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: "She cried but she took": according to non-Germans

[cahn]

Huh, the evolution of this is interesting! "Elle pleurait et prenait toujours" does sound rather snappy, at that :P

Re: "She cried but she took": according to non-Germans

[mildred_of_midgard]

You replied *just* as I was about to ETA that I do need to double check one of my major premises, which is that Karl von Hessen's memoirs were in fact written in French; it occured to me that it is just possible that the 1861 publication is a French translation, and "elle pleurait et prenait toujours" is a translation of the 1816-1817 German original and not vice versa as I was assuming based on circumstantial evidnece. The fact remains that the snappier French line and variations thereof caught on very early in French and English historiography (and that Brendan Simms did write in English :P).

ETA: Yeah, the French version is ~150 pages and the editors' note at the beginning says nothing about a translation, just that they corrected some solecisms in the manuscript; the 1816-1817 version titles it "Memoires de mon temps", and the 1862 German article cited by Luh, which is just a few pages of excerpts, says the manuscript was printed in French in 1861. So I think it's the usual case of "18th century German writes in French; is translated partially or fully into German in the 19th century for interested Germans." (And the translation really appears to be partial in this case.) I had a sudden panic that the 1816-1817 version might have been a complete copy dictated in German, because it's no longer the 18th century, but no, looks like the original really was "elle pleurait et prenait toujours."