As I working diligently on the Peter Keith paper, some randomness.
* Is there any source other than Wilhelmine for "If my father had treated me the way you treated me, I would have run away"? I've seen variants like "I would have ended my life with a pistol shot" in secondary sources, but can't think of anywhere other than Wilhelmine for this claim.
* Me, typing the words "the man who'd arrested Katte and later become friends with Keith" and suddenly realizing what I was writing...
Me: "...Was that awkward at all, making friends with the guy who escaped when the guy you arrested was famously unjustly executed? Or just one of those things?"
* The story that Peter left Wesel because he was warned started early: von Johnn, the Danish ambassador, writes on the 19th of August 1730 that that's what everyone in Berlin learned on August 17, i.e., that was the very first version of the story to reach Berlin. No wonder it spread so widely. (Still can't believe Kloosterhuis fell for it, when he's the one who published the inventory of Peter's rooms on August 7, which makes it crystal clear that the chronology would be impossible. He also cites Koser pretty extensively, and Koser spells it out (the only person I've seen do so).)
(Cahn, if you're seeing this notification for the second time, apparently the first time I clicked on the wrong tab and left the comment in one of your personal posts! Which I have now deleted.)
Me: "...Was that awkward at all, making friends with the guy who escaped when the guy you arrested was famously unjustly executed? Or just one of those things?"
Ugh, I wonder if that was all filed under "working for FW was just One of Those Things." :P
Probably! These people were pretty good at compartmentalization: one decade you're leading Russian armies, the next decade you're fighting Russians. Actually, writing that out made me realize the guy I'm thinking of, James Keith (I have Keiths on the brain), was still alive when Zorndorf happened, since Hochkirch, when he died, was a couple months later. Do we know if Keith, former Russian general, was present at Zorndorf, Selena? At any rate, he was in the army and knew very well he could be asked to fight a Russian army without batting an eye.
That said, we also know that sometimes there was awkwardness! At least if the story is true that James Keith's brother George, better known as the Earl Marischal, summoned the British envoy to his deathbed in 1778 because "I find pleasure in emitting the last sighs of a Jacobite to a minister of King George."
Sometimes you downplay the awkwardness, sometimes you lean into it!
Do we know if Keith, former Russian general, was present at Zorndorf, Selena?
No idea, Seydlitz was the only one singled out in the descriptions of that battle I recall, because that was the occasion where he kept waiting against Fritz' orders because he knew his charge had to be timed just right. (Which was until 1918 used as an example in Prussian army training, I hear, for how obeying the spirit of the order is more important than the letter of the order and an officer needs to be able to show initiative, too. (But not everyone is the Cary Grant of generals.)
Anyway, it's possible James Keith was there since he was certainly with Fritz' part of the army some months later at Hochkirch, and between Zorndorf and Hochkirch was just Fritz' meeting up with Heinrich a deux plus Seydlitz in Dresden (speaking of awkward, emotionally intense moments...) and I don't think Keith was ever with Heinrich's part of the army.
Pretty much what I was thinking, except that not every regiment is engaged in every combat (I believe there was a battle, maybe Prague? that AW's was not engaged and Heinrich's was). Anyway! Same idea!
And yes, Seydlitz is the one I always associate with Zorndorf. Cary Grant, lol.
Discovery: Varnhagen von Ense says that Keith was not at Zorndorf, he had been left in Silesia. He was initially supposed to be in command there, but he was bedridden with asthma and the Margrave Karl of Brandenburg had to take over. But before the Margrave left, Keith gave him some advice on how to beat the Russians.
Then Keith recovered fairly quickly, and he went to the field camp in Silesia to assume command again. He was on the move in Silesia when he got the news of Zorndorf.
Also, I hadn't realized how pissed off he was at the Russians for his dismissal: when he heard that they had fought bravely, he just replied, "cette canaille!"
Ah, no, it looks like that was me skimming too quickly.
