Fredersdorf: Letter 1
Date: 2023-04-14 03:54 pm (UTC)"Correspondence", yes! Another excellent guess on your part: that could totally be an 's', and there's a squiggle that could easily be the dash for a word break, I should have caught that! So I'm now reading it as "through whom your Grace has conducted your French correspondence"! Because of course Fredersdorf would need someone.
Jeusen Günte defeats me so far. We should get someone here who is good at scrabble. :)
Haha. The problem with that is that the 'g' in Günte is lowercase! I'm also not sure about any of the letters in "Jeusen", it's like my friend writing "ouailron" for "occasion". It probably all makes perfect sense once you can read the letters.
Anyway, worth repeating: this is not how you write to a man who is curerntly in disgrace for embezzlement.
YES!
Anyway, I have just started the second letter. More later!
ETA: I have just hit the word "gantz" in the second letter. Now, he does not put an umlaut over the 'a' in that word, the 'a' is clearly shaped differently from whatever the vowel in "günte" is, and the 'z' is clearly distinct from whatever that final letter in "günte" is (and by the way, it can be really hard to tell 'u' from 'o', so that could just as easily be "gönte", and I would have put it if I could make any sense of "gönnte" in that context)...now that I know he spells "ganz" "gantz", I'm wondering if "günte" could be any form of "gantz". Because at least semantically it would make sense, although the spelling doesn't match and I can't think of any qualifying variants of "gan(t)z". (Lol, maybe he couldn't decide if he wanted "gut" or "gantz" and wrote "günte", I've been known to do things like that in my native language. :P)
ETA 2: Huh. I'm wondering if "Jeusen" is somehow "Gentze" rendered in German. Because that 'u' could be be an 'n'; by itself it looks exactly like it, and I went back and forth and only put 'u' because of the squiggle over it that I took to be an umlaut. And Gentze is written in French handwriting, and whatever "Jeusen" is, is in German. So if that's "Jensen"...yeah, German "J" is not a great match for French "G", but it's not the worst match, either...
At any rate, I need more examples of that particular final squiggle that might be an 'n' and might be a final flourish on the 'e' and might be an 'r' and might be an 's' and might be the word "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" for all I know. I think it's a lot like the final squiggle on "HochwohlgeborX", which makes me think both are "n", but who knows. I'll keep an eye out for it.
Re: Leining to Fredersdorf: Letter 1
Date: 2023-04-14 04:44 pm (UTC)Poking my head in quickly to say, yay! and yes, definitely worth repeating :D
#JusticeForFredersdorf
Re: Leining to Fredersdorf: Letter 1
Date: 2023-04-14 04:49 pm (UTC)