In addition to getting the British envoy's take and now the Prussian take on this affair, I have finally made contact with the Turin archives! There is a letter from the minister of foreign affairs in Turin to his envoy in Britain detailing the *second* duel, which the Italians are going to send me a scan of for a reasonable price.
That was inexplicably and incomprehensibly difficult to get, because I couldn't get the Italian ministry for culture website to load (and neither could my wife in Brazil or a friend in Germany, though for some reason Selena could). I had to get a VPN. And then the first VPN I tried had no servers in Italy, and the servers I tried in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands couldn't load the website either. So I had to pay for yet another VPN, one with servers in Italy, and I was finally able to load the website, browse the archive catalogues, and find the email address for the ministry! Fortunately, even though I didn't have an exact reference number, the citation info I had from another scholar's footnote was enough, and the archivists were able to track down the letter I needed. Score!
Furthermore, a friend in Vienna has offered to go to the archives in Vienna later this year (October or November) and scan whatever the Austrian ambassador wrote. Now that I realize that the ambassadors were all given the same account, I'm not expecting a wildly different version, but it'll still be interesting to see, and good to check just in case. Maybe he has some interesting personal commentary! Especially since Austria and Prussia are just about to go to war (Bavarian Succession).
Finally, and most excitingly, a friend in Stuttgart has agreed to go to Paris and scan the price-gouging (25 euros per page!) French archives for me! That's most exciting not because of the Karl von Keith affair, but because of the earlier envoys! I'm hoping to get Rottembourg's takes on Fritz and FW in the 1720s, Sauveterre in 1730, Valory in 1740, and maybe even Rottembourg and Rottembourg's successor on the king who thought he was a frog!
We don't know when she'll be able to go, but since I'm paying her travel expenses, a per diem, and hourly labor for all this scanning, she's pretty stoked about a free trip to Paris. She's also a former academic, so the thought of being in archives scanning things is more appealing to her than it would be to many people.
So hopefully salon gets a bunch of French sensationalist gossip in the next year!
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timeasmymeasure
Archive updates
Date: 2025-07-13 04:01 pm (UTC)That was inexplicably and incomprehensibly difficult to get, because I couldn't get the Italian ministry for culture website to load (and neither could my wife in Brazil or a friend in Germany, though for some reason Selena could). I had to get a VPN. And then the first VPN I tried had no servers in Italy, and the servers I tried in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands couldn't load the website either. So I had to pay for yet another VPN, one with servers in Italy, and I was finally able to load the website, browse the archive catalogues, and find the email address for the ministry! Fortunately, even though I didn't have an exact reference number, the citation info I had from another scholar's footnote was enough, and the archivists were able to track down the letter I needed. Score!
Furthermore, a friend in Vienna has offered to go to the archives in Vienna later this year (October or November) and scan whatever the Austrian ambassador wrote. Now that I realize that the ambassadors were all given the same account, I'm not expecting a wildly different version, but it'll still be interesting to see, and good to check just in case. Maybe he has some interesting personal commentary! Especially since Austria and Prussia are just about to go to war (Bavarian Succession).
Finally, and most excitingly, a friend in Stuttgart has agreed to go to Paris and scan the price-gouging (25 euros per page!) French archives for me! That's most exciting not because of the Karl von Keith affair, but because of the earlier envoys! I'm hoping to get Rottembourg's takes on Fritz and FW in the 1720s, Sauveterre in 1730, Valory in 1740, and maybe even Rottembourg and Rottembourg's successor on the king who thought he was a frog!
We don't know when she'll be able to go, but since I'm paying her travel expenses, a per diem, and hourly labor for all this scanning, she's pretty stoked about a free trip to Paris. She's also a former academic, so the thought of being in archives scanning things is more appealing to her than it would be to many people.
So hopefully salon gets a bunch of French sensationalist gossip in the next year!