A closer reading indicates Bestushev conspired against Keith and caused him to lose his position of command, at which point he demanded his release from Russian service. He eventually got it, but then he had some friction with the authorities over the terms of his release: they wanted him to promise never to fight against Russia, whereas he was like, "Once I'm out of your service, I'm nothing more than a British subject, and I'll fight who I want." But since he didn't want to go to Siberia, he agreed to read the fine print. It said that if he did fight against Russia, he agreed to be judged by the Russian articles of war. He immediately agreed to sign that, since he was confident that there wasn't a single article saying a free Englishman couldn't fight who he wanted.
So while he did leave voluntarily, it was because he was pissed off at losing his command, and it wasn't on good terms. So much so that when he left, he took ship directly to England, since he was afraid of traveling by land and getting arrested.
But since he didn't want to go to Siberia, he agreed to read the fine print. It said that if he did fight against Russia, he agreed to be judged by the Russian articles of war. He immediately agreed to sign that, since he was confident that there wasn't a single article saying a free Englishman couldn't fight who he wanted.
Also, notice how he's a free Englishman, not a Scot. We've talked before in salon about the prejudice against Scots during this period, and when James is trying to quit Russian service, it's ~1747, i.e., just months after the defeat of the biggest (and final) Jacobite rebellion, the '45.
At least if the story is true that James Keith's brother George, better known as the Earl Marischal, summoned the British envoy to his deathbed in 1778 because "I find pleasure in emitting the last sighs of a Jacobite to a minister of King George." Heh. Interesting that he still thought of himself that way in 1778, long after Jacobite hopes had died and when he had served another country for so long.
Random: thanks to the latest batch from the Prussian archives, I now know that Peter Keith's son Karl abbreviated FW's name as "F.W.". It's not just us! (And if he'd had 4 million words of salon material to produce, he'd have dropped the periods too. ;))
I had originally said that I could only find a few posthumous references to Peter as Baron/Freiherr, and I thought it was a misunderstanding based on his wife's "Baroness" title. I've now found two occurrences from the 1740s: one in 1748 where the East Frisians were asking Fritz permission to make him a member of the local nobility/knighthood (Ritterschaft) despite the fact that he only had an estate (Visquard) in East Frisia through his wife, and his son's baptism record in 1745, which I had somehow missed/forgotten refers to him as "Baron de Keith."
But I've never seen him referred to this way by anyone who actually knew him, just in official documents where his wife is mentioned as a Baroness. Whereas their son Karl Ernst is a baron pretty consistently. So I'm inclined to think that Peter didn't use this title, but it was used as a courtesy title for him to avoid having his wife outrank him.
I'm not aware of that as a general practice, but it's all I can come up with.
Also! More interestingly. Back in the beginning of salon, I reported that Fritz & co. had been arrested on that Strasbourg trip. I'm starting to think I got that from *Tumblr*. The closest I can find in what I had read of real sources is MacDonogh's "Broglie had been keen to avoid a diplomatic incident by arresting the king." Maybe I misunderstood that in isolation, or combined it with something I had read on Tumblr, because I'm not finding it elsewhere. It's not in Voltaire, it's not in Bielfeld, it's not in Blanning, it's not in Asprey...
And as we later found, thanks to the good offices of selenak and felis, that it's not in Broglie's report or Manteuffel's or any of the other actual contemporary sources.
The only actual (non-tumblr) place I can think of (unless you can think of something else, Selena) that says they were arrested is Ziebura's AW bio, where she writes, "Frederick does not mention to Voltaire the inglorious end of their adventure, but Wilhelm notes in his autobiography that they were arrested." ("Friedrich berichtet Voltaire nichts von dem unrühmlichen Ende ihres Abenteuers, aber Wilhelm vermerkt in seinem Lebenslauf, dass sie arretiert wurden.")
Well, you may remember that I got my hands on a copy of that autobiography last year, and since I was researching that episode for my Peter Keith work, I went and looked at it just now.
Here's what it says:
Je Suivie le Roi Mon frere à Bareut et de la Strasbourg ou nous etant arrette qu'un jours nous nous rendimes a Wesell
Now, I looked at that with my recently improved French and immediately went, "I don't think that's what it says..." Then I asked Google Translate, and Google went, "I don't think that's what it says..."
