Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 44

[cahn]

Not only are these posts still going, there is now (more) original research going on in them deciphering and translating letters in archives that apparently no one has bothered to look at before?? (Which has now conclusively exonerated Fritz's valet/chamberlain Fredersdorf from the charge that he was dismissed because of financial irregularities and died shortly thereafter "ashamed of his lost honor," as Wikipedia would have it. I'M JUST SAYING.)

Comments

Re: Letter from Fritz...to Peter? - or not?

[mildred_of_midgard]

The almost identical phrasing in the Camas letter reminds me of how Fritz used the same text in his letters to both Duhan and Algarotti in 1740.

Yep, and Voltaire and Suhm in 1739.

Given Peter inherited Knobelsdorff‘s books, I think it‘s plausible for Knobelsdorff to have used the letter as a reading marker in a book and for Peter to find it later and keep it.

Or maybe even more plausible, Peter not to have found it (if it was a large library and the letter was folded up inside a page, he might not have gone through every page of every book), and someone else, like his son, to have found it. Would Peter have kept a letter showing that everyone but him was in favor? Maybe, but I find it even more likely that someone who didn't have his fraught history and raw emotions re Fritz would have gone, "Ooh, a letter from the great king! Must put it somewhere safe!" Might still have been Peter, of course, but I present this alternate possibility.

ETA: The evidence for Peter finding it is the order in which it's placed in the stack of letters, i.e. early 1750s, right after Knobelsdorff's death and Peter's acquisition of the library.