The Camas Letters

[mildred_of_midgard]

Write-up by felis of the correspondence between Fritz and the married couple Camas.

Overview
So I was reading Fritz' correspondence with both Paul-Henri Tilio de Camas and his wife, Countess de Camas. (And by the way, I was surprised to learn that Camas, born 1688, lost his left arm with 18 and instead of leaving the army, he got a prosthesis and kept rising through the ranks, got his own regiment in 1740, and then died 1741 in Breslau. (Damn.) Also new to me: his wife - born Sophie Caroline von Brandt - only got the title Countess de Camas after his death. She also gets called "maman" by Fritz a lot, and lived until 1766.)

There aren't that many letters in either correspondence and they don't overlap, i.e. Fritz' letters to her start a couple of years after her husband's death (1734-1740 vs. 1744-1765). What they have in common is that Fritz seems to have had a lot of respect and affection for both of them and wrote pretty openly about his state of mind (when he wasn't being cryptic, see above, although that's also being open about his state of mind, just not the particulars).

With him, Fritz talks about army matters (recruits and 1734 and plans), gifts that are sent back and forth (Fritz: "quickly break the glasses I sent you so I can send you more!" ;)), and he gives reports on what he's doing (not much) and on his ever volatile relationship with FW, especially when he's in Berlin. Oh, and there's some gossiping about two women writing letters to Voltaire and Voltaire possibly answering. (Fritz needs to know everything of course.)

His correspondence with her is basically all during wartime (save for a few letters in 1764/65), short reports on the state of the war and of himself, grief after Keyserlingk's death (which is how I got there in the first place), sending gifts, a couple of problem-solving matters concerning his mother, a girl that got pregnant at court, and the queen. All very affectionate ("ma chère/bonne maman" is the usual adress from the first letter on), occasionally self-deprecating, and - unlike her husband - she doesn't even get a "write me more often" letter. (At least not one that's published at Trier. Preuss definitely left out some of hers, no idea if he also skipped some of Fritz's.)

Speaking of Lehndorff, I checked what he had to say on the occasion of her death in 1766 and it's very complimentary:

Countess Camas, the Queen's Oberhofmeisterin, died at the age of 80. This venerable woman should have lived centuries. I have never known a woman of such perfection; a dignified, cheerful, kind, and magnificent character; everything about her was perfect and remained so despite her age. Until the last moments of her life, she retained her freshness of mind. I will mourn her all my life and forever miss what I lost in her. The queen's court ought to mourn her forever, for all its splendor has died out with her. The king loved and respected her. She was the only lady His Majesty distinguished and yet she never got above herself, on the contrary, she knew how to assess everything according to its correct value.

And then there was the whole EC hits Wartensleben with a fan incident, where his and Countess Camas' reaction was to find a quiet spot for themselves and talk about Candide.

[selenak: Incidentally, does Fritz write "Maman" from the start, or does this come after SD's death? I've always wondered.

felis: re: "maman" - he uses that from the start! There's even one where he's talking about both of them - maman vs. mère - which was a tad confusing for a moment. My subjective impression was that he got even more affectionate and clingy after SD's death, but there's of course no way to tell if that wasn't just due to his general state of mind during the war, particularly because there aren't any letters between 1745 and november 1760.]

Camas Letters I - Colonel Camas (1734-1740)
I'm going chronologically, therefore a look at the correspondence with the husband first. There are 43 letters at Trier (42 from Fritz, 1 from Camas), dated from June 1734 to March 1740.

The early ones are mostly short and deal with military recruitments (a topic that keeps coming back throughout the years), except for this postscript to the very first one: I will finally depart on Thursday and leave this unfortunate land [to join the military campaign against France]. It seems to me that since you are no longer here with Madame, we are missing someone in the house; and it occurred to me more than once to want to invite Madame de Camas. You see by this that you are not forgotten. Your health has been drunk to here, and I drank to it with all my heart.

Fritz reports from the 1734 campaign, casting himself as the eager student of military matters and humble manners - You see by that, my dear Camas, how much I pay attention to your lessons; after practicing them, they can make me deserve the praise you give me. - and in later years, there's some talk about siege and salary plans, plus reactions to promotions and reviews on both sides. In short, quite a bit of shop talk, which illustrates that Camas was an experienced military man. (According to wiki, he came from a Huguenot family and joined the Prussian army at age 13. As mentioned, he lost his arm at age 18 (during the War of the Spanish Succession), got a prosthesis and kept rising through the ranks until he died in 1741 (of fever). During this correspondence, he was stationed at Frankfurt (Oder).)

