Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 45

[cahn]

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) )

Comments

Re: More FS related Quotes: Prussians, Politics and Sons

[cahn]

We get Wilhelmine's lunch and Joseph's love for his dad in the same comment! <3

Wilhelmine might have been curious to meet the female monarch who had had the courage to stand up to her brother.

Awwww. I love this framing and, I mean. I can't imagine she's wrong.

Once these events were reported to Berlin, all hell broke loose. Against her brother's accusations, the Margravine defended herself cooly and matter-of-factly: "Regarding my encounter with the Queen of Hungary, it was a simple polite gesture.

as we know: FRITZ

FS takes a leaf from Voltaire's, Fritz' and Heinrich's book and writes, not an anonymous pamphlet, but an anonymous memorandum "by a true German" to explain why he thinks they should just make up with Prussia already in 1748 (Cahn, the two Silesian Wars are over for some years, but MT is just about to wrap up the War of Austrian Succession as far her other opponents are concerned):

Thank you as always for the chronology note (maybe someday I will figure out more dates in this fandom -- I did finally get 1730 into my head :P -- but today is not the day) -- also, LOL :D A true German! <3

Fred Hennings and Georg Schreiber both are a bit confused why MT wanted the Leopold marriage to take place in Innsbruck instead of Milan or Vienna. Zedinger, like Stollberg-Rillinger, is confused they're confused, because the reasons seem obvious to her:

Heh. I really am enjoying your parallax view of the three bios, and how some of them have viewpoints that others of them don't have!

Moving on to FS' death, Schreiber provides some gruesome details, because since this was August, poor FS was decaying very quickly and they had to use a lot of herbs and perfumes for the burial

:(

When ther are repeated often ridiculous complications during the journey, he writes: "An angel would lose his patience at this point, and his Majesty, too, is in a bad mood and exhausted."

Awwww. I love these quotes about Vienna!Joe and his dad, and reporting about the random stuff that happens during the journey.

Again, I remember the sight of those three coffins in the MT crypt - that beautiful baroque opulent tomb of MT and FS with their statues depicted lying on their bed turned towards each other, and the absolute contract, that zinc coffin Joseph put himself into. But he still wanted to be with his parents in that final resting place. Different as they were from him, and as much as they often had to find each other frustrating, I think he always was aware they loved him.

Oh, this is just... I'm glad that they shared that love. This is beautiful and touching and there's something in my eye now :P <3333333

Re: More FS related Quotes: Prussians, Politics and Sons

[mildred_of_midgard]

(maybe someday I will figure out more dates in this fandom -- I did finally get 1730 into my head :P -- but today is not the day)

Hee, well, you're ahead of one contemporary! I was looking at my Peter fic today, because I got a comment on it yesterday, and I noticed the line "at least Ariane was glad he'd survived that terrible year of 1730." Of all the details I suspected were going to turn out historically inaccurate when I wrote that fic, and many of which did*, I never anticipated that Peter remembering the year as 1730 was going to be one of them!

* I knew making out up with Fritz was not how he got Charlottenburg and Tiergarten responsbilities, but we didn't know about Knobelsdorff yet. I strongly suspected Friedrich Ludwig was dead already in in 1777, and indeed, he was. I didn't realize Peter *did* ask Fritz for things after the early 1740s. Etc.