Google and I agree that that says, "I accompanied my brother the king to Bayreuth, and from Strasbourg, where we only stayed one day, we went to Wesel."
I would be just willing to accept an alternate interpretation of "We were only arrested one day," but only if there were rumors flying around that they were arrested more than one day. And as we've seen, there weren't (unless I'm missing something).
Now, I'm far from fluent in French, but I think the easiest explanation here is that Ziebura is also less than perfectly fluent, and that she's fallen prey to a false friend.
Also, I want to add that Ziebura says that the autobiography was written in 1744, the year of the birth of AW's son (FW2), but Krieger, who published the autobiography with his commentary, says that we can't assume that; both drafts (there are two) break off in the middle of a sentence at the end of a page, one in 1740 and one in 1744, and it's clear (to him) that we're just missing the last part.
Update: I checked with a near-native speaker of French. He confirmed my reading and agrees that it looks like a case of a false friend. Mystery solved! There was no arrest.
Je Suivie le Roi Mon frere à Bareut et de la Strasbourg ou nous etant arrette qu'un jours nous nous rendimes a Wesell
Me: Yeah, that seems pretty straightforward, "where we had stopped just for a day," what's the prob -- oh. Yeah.
I see that your friend has confirmed, but yes, I remember memorizing arrêter as "stop" and being told that it did NOT mean "arrest" (in the police sense, rather than the, idk, "the motion of his hand was arrested in mid-air" sense) even in first-year French.
Good grief, yes, same here to both what you were saying. I imagine Ziebura was just very exhausted the day she transcribed this...
This said, the brain works in mysterious ways even for princes who have French as their first language, see Fritz writing to Heinrich to arrange their post AW meeting in Dresden, and using a a French word which puzzled me until I figured out he must have been thinking in German and used the literal translation, proving this could happen even to Fritz. (Who had just marched to Zorndorf and back in the company of German soldiers and without his usual full entourage of French speakers, which might explain it.)
Good grief, yes, same here to both what you were saying. I imagine Ziebura was just very exhausted the day she transcribed this...
Either that, or she was just going from memory. You and I have written some stuff in salon that would make me question your command of German and my command of English if I thought we had written it while staring at the text in question, but no, we were summarizing what we remembered.
This said, the brain works in mysterious ways even for princes who have French as their first language, see Fritz writing to Heinrich to arrange their post AW meeting in Dresden, and using a a French word which puzzled me until I figured out he must have been thinking in German and used the literal translation, proving this could happen even to Fritz.
Very true! Bilingualism is complicated. It's possible Ziebura was very fluent in French, but had a moment of what linguists call "linguistic interference" and what laypeople call "a brain fart." ;)
(Who had just marched to Zorndorf and back in the company of German soldiers and without his usual full entourage of French speakers, which might explain it.)
I remember memorizing arrêter as "stop" and being told that it did NOT mean "arrest" (in the police sense, rather than the, idk, "the motion of his hand was arrested in mid-air" sense) even in first-year French.
So did I! But that doesn't mean a word can't have multiple meanings, or that the meaning can't change over time. We've seen "Sodomie" change meanings in German since the 18th century, from "sexual deviance including homosexuality" to "bestiality".
And looking at Larousse, I see "Appréhender quelqu'un par autorité de justice ou de police, l'incarcérer" *is* a possible meaning for "arrêter", it's just not the most common one that you and I would learn in first-year French.
What convinced me that this wasn't "we were arrested" was the "qu'", which I didn't learn in first or second year French could mean "only/just/no more than." I only learned that in the last couple years of French practice, which is why I referred to my "recently improved" French. So either AW is saying they were only arrested one day, or that they only spent one day there, and then it becomes a question of pragmatics. Saying you went to a whole other country but only for one day: totally normal. I myself would say "I've been to Prague, but only for one day." Casually mentioning you were arrested but only for one day: only makes sense if that's not a big deal (compared to something that is a big deal). Since it *would* have been a big deal for the King and Crown Prince of Prussia to be arrested, that reading only works for me if there are claims that they were arrested for more than one day. Since I'm not seeing those claims, "only spent one day" is the only reasonable reading I can get out of this.