As of this Ruppin letter from December 1735, Fritz starts talking more about non-military things as well, and gets creative with his metaphors:

You know that my occupations are only fixed to three objects, namely, the service, reading, and music. This is what alternately keeps me throughout the day, except for two hours which must be given both to dinner and to digestion.

[...] It is a foreshadowing of death to me when a hussar comes to bring me the order to leave. Do not cry out, I beg you, at this comparison; I will demonstrate it to you just in every way. Death is, according to what theologians say, a separation of the soul from the body, and a general abandonment of all our honours, our goods, our fortune, and our friends. Freedom is my soul; I see myself more honored here than in other places; I have friends that I only see here. So the comparison is fair; and to push it even more, my return conforms to the dogma of the rehabilitation of all things, and between [my return] and my departure, I appear before the tribunal of a judge ready to condemn us and unwilling to absolve us.

Not the last time he'll compare FW to a (vengeful) God in these letters. Nonetheless, he has to leave for Berlin and that's where, only two weeks later, he writes about the mystery affliction, quoted and discussed above.

FW is a frequent topic in general, as Fritz very openly reports ups and downs (which I was roughly familiar with through the Wilhelmine correspondence), whereas friends and other family members get basically no mentions.

Forced hunting excursion in December 1736: The devil, who never sleeps, has put an end to the hunting of wild boars; he gave the master a cold, which confused all the designs of the planned murders. However, I had a commission to kill nearly two hundred of these miserable boars. I acquitted myself of it as a not very cruel person; taking pity on their sufferings, I shortened their martyrdom as much as I could. I confess to you that I do not feel any inclination for hunting; this passion is precisely the opposite of mine.

Interesting detail from December 1737 - Camas was a guest at Wusterhausen and Fritz thinks it would have been a bad idea to write to him there: It is a mark of caution in a young man not to blindly follow his inclinations, and to know how to restrain his inclinations when he foresees that the consequences they draw after them might be detrimental to someone. It was by such prudence that I refrained from writing to you during your stay at Wusterhausen. I feared that our correspondence might have augured badly; moreover, it seemed to me that you would be sufficiently occupied over there with the attentions you owe the King, with the hunts, with the tobacco parliaments, with the dissipations from the neighborhood, etc., that my letters would only steal whatever little time you had left. I know how to impose silence on myself, and I am currently enjoying the pleasure of breaking it.

[That said, when Camas is there again almost a year later, he gets a "stop inventing eloquent excuses for your laziness and write more often" letter afterwards, clearly in jest, but Fritz still makes sure to tell him it was a joke in the next one.]

Familiar FW whiplash a year later (which I'd encountered before, see #7), where he goes from

I feel the feelings of filial love redouble in me when I see feelings so reasonable and so just in the author of my days. (December 1738)

to this state of things in January 1739:

All these beautiful appearances of grace, benevolence and gentleness have disappeared like a dream. The King's temper was so soured, and his hatred against me manifested itself in so many different forms, that if I had not been what I am, I would have asked for my leave a long time ago; and I would like a thousand times better to beg my bread honorably elsewhere than to feed myself on the sorrows that I must devour here. The relentlessness of the King to denounce me secretly and in public is no longer something that is whispered to each other; it is the talk of the city, everyone witnesses it, and everyone talks about it; and what is most curious is that I still do not know my crime, if not that of being his heir apparent. [...]

The prognosis I made for myself is unfortunate, but true; I should never expect to be able to live in peace with a father who is easy to irritate, and who is filled with fatal impressions. I must see him as my most cruel enemy, who spies on me constantly to find the moment when he thinks he can give me the blow of jarnac [an unexpected blow from behind]. You have to be on your guard without slacking off; the slightest misstep, the slightest imprudence, a trifle, a nothing magnified and amplified, will suffice for my condemnation.

