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cahnUnfortunately, there was then at Berlin a King who pursued one policy only, who deceived his enemies, but not his servants, and who lied without scruple, but never without necessity.
(from The King's Secret - by Duke de Broglie, grand-nephew of the subject of the book, Comte de Broglie, and grandfather of the physicist) )
(from The King's Secret - by Duke de Broglie, grand-nephew of the subject of the book, Comte de Broglie, and grandfather of the physicist) )
FS Choice Quotes - Silesia 1 and getting engaged
Date: 2023-08-16 11:06 am (UTC)FS and MT weren't allowed to correspond directly before becoming officially engaged, or to meet without company, but MT's Aja the Countess Fuchs as well as her mother were unofficially helpful with both, i.e. they engineered meetings with minimum supervision when FS was visiting in Vienna after having become Duke and before the official engagement, and FS wrote to the "Fuchsin" knowing she'd forward news to MT. Once they were allowed to write directly, the engagement letters are a mixture of Rokoko German-French with some Italian sprinkled in and for all that the letter writing rules are observed re: salutations and goodbyes, pretty endearing, with this letter of MT's the one to even melt the determinedly anti-Romantic Stolberg-Rillinger a bit when she quoted it in her MT bio, as does Fred H. in his FS bio:
Caro viso, je vous suits infininement obliges pour votre attention de m'ecrire de vos nouvelles, car j'etois en peine comme une pauvre chienne; aimez moi un peu et me pardonnez si je ne vous respons pas assez, mais c'est 10 heure et herbeville attende pour ma lettre. Adieu Mäusl, je vous embrasse de tout mon coeur, menagez vous bien, adieu caro viso
je suis la votre
sponsia dilectisissima
Schreiber who quotes a German translation of this same letter thinks a nickname like "Mäusl" presumably wasn't newly invented for this correspondence when they finally got officially engaged but presumably was used verbally in those semi secret meetings before. Speaking of nicknames, Schreiber is also bewildered wthat only six years into the marriage, FS and MT use "Alter" (FS writes as Zedinger quotes "Chère Mitz" - I have to say here I was relieved to read this, because I kept wondering where I got the "Mitz" nickname from and wasn't able to find it, and now I have proof again I didn't invent it - and signs himself "Dero Alter", MT writes "Mein Alter", i.e. "my old man". Now neither of them as old yet when they started to use this, so my take is that it's clearly a shared teasing.
Back to Fred Hennings, have some excerpts from the "Invading is how you show true friendship" conversation which Gotter, the Prussian representataive, transcribed for Fritz, complete with stage directions. Now as with his letters, Fritz at this point did of course not address MT, or negotiate with MT. He negotiated with FS, assuming along with most folk in 1740/41 that naturally the husband would be the true power, not the ZOMG WOMAN who'd inherited the Austrian territories. However, it was very clear MT was listening in to the negotiations in the next room since at some point she interrupted ostensibly to remind FS of the time, and when he came back with new arguments the Prussian Representative noted to his displeasure that this made clear who they were really talking to, no matter that Fritz wanted to do this among men etc. So, have some quotes from the second conversation between FS and Prussian Representative Gotter on New Year's Day 1741 (note re: the title - FS is only a Grand Duke (of Tuscany) right then, so no "your Majesty"):
Gotter: The King much regrets that the measures he had to take have found such a bad reception here, despite his intentions being only good ones, and only aim to preserve the House of Austria and the improvement of Your Highness' station.
Grandduke: To invade with 30.000 men, to play Master... are those the proofs of good friendship and means to preserve the House of Austria? Do you really want to dress up such outrageous acts in pretty clothing? Does one win friends by beating them with a stick? Judge for yourself!
Gotter: Your Highness should consider the respectable offerings the King has made. Also your ascension to the Imperial dignity.
(At this point Fritz - in his capacity as Prince Elector of Brandenburg - was still offering to support FS as Emperor as part of FS letting him have Silesia.)
Gotter: When invading Silesia, the King is only taking possession of a country which as he believes is rightfully his and which he also considers his reward for the great services he offers.
