cahn | Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 45

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Unfortunately, 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) )

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From:

selenak

The whole conversation with Gotter is one long "Oh, Fritz" exclamation on the part of a reader. Well, with the occasional "oh Gotter", because Gotter can't resist emphasizing FS makes some Latin mistakes while he, Gotter is fluent in Latin.

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.

From:

cahn

And it's the kind of thing I just can't imagine written among, say, the Bourbons.

Aw... yeah. :P

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Oh, I forgot something I meant to add elsewhere, another new detail I learned through these biographies: FS had two surviving into adulthood siblings

Charlotte was also new to me! (I knew about Karl the general who kept losing, of course.)

From:

selenak

I am pleased Salon upholds the tradition of sibling discovery! Charlotte doesn't make it into historical fiction, mind - the MT series includes Karl the battle loser and their mother, but not Charlotte, for example - , so that's probably one big reason I never heard of her before. But all three biographies agree the surviving Lorraine siblings were close.

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!"

From:

mildred_of_midgard

My immediate reaction to a mention of Cleopatra: "Is that Jeanne Reames?" And then I clicked on the link (no, I did not watch, predictably), and saw Jeanne Reames straight off! I liked her Alexander books, can recommend. Cleopatra/Kleopatra is indeed a great character, and in general the characterization is good.

From:

cahn

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!"

:D I am all about subscribing to the sibling newsletters! :D