Another year later, December 1739, it's a mixed bag: We are amphibians of joy and sadness here; on the one hand we have parties to entertain my sister [Charlotte just came to visit], and on the other we pity the King for the uncertain and failing state of his health. You can, my dear friend, roughly imagine the situation in which we are; however, it is a hundred pikes preferable to that of last year, which was desperate. I will hardly be able to send you news from here, except that the old etiquette is observed regularly, that it has been terribly cold here, that we dance a lot, that we speak even more, and that the we laugh and cry in turn. We have two new envoys here, Rudenskjöld and Valori. The first is a witty, clever man who has a lot of knowledge and world. The second is a fool, very coarse, and so deeply absorbed by the salacious, that the man of quality is totally lost in it; [...]

On to happier content, there are a few gift-related letters, mostly food from Camas and wine and glassware from Fritz. In January 1737 for example, Fritz writes a note to thank Camas for sending him cheese, adding: You get too favorable an idea of my poor solitude; we are more in a convent than in the world. Philosophy, however, does not make us more austere than necessary, as you have guessed very well. A thousand compliments to Madame. (By the way, greetings to Madame are a very common occurrence.)

And this one from February 1738 made me smile, even with the chronic debt problems in the background: My dear Camas, I give you a thousand thanks for the cheeses, the pears, and everything that you took pleasure to send me. Your memory is dearer to me than all the treasures that could be given to me, and even if your letters were accompanied only by a sprig of straw, that very straw would please me if it came from you. Do not think that I appreciate the marks of friendship according to their value or their weight in gold; far from it, I can assure you that the love of poverty was never to such a high degree among the Romans as it is with me. Mark of that: I don't have a dime in the whole house, nor in my power. [...]

Lots of "wish you were here" variations as well, and when Camas visits Rheinsberg in June 1738, this is the result: I must have struck you as an intruder, and perhaps even an annoyance, the whole time you have been here. I hounded you, I persecuted you to possess you for a few moments, and this, sometimes, when you needed rest. I confess my wrong to you, and I admit it; however, in order not to deny this unfortunate character, I will sustain it until the moment of your departure.

Lovely take on his quiet Rheinsberg life, October 1738 (if, as always, struggle with the Stoics): I'm not sure, to tell the truth, what the weather is like here. The sphere of my activity extends only from my home to my library: the trip is not long, and there is no time to feel the weather on the way. As for hunting, there is a whole coterie here that hunts for me, and I study for them; there is something for everyone, and no one is hindered in their entertainment. We politicize little, talk less, and think a lot. It is not a question here of the Greek, Turkish, or Christian emperor; it is the contentment of mind and peace of soul which I try, with my little convent, to cement as best as we can. If we succeed, that is the criterion. At least we work on it, although, to tell the truth, the impassibility of the Stoics seems to me to be in morality what the Philosopher's Stone is in chemistry and the squaring of the circle in mathematics: it is the chimerical idea of a perfection or a tranquility that we cannot achieve.

Also in 1738: Voltaire gossip. Someone not Fritz is writing to him and Fritz has to know everything, because reasons: [...] remember, please, that you promised me a certain letter from a person whose good wit had in some way obscured common sense; I will not misuse it; it will only be to satisfy my curiosity, and to give me a little sermon on the foolishness that self-love can make same-minded people commit. The ridicule of others makes me tremble for myself, and I do not hear of any extravagance that, by looking back on myself, I do not fear being at risk of committing as well. [...] I would say much more if I did not fear to abuse your patience; I therefore expect from you all the correspondence of our heroine Don Quixote of the good wit, and the answers of Voltaire, if he does [answer], which can only be entertaining.

He gets the letter from Camas - unintelligible epistle of our very obscure beautiful mind [...], a masterpiece of extravagance - and a couple of months later has this to report: I had my spies on the campaign to find out the answer that the Solomon of Cirey gave the queens of Northern Saba [Madame Louise von Brandt and Madame de Wr...]. I learned that it was a very didactic reasoning on how to suppress and overcome passions. It is left to know if it was to the taste of our heroines in fine spirits; it's up to you to judge.

