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: Leining to Fredersdorf: Letter 2

[mildred_of_midgard]

but apparently Charlotte Pangels and all the other "Voltaire was the only contemporary to ever say that Fritz was gay!" biographers did not.

Are we sure they've even read Kalckreuth? He's not mentioned in MacDonogh or Blanning, I just checked. I honestly think we of salon (by which I mostly mean you) have read reams of sources on Fritz that many of his biographers have not.

(i.e. the coffee maker Wöllner/Völker - has that guy shown up yet in the letters, Mildred)

I'm only 3 lines ahead of you, and so far no, but still almost 3 pages to go in this letter, so we'll see.

ETA: I finished my first passthrough of the first paragraph, and I'm only missing 2 words, and I can already tell it's only mentioning Glasow in passing; Leining's talking about the payment of the order for Champagne wine that he found in Glasow's papers. Nothing exciting yet. We'll see about the second paragraph, but these letters may have run out of interesting Glasow gossip.

Since clearly there was at the very least some embezzling going on, I'm wondering about Kalckreuth's motives here. I mean, he was already Heinrich's boyfriend but not yet his AD (Henckel von Donnersmarck was), and while no Kaphengst, I bet he wasn't monogamous.

Hmm! It's possible!