Grandduke: Rather say - he wanted to have Silesia and thought this was a great opportunity to get it. Couldn't he have made prepositions before attacking - talk to us instead of surprise us, when we least expected it from him? It would have been my pleasure to negotiate, instead of arms deciding everything now. It was in his hand to play a good and glorious role, but now he has filled the world with distrust and no one knows anymore what to expect of him.
Gotter: I am ordered, kind Sir, despite your earlier refusal to listen to me to assure you once again how much the King wants to come to an agreement with you. There are ways and means for everything except death. The King's friendship for you might move him to lessen his demands. And if the King's behavior is a bit odd, if he has started this game a bit early, you can blame only his eagerness to be of use to you before open or secret enemies of his can execute the coup they have prepared.
Grandduke: The King might think benevolently, but he acts lousily, if I may say so. Sir, if someone would barge into your rooms with a drawn sword in his hand and would gesture wildly with it, would you then endure this and treat him as your friend?
Gotter: I would ask him what he wants here, and if he told me that he only wants a corner of the room in order to defend me against those who want to kill mem, I would leave him there and rejoice in his presence. (...)
Grandduke: That looks like someone slapping someone else in the face and then saying: Don't be angry, I didn't do it out of ill will. No?
Gotter is silent but thinks: omne simile claudicat.
Grandduke: What kind of prepositions to you want to make? In which way do you want to play this affair down and make up for it? You want the whole of Silesia of us, and we don't want to hand it over. There is no gap to bridge between everything and nothng.
Gotter: In order to make this easier for you, the King is ready to accept less than everything and will content himself with the majority of the country. It is now up to you, gracious Lord, to satisfy him.
Grandduke: Oh no, Sir, it isn't up to us. The King wants to enrich himself at our expense, and for us the leading principle is to concede to no one, who ever it may be, something of the Queen's territories. Otherwise everyone would come with similar demands, and we'd never be at rest. Better to go down with the sword in hand than letting yourself torn apart without resisting.
Gotter: But, gracious Lord, is it worth enstranging yourself with your best friend, my King, just because of the little trivial thing he wants to have?
Grandduke: A little trivial thing? Are you calling Silesia a bagatelle? Good lord, we know better.
Gotter: The King doesn't claim the whole of Silesia; what he wants is the teensiest weensiest bit that it will neither make the King of Prussia richer nor the House of Austria poorer. He would be able to live well without it.
Grandduke: So in order to oblige him I'm supposed to tear my waistcoat apart.
Gotter: It's not even a sleeve of your waistcoat but a single button.
And so forth, and so on, until MT interrupts again, "reminding FS of the time". Now, all three biographers think while FS did think the whole protection racket was outrageous and while he wouldn't trust Fritz again, he also would have been ready to compromise if it had been up to him, Schreiber and Zedinger point out he had himself given up Lorraine, so might not have thought the loss of one province as so unacceptable as MT did. But I don't think that comparison really works, because FS gave up Lorraine in exchange for Tuscany and a wife who was the richest heiress on the continent, and in a situation where the French had already occupied the duchy (they invaded the moment the War of the Polish Succession began). The alternative to giving up Lorraine would have been no MT, no Tuscany and still an occupied duchy with French troops calling the shots. Whereas giving up Silesia without a fight, well, Mildred wrote lengthy speculations about possible scenarios.
Re: FS Choice Quotes - Silesia 1 and getting engaged
Date: 2023-08-18 05:21 am (UTC)I see that FS was more than 8 years older than MT, and especially if they grew up together, that's a very large interval! I can totally see FS being "old" to MT as a young girl :)
Gotter: The King doesn't claim the whole of Silesia; what he wants is the teensiest weensiest bit that it will neither make the King of Prussia richer nor the House of Austria poorer. He would be able to live well without it.