In August 1739, Camas gets sick and Fritz worries: The second piece of news, which distresses me, which worries me, which alarms me, is the gout with which you are said to be tormented; I admit that I trembled at the mere thought of seeing such a brave officer become an invalid, such an honest man, such an experienced soldier, who, for having lost one of his limbs for the country, seems to deserve that human infirmities respect those whom he saved from a thousand dangers and a hundred battles. Your letter reassures me in some way, if it is not the effect of one of those generous efforts of friendship which puts aside pain and what can disturb common souls. I still fear for you, my dear Camas, and I reproach you for not having said two words to me about your health, which is dear to me, in a letter of four pages. You may think that I think only of myself, and that, intoxicated with my happiness [the first piece of news = FW just gifted him the Prussian stud farms at Trakehnen], I count my friends for nothing. Disillusion yourself, I beg you; no, I will never be indifferent to those with whom I am bound by the sacred knots of friendship. [...]

I'd love to include the four-page letter from Camas, or any letter from Camas, but I'm pretty sure Preuss edited even the single one that's available, only leaving a couple of lines of praise for the "Ode on Flattery" (written in the wake of a conversation they had about the topic), which is both ironic and not very interesting.

The final 1740 letters are short notes Fritz seems to have written while they were both in Berlin, sending some of his verses back and forth. For some reason, I found them oddly charming. The last one: My dear Camas, by asking you to lend me for a few moments the tale of the doctor which I gave you [a satire inspired by Superville], I will pay you the interest in advance through two Epistles. If I told you that the weather is fine outside, and that the walk is charming, you would be outraged; but telling you that I esteem you with all my heart cannot, I hope, be disagreeable to you. These are the feelings with which, in wishing you good night, I am all yours. Farewell. Federic

Camas Letters II - Countess Camas Part One (1744/45)
New thread for the Countess, split in two parts. There are only 28 letters at Trier - 23 written by Fritz and 5 by her (plus two little footnote excerpts from unpublished ones *sideeyes Preuss*) - but they are a truly fascinating read. They date from August 1744 to November 1765, with a big gap between 1745 and 1760.

The very first one made me scratch my head a bit:

(Potsdam) August 2nd, 1744:
Ma bonne maman,
I give you a thousand thanks for wanting to share the cares of friendship with me. I love you a thousand times more for it. You will know what happened here. I never got out of a greater mess/distress/embarassment [? - embarras]. Poor Rottembourg thought he was dying of inflammation of the kidneys; but I believe today it is out of the question. Farewell, my good maman; don't forget a friend with whom one plays stripped king [jouer au roi dépouillé]. Federic.

As you can see, some of it is unclear to me, because I'm not sure if the entire note is about Rottembourg's illness, or if that's just a "this is also happening" info and there is something else going on that I don't understand for lack of context. I initally thought it might be war-related somehow (which starts a couple days later) - not least because when I googled "jouer au roi dépouillé" I found this definition: game where one undresses dress after dress the king of the game and, figuratively, a saying when several people unite to ruin another (see also: the title of this French Revolution Louis Le Dernier Caricature) - but I really don't know.

[mildred_of_midgard: When I saw the date, I immediately assumed war-related, because Fritz is fond of writing "You already know what's going on here" to his correspondents in relation to the war. And if that's a game that means "a saying when several people unite to ruin another," that's additional evidence, because any time Fritz goes to war after the first time, it's all about how everyone is ganging up on him (see also the Maenads of the Seven Years' War, ripping poor Orpheus apart).]

Speaking of the Second Silesian War: Early on, Schwedt cousin Wilhelm dies of an errant cannon shot at Prague and Fritz is worried how SD is going to take that, so he asks Countess Camas to consult with Podewils and to break it to her gently and without details. The two relevant letters from September 1744 were written by his secretary, but he added postscripts by hand, which basically repeat the message in a more casual and personal manner:

I tremble that one does not give my mother a report which would disturb her peace. I implore you, by all that I can conjure, to remove any sinister idea from her mind, so that I will see her again happy and in good health. My brothers, thank God, and I are doing very well, and the city will be taken in two days.

Follow-up: Ma bonne maman Camas, you are the best person in the world. I embrace you with all my heart for the care you take of my dear mother; I beg you to continue in the same way, and not to worry about the fate of an individual who has no other merit than to be entirely attached to you.