The reason I asked my friend: Larousse says that "arrêter" means "spend time" when it's reflexive, i.e., I would expect AW to have written "nous nous etant arrette." I wanted to check that my reading was still okay without the extra "nous". Since my friend says it is, we're good.
Speaking of words that can have more than one meaning, I meant to add that our friend "douceurs" that we ran into in the Leining letters and which Selena translated "sweets" and I commented I only knew it as "gratuities" in English...I have now run into the "gratuities" meaning in both the Keith papers *and* the Berlin Kriminal Senat's judgment on Pfeiffer. (Either that, or they're giving out candy in some weird contexts. :P) So it seems that had both meanings, or else Leining was borrowing from French.
Okay, I can't find it in Duden, but the Digitale Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache defines "Douceur" as "Trinkgeld", i.e. tip, and says it's old-fashioned. Since I can't come up with any other reading of the Leining sentence than the way Selena read it, i.e., with Fritz being the recipient, and since there's a food context, "Douceur" might actually have only meant "tip/gratuity" in German, but Leining was thinking in French, where it does mean "sweets" in the plural. I've often found it hard in these older texts to tell if someone is using the French word instead of the German word ad hoc, because the French word was the first one to come to their mind, or because they're speaking German and the French word was a widely used French loanword in German.
So having seen MacDonogh say that Broglie had been keen to avoid a diplomatic incident by arresting the king, and having seen Mitford say that Fritz was nearly arrested, I wondered where that was coming from.
Well, searching for something Peter Keith-related, I found this gem in Fritz's description to Voltaire of the Strasbourg episode:
This general [Broglie] wanted to know who this Count Dufour was, a foreigner who, having barely arrived, was getting involved in assembling a company of people he did not know. He took the poor count for a purse-snatcher, and prudently advised M. de la Crochardière not to be taken in by him. Unfortunately, it was the good marshal who was.
Saxons: Purse-snatcher, eh? Well, he's not wrong...
More randomness: There are 1 million editions of Wilhelmine's memoirs and they are all slightly different. Good news: I did find the version that she wrote in 1739-1740 (in German translation), which we had been wishing we had a few years ago (though now I completely forget why :P).
I'm glad I found this version, because it includes one throwaway line that wasn't in any other version I've read, and which is relevant to Peter Keith: when he was page, he was "very much in favor" with FW! Now, I'm not surprised that if you want to spy on the king for your boyfriend, this is best served by sucking up to the king and not alienating him. But wow, I feel like discovering that he was plotting with Fritz was like FW discovering Løvenørn had betrayed him: "I thought you were my friend!"
Also, huh. Peter must have had better acting abilities than Fritz, and must have been all "Mr. Gung Ho Army Guy" in front of FW very convincingly. I wonder if he had to consume a lot of alcohol (and pretend to smoke like, was it Seckendorff and the Alte Dessauer?), or if that was Not For Pages.
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timeasmymeasure
Random escape-related stuff
Date: 2024-08-02 07:27 pm (UTC)* Is there any source other than Wilhelmine for "If my father had treated me the way you treated me, I would have run away"? I've seen variants like "I would have ended my life with a pistol shot" in secondary sources, but can't think of anywhere other than Wilhelmine for this claim.
* Me, typing the words "the man who'd arrested Katte and later become friends with Keith" and suddenly realizing what I was writing...
Me: "...Was that awkward at all, making friends with the guy who escaped when the guy you arrested was famously
unjustlyexecuted? Or just one of those things?"* The story that Peter left Wesel because he was warned started early: von Johnn, the Danish ambassador, writes on the 19th of August 1730 that that's what everyone in Berlin learned on August 17, i.e., that was the very first version of the story to reach Berlin. No wonder it spread so widely. (Still can't believe Kloosterhuis fell for it, when he's the one who published the inventory of Peter's rooms on August 7, which makes it crystal clear that the chronology would be impossible. He also cites Koser pretty extensively, and Koser spells it out (the only person I've seen do so).)
