They're only 8 pages long, the handwriting is abysmal, and they're not in the section I expected (this one is titled "Instructions from Frederick the Great"), which is how I missed them the first time around, quickly flipping through ~1500 handwritten pages in languages I don't know very well. But they're here!
I was hoping for something worth publishing in a short book, like the Des Champs memoirs, whereas I doubt there's much not in these memoirs not already contained in Formey's eulogy, but at least we HAVE the memoirs now, so we'll find out!
...Once I decipher this handwriting, ugh. There's a lot of blotches and scribbling out, this is obviously a first draft, but I will do my best.
Stay tuned!
P.S. Now I have to delete the part of the essay that says they must have been lost, since Carl Ernst gets the sequence of events of the escape wrong. Well, one, these are so short I doubt much detail is included, and two, from what I was able to make out on the first page, Peter, writing 20 years later, has FW sending him to Wesel in mid-January 1729, so apparently his dates can't be trusted either. (Funny how he remembers what part of what month but not what year.)
P.P.S. Wow. Even at 8 pages, just to finally have these, this was worth the $745! (Though I'm still mourning the death of my hopes of being able to publish them as a book-length monograph, short memoirs are orders of magnitude better than forever lost memoirs!)
P.P.P.S. Selena, I'm going to be behind on comments for a while longer. Please forgive your royal decipherer, and keep your write-ups coming. I'm over here avidly reading and enjoying everything you write!
I FOUND PETER'S MEMOIRS
I was hoping for something worth publishing in a short book, like the Des Champs memoirs, whereas I doubt there's much not in these memoirs not already contained in Formey's eulogy, but at least we HAVE the memoirs now, so we'll find out!
...Once I decipher this handwriting, ugh. There's a lot of blotches and scribbling out, this is obviously a first draft, but I will do my best.
Stay tuned!
P.S. Now I have to delete the part of the essay that says they must have been lost, since Carl Ernst gets the sequence of events of the escape wrong. Well, one, these are so short I doubt much detail is included, and two, from what I was able to make out on the first page, Peter, writing 20 years later, has FW sending him to Wesel in mid-January 1729, so apparently his dates can't be trusted either. (Funny how he remembers what part of what month but not what year.)
P.P.S. Wow. Even at 8 pages, just to finally have these, this was worth the $745! (Though I'm still mourning the death of my hopes of being able to publish them as a book-length monograph, short memoirs are orders of magnitude better than forever lost memoirs!)
P.P.P.S. Selena, I'm going to be behind on comments for a while longer. Please forgive your royal decipherer, and keep your write-ups coming. I'm over here avidly reading and enjoying everything you write!