Oh Fritz :)
Re: FS Choice Quotes - Silesia 1 and getting engaged
Date: 2023-08-18 09:45 am (UTC)I see that FS was more than 8 years older than MT, and especially if they grew up together, that's a very large interval! I can totally see FS being "old" to MT as a young girl :)
That might be the origin of the nickname. Of course, when they re-met each other after he'd become Duke and could only be in Vienna intermittently, for visits, she was a teenager at the right age to crush on him, but during her childhood, he probably looked like an adult to her. (Though I bet she knew he was a possible marriage candidate, and not just here for his courtly education.)
Oh, I forgot something I meant to add elsewhere, another new detail I learned through these biographies: FS had two surviving into adulthood siblings (initially three, but the older sister died early), Karl the guy who was hated on by the Hungarian Brühl biographer as an incompetent general whom MT should have sacked instead of kept on giving commands to, and another Charlotte who after their other's death first lived with FS in Vienna and then with Karl in Brussels. He was close with both siblings, and also close to MT's sole sister Anna Maria who was married to his brother Karl and tried tragically young and for the sadly all too common reason of childbed fever. In one of the letters by FS to Karl and Anna Maria when they're in Brussels and she's pregnant, he congratulates and says he wishes he could put his hand on her belly to feel the child kicking, which strikes me as a very intimate thing but also something a man whose wife went through sixteen pregnancies of her own presumably had already plenty experience with. And it's the kind of thing I just can't imagine written among, say, the Bourbons.
Re: FS Choice Quotes - Silesia 1 and getting engaged
Date: 2023-08-19 05:53 pm (UTC)Aw... yeah. :P
Re: FS Choice Quotes - Silesia 1 and getting engaged
Date: 2023-09-05 12:50 pm (UTC)Charlotte was also new to me! (I knew about Karl the general who kept losing, of course.)
Re: FS Choice Quotes - Silesia 1 and getting engaged
Date: 2023-09-06 05:40 am (UTC)Speaking of siblings: I watched this lively debate of novelists who wrote about Alexander (the Great), and it very much amused me that one of them said that one of her special angles was a focus on his sister Cleopatra, because if you read/watch Alexander fiction, you'd think he was an only child, which he assuredly was not. I'm not invested in Alexander but at this point I exclaimed "hail, comrade!"
Re: FS Choice Quotes - Silesia 1 and getting engaged
Date: 2023-09-07 12:08 pm (UTC)Re: FS Choice Quotes - Silesia 1 and getting engaged
Date: 2023-09-10 08:32 pm (UTC):D I am all about subscribing to the sibling newsletters! :D
Re: FS Choice Quotes - Silesia 1 and getting engaged
Date: 2023-09-05 12:49 pm (UTC)This may have been in S-R, but if so, I had forgotten, and was surprised and charmed anew! I immediately thought, "No wonder she got buried in the Habsburg crypt." :P
have some excerpts from the "Invading is how you show true friendship" conversation which Gotter, the Prussian representataive, transcribed for Fritz, complete with stage directions.
This whole thing was AMAZING, and I can't believe we hadn't come across it before. How does *every* biographer not cite this, I do not understand.
Whereas giving up Silesia without a fight, well, Mildred wrote lengthy speculations about possible scenarios.
Yes, and as you may recall, I wrote them when we discovered that Saxon and Bavarian foreign policy of the early 1740s was WAY more complicated than we realized early on in salon when we made similar speculations, and it's really hard to predict what would have happened.
Re: FS Choice Quotes - Silesia 1 and getting engaged
Date: 2023-09-06 05:48 am (UTC)It is of utmost hilarity. (Well, to us, from centuries distance, my guess is that MT was probably seething behind the door.) I do suspect the reason why it's not quoted more often is that even Fritz-fannish 19th century German historians did feel a sense of him not coming across as the daring young eagle claiming what's his (why does he over with justifications in the best contorted logic ancien regime style anywway, from their pov? He's supposed to be the bold straight talking manly man here!), and Austrian historians weren't that interested because it's not MT doing the responding but FS.
Re: FS Choice Quotes - Silesia 1 and getting engaged
Date: 2023-09-07 12:09 pm (UTC)Yeah, fair. But come on, Blanning! :P
Austrian historians weren't that interested because it's not MT doing the responding but FS
Good thing we finally read up on FS, then!