(Cahn, if you're seeing this notification for the second time, apparently the first time I clicked on the wrong tab and left the comment in one of your personal posts! Which I have now deleted.)
Re: Random escape-related stuff
Date: 2024-08-05 04:42 am (UTC)Ugh, I wonder if that was all filed under "working for FW was just One of Those Things." :P
Re: Random escape-related stuff
Date: 2024-08-05 02:33 pm (UTC)That said, we also know that sometimes there was awkwardness! At least if the story is true that James Keith's brother George, better known as the Earl Marischal, summoned the British envoy to his deathbed in 1778 because "I find pleasure in emitting the last sighs of a Jacobite to a minister of King George."
Sometimes you downplay the awkwardness, sometimes you lean into it!
Re: Random escape-related stuff
Date: 2024-08-07 01:50 pm (UTC)No idea, Seydlitz was the only one singled out in the descriptions of that battle I recall, because that was the occasion where he kept waiting against Fritz' orders because he knew his charge had to be timed just right. (Which was until 1918 used as an example in Prussian army training, I hear, for how obeying the spirit of the order is more important than the letter of the order and an officer needs to be able to show initiative, too. (But not everyone is the Cary Grant of generals.)
Anyway, it's possible James Keith was there since he was certainly with Fritz' part of the army some months later at Hochkirch, and between Zorndorf and Hochkirch was just Fritz' meeting up with Heinrich a deux plus Seydlitz in Dresden (speaking of awkward, emotionally intense moments...) and I don't think Keith was ever with Heinrich's part of the army.
Re: Random escape-related stuff
Date: 2024-08-07 03:05 pm (UTC)And yes, Seydlitz is the one I always associate with Zorndorf. Cary Grant, lol.
Re: Random escape-related stuff
Date: 2025-05-03 05:56 am (UTC)Then Keith recovered fairly quickly, and he went to the field camp in Silesia to assume command again. He was on the move in Silesia when he got the news of Zorndorf.
Also, I hadn't realized how pissed off he was at the Russians for his dismissal: when he heard that they had fought bravely, he just replied, "cette canaille!"
Re: Random escape-related stuff
Date: 2025-05-03 11:45 am (UTC)Re: Random escape-related stuff
Date: 2025-05-03 01:49 pm (UTC)A closer reading indicates Bestushev conspired against Keith and caused him to lose his position of command, at which point he demanded his release from Russian service. He eventually got it, but then he had some friction with the authorities over the terms of his release: they wanted him to promise never to fight against Russia, whereas he was like, "Once I'm out of your service, I'm nothing more than a British subject, and I'll fight who I want." But since he didn't want to go to Siberia, he agreed to read the fine print. It said that if he did fight against Russia, he agreed to be judged by the Russian articles of war. He immediately agreed to sign that, since he was confident that there wasn't a single article saying a free Englishman couldn't fight who he wanted.
So while he did leave voluntarily, it was because he was pissed off at losing his command, and it wasn't on good terms. So much so that when he left, he took ship directly to England, since he was afraid of traveling by land and getting arrested.
Re: Random escape-related stuff
Date: 2025-05-05 01:42 am (UTC)Hee, I kind of love that.
Re: Random escape-related stuff
Date: 2025-05-06 03:38 pm (UTC)Re: Random escape-related stuff
Date: 2024-08-08 12:30 pm (UTC)Heh. Interesting that he still thought of himself that way in 1778, long after Jacobite hopes had died and when he had served another country for so long.
Re: Random escape-related stuff
Date: 2024-08-23 06:33 pm (UTC)Fritz is "F.II."
Re: Random escape-related stuff
Date: 2024-08-24 09:39 am (UTC)Re: Random stuff
Date: 2024-08-24 08:59 pm (UTC)But I've never seen him referred to this way by anyone who actually knew him, just in official documents where his wife is mentioned as a Baroness. Whereas their son Karl Ernst is a baron pretty consistently. So I'm inclined to think that Peter didn't use this title, but it was used as a courtesy title for him to avoid having his wife outrank him.
