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 other news, Royal Patron and I had a Zoom call tonight in which he held up the Catherine bio to the webcam and turned the pages on demand (he does not read German), and I discovered that the German edition is abridged and "She cried and always took" did not make the cut! (The English edition is unabridged.)

So when you're back in Munich and check your copy, Selena, if you just want to look at page 247 and see if it contains "Sie läßt Knute und Stock gelten..." with the ellipsis at the end, then you have the same edition (there were apparently at least three editions of the French, I discovered tonight) as Royal Patron's library copy, and there is no need for you to do anything further with this book, unless you want to read it for your own sake.

Royal Patron was also nice enough to scan me a 1933 dissertation entitled "Russland und Schweden*: 1762-1772" which cannot be obtained for any price online, so that should be useful for my 1768-1772 (which is increasingly 1764-1772, because you need the lead-up for context) research as well! He is truly a most generous patron (with access to the UCLA library).

* You see where my inability to type "Sweden" on the first try comes from. ;)

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

[selenak]

The book arrived yesterday and I had a very quick look in between packing suitcases, and couldn‘t find anything. That explains it. I‘ll look again when I get back on the weekend.

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

[mildred_of_midgard]

Aha. Yeah, I didn't want you to spend too much time looking for something that wasn't there. (It's a good thing RP and I ended up doing this by Zoom, because the timing accidentally worked out, as he was originally supposed to look for the quote on his own using the clues I'd given him, and it would have been much harder for him to figure out that he wasn't doing it wrong, it wasn't actually there!)

So interestingly, this book *would* not have been an early example of the quote in German, though it is in French and English historiography.

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

[mildred_of_midgard]

Aha. Yeah, I didn't want you to spend too much time looking for something that wasn't there. (It's a good thing RP and I ended up doing this by Zoom, because the timing accidentally worked out, as he was originally supposed to look for the quote on his own using the clues I'd given him, and it would have been much harder for him to figure out that he wasn't doing it wrong, it wasn't actually there!)

So interestingly, this book *would* not have been an early example of the quote in German, as I'd originally thought, though it is still a (very) early example in French and English historiography.