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

[mildred_of_midgard]

In an 1878 serialized history appearing in the Revue des Deux Mondes and then published as a free-standing book, La Question d'Orient Au XVIIIe Siècle, in the same year, Albert Sorel quotes "Elle pleurait et prenait toujours!" and attributes it to Fritz.

I forgot to mention, Albert Sorel is famous enough as a historian that I recognized the name immediately, though I haven't read any of his work. Wikipedia tells me he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times. So people were reading his stuff. I suspect he and maybe the Duc de Broglie were responsible for this phrase taking off in French (and thereby English) historiography.

I was also going to fix a bunch of typos in the original write-up last night, but cahn's reply beat me to it by one minute. So you'll just have to accept missing verbs, 1910 being in the 19th century, etc. ;)