I'm not aware of that as a general practice, but it's all I can come up with.
Also! More interestingly. Back in the beginning of salon, I reported that Fritz & co. had been arrested on that Strasbourg trip. I'm starting to think I got that from *Tumblr*. The closest I can find in what I had read of real sources is MacDonogh's "Broglie had been keen to avoid a diplomatic incident by arresting the king." Maybe I misunderstood that in isolation, or combined it with something I had read on Tumblr, because I'm not finding it elsewhere. It's not in Voltaire, it's not in Bielfeld, it's not in Blanning, it's not in Asprey...
And as we later found, thanks to the good offices of
The only actual (non-tumblr) place I can think of (unless you can think of something else, Selena) that says they were arrested is Ziebura's AW bio, where she writes, "Frederick does not mention to Voltaire the inglorious end of their adventure, but Wilhelm notes in his autobiography that they were arrested." ("Friedrich berichtet Voltaire nichts von dem unrühmlichen Ende ihres Abenteuers, aber Wilhelm vermerkt in seinem Lebenslauf, dass sie arretiert wurden.")
Well, you may remember that I got my hands on a copy of that autobiography last year, and since I was researching that episode for my Peter Keith work, I went and looked at it just now.
Here's what it says:
Je Suivie le Roi Mon frere à Bareut et de la Strasbourg ou nous etant arrette qu'un jours nous nous rendimes a Wesell
Now, I looked at that with my recently improved French and immediately went, "I don't think that's what it says..." Then I asked Google Translate, and Google went, "I don't think that's what it says..."
Google and I agree that that says, "I accompanied my brother the king to Bayreuth, and from Strasbourg, where we only stayed one day, we went to Wesel."
I would be just willing to accept an alternate interpretation of "We were only arrested one day," but only if there were rumors flying around that they were arrested more than one day. And as we've seen, there weren't (unless I'm missing something).
Now, I'm far from fluent in French, but I think the easiest explanation here is that Ziebura is also less than perfectly fluent, and that she's fallen prey to a false friend.
Also, I want to add that Ziebura says that the autobiography was written in 1744, the year of the birth of AW's son (FW2), but Krieger, who published the autobiography with his commentary, says that we can't assume that; both drafts (there are two) break off in the middle of a sentence at the end of a page, one in 1740 and one in 1744, and it's clear (to him) that we're just missing the last part.
Re: Random stuff
Date: 2024-08-25 07:16 pm (UTC)Re: Random stuff
Date: 2024-08-26 05:40 am (UTC)Me: Yeah, that seems pretty straightforward, "where we had stopped just for a day," what's the prob -- oh. Yeah.
I see that your friend has confirmed, but yes, I remember memorizing arrêter as "stop" and being told that it did NOT mean "arrest" (in the police sense, rather than the, idk, "the motion of his hand was arrested in mid-air" sense) even in first-year French.
Nice find :D
Re: Random stuff
Date: 2024-08-26 06:24 am (UTC)This said, the brain works in mysterious ways even for princes who have French as their first language, see Fritz writing to Heinrich to arrange their post AW meeting in Dresden, and using a a French word which puzzled me until I figured out he must have been thinking in German and used the literal translation, proving this could happen even to Fritz. (Who had just marched to Zorndorf and back in the company of German soldiers and without his usual full entourage of French speakers, which might explain it.)
Re: Random stuff
Date: 2024-08-26 05:15 pm (UTC)Either that, or she was just going from memory. You and I have written some stuff in salon that would make me question your command of German and my command of English if I thought we had written it while staring at the text in question, but no, we were summarizing what we remembered.
This said, the brain works in mysterious ways even for princes who have French as their first language, see Fritz writing to Heinrich to arrange their post AW meeting in Dresden, and using a a French word which puzzled me until I figured out he must have been thinking in German and used the literal translation, proving this could happen even to Fritz.
Very true! Bilingualism is complicated. It's possible Ziebura was very fluent in French, but had a moment of what linguists call "linguistic interference" and what laypeople call "a brain fart." ;)
(Who had just marched to Zorndorf and back in the company of German soldiers and without his usual full entourage of French speakers, which might explain it.)
That does make sense.
French loanwords
Date: 2024-08-26 05:12 pm (UTC)So did I! But that doesn't mean a word can't have multiple meanings, or that the meaning can't change over time. We've seen "Sodomie" change meanings in German since the 18th century, from "sexual deviance including homosexuality" to "bestiality".
And looking at Larousse, I see "Appréhender quelqu'un par autorité de justice ou de police, l'incarcérer" *is* a possible meaning for "arrêter", it's just not the most common one that you and I would learn in first-year French.
What convinced me that this wasn't "we were arrested" was the "qu'", which I didn't learn in first or second year French could mean "only/just/no more than." I only learned that in the last couple years of French practice, which is why I referred to my "recently improved" French. So either AW is saying they were only arrested one day, or that they only spent one day there, and then it becomes a question of pragmatics. Saying you went to a whole other country but only for one day: totally normal. I myself would say "I've been to Prague, but only for one day." Casually mentioning you were arrested but only for one day: only makes sense if that's not a big deal (compared to something that is a big deal). Since it *would* have been a big deal for the King and Crown Prince of Prussia to be arrested, that reading only works for me if there are claims that they were arrested for more than one day. Since I'm not seeing those claims, "only spent one day" is the only reasonable reading I can get out of this.
The reason I asked my friend: Larousse says that "arrêter" means "spend time" when it's reflexive, i.e., I would expect AW to have written "nous nous etant arrette." I wanted to check that my reading was still okay without the extra "nous". Since my friend says it is, we're good.
Speaking of words that can have more than one meaning, I meant to add that our friend "douceurs" that we ran into in the Leining letters and which Selena translated "sweets" and I commented I only knew it as "gratuities" in English...I have now run into the "gratuities" meaning in both the Keith papers *and* the Berlin Kriminal Senat's judgment on Pfeiffer. (Either that, or they're giving out candy in some weird contexts. :P) So it seems that had both meanings, or else Leining was borrowing from French.
Okay, I can't find it in Duden, but the Digitale Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache defines "Douceur" as "Trinkgeld", i.e. tip, and says it's old-fashioned. Since I can't come up with any other reading of the Leining sentence than the way Selena read it, i.e., with Fritz being the recipient, and since there's a food context, "Douceur" might actually have only meant "tip/gratuity" in German, but Leining was thinking in French, where it does mean "sweets" in the plural. I've often found it hard in these older texts to tell if someone is using the French word instead of the German word ad hoc, because the French word was the first one to come to their mind, or because they're speaking German and the French word was a widely used French loanword in German.
Re: Random stuff
Date: 2024-09-03 04:16 am (UTC)Well, searching for something Peter Keith-related, I found this gem in Fritz's description to Voltaire of the Strasbourg episode:
This general [Broglie] wanted to know who this Count Dufour was, a foreigner who, having barely arrived, was getting involved in assembling a company of people he did not know. He took the poor count for a purse-snatcher, and prudently advised M. de la Crochardière not to be taken in by him. Unfortunately, it was the good marshal who was.
Saxons: Purse-snatcher, eh? Well, he's not wrong...
Re: Random escape-related stuff
Date: 2024-08-29 04:48 am (UTC)I'm glad I found this version, because it includes one throwaway line that wasn't in any other version I've read, and which is relevant to Peter Keith: when he was page, he was "very much in favor" with FW! Now, I'm not surprised that if you want to spy on the king for your boyfriend, this is best served by sucking up to the king and not alienating him. But wow, I feel like discovering that he was plotting with Fritz was like FW discovering Løvenørn had betrayed him: "I thought you were my friend!"
Also, huh. Peter must have had better acting abilities than Fritz, and must have been all "Mr. Gung Ho Army Guy" in front of FW very convincingly. I wonder if he had to consume a lot of alcohol (and pretend to smoke like, was it Seckendorff and the Alte Dessauer?), or if that was Not For Pages.