Further on, he gives short updates on war developments and deaths, and repeatedly praises her common sense, see for example this letter from July 27th, 1745:

If everyone wore [as much] common sense on their backs as you have under your hair, we wouldn't see as much madness happening in the world as we do. I know Madame de B ... too well not to do justice to her merits, blaming the lightness of her resolutions. Alas! you tell me more flattering things than I deserve. I beg you to send me all your wisdom by first mail, because I really need it in the situation in which I find myself, and perhaps it is not for me to find a fault in Madame de B... of which I can be guilty myself. [No footnote to tell me who Madame de B... is supposed to be, so I'm stumped.] We are looking at each other like fools here, and I assure you, madame, that if you saw it, you would have pity for the ridiculous figure that two great armies make vis-a-vis each other. We scrap dealers turn our eyes to Berlin, like the Jews to Holy Zion. For myself, I pleasantly flatter my imagination by letting the sweet idea of my relatives, my friends, and so many people dear to me in Berlin reign in my mind. Now is the time to make ourselves worthy of enjoying ourselves with them wholeheartedly this winter, and to give us all the peace of mind so necessary to taste pleasure.

Farewell, ma chère maman; keep us all a mother [mère] you know we adore very much, [is he talking about her, or is he talking about the fact that she's taking care of SD? I'm leaning towards the latter, because the maman vs. mère showed up in the 1744 exchange as well] and, when you tie your knots during the silence of your parrots, the quiet of the Academy, and the slumber of your dogs, give a few of your lost thoughts to your absent friends, counting me, I pray, as the first of them.

Then Keyserlingk dies in August 1745 (after Jordan did earlier during the year) and Fritz shares his grief with her and asks her to take care of Keyserlingk's young daughter Adelaide (he also switches from "maman" to "madame" as the opening address for these, and these only, no idea why - possibly dictated?):

August 30th:
The last time I wrote to you, my soul was very quiet, and I did not foresee the misfortune that was going to overwhelm me. I lost, in less than three months, my two most faithful friends, people with whom I have always lived, and whose gentle companionship, the quality of honest men, together with the true friendship that I had for them, has often helped me to overcome sorrows and to endure illnesses. You can imagine that it is difficult for a heart born sensitive like mine to stifle the deep pain that this loss causes me. On my return to Berlin, I will find myself almost a stranger in my own homeland and, so to speak, isolated in my own home. I am talking to a person who has shown remarkable strength, also losing, almost suddenly, so many people who were dear to her; but, madame, I confess that I admire your courage without being able to imitate it yet. I only put my hope in time, which overcomes everything there is in nature, and which begins by weakening the impressions in our brain, in the end destroying us ourselves.

I looked forward to my return as an object of joy; now I fear Berlin, Charlottenburg, Potsdam, in short, all the places which will bring me fatal memories of friends whom I have lost forever. Rest easy in Berlin; barring great setbacks, which it is impossible to foresee, I do not see the shadow of danger, and if fate has not resolved to destroy us, I do not see what there is to fear.

September 10th:
You know that I lost a friend whom I loved as much as myself, and whose memory I still revere. I beg you, for all the reasons I have to esteem you, to serve, with Knobelsdorff, as tutor to poor Adelaide, to take care of her health and her young age as well as of her education when the time is right. You know the grandmother, and know that she is not capable of raising a daughter. As I want this one to be worthy of her father, I ask, for the friendship you have always shown me, that you take this remnant of my dear Keyserlingk under your protection, and that, now and in a more mature age, you assist the mother with your advice and the daughter with your care. I will look at this attention as if you had it for myself, and if anything can add to the esteem I have for you, be sure that this choice which I ask of you, and the assurance that I have that you will accept it, will make me look at you with more consideration than ever. As you have almost no relatives left, I hope your good heart will not refuse my request, something that can truly relieve me in my affliction.

And that's basically it for the early period. The published correspondence resumes in 1760 - which means it skips all the catastrophes and deaths during the first half of the Seven Years War - at which point we finally get some letters from her as well.

Camas Letters II - Countess Camas Part Two (1760-1763)
In November 1760, Fritz has porcelain to distribute, changes to report, and smaller battles to fight:

I am exact in answering you and eager to satisfy you; you will have breakfast, my good maman, with six very pretty coffee cups, well variegated, and accompanied by all the little embellishments which add to the price. A few additional pieces will be delayed in shipment for a few days; but I flatter myself that this delay will contribute to your satisfaction, by providing you with a trifle [joujou] which, by pleasing you, will make you remember your old worshiper.

It is singular how age makes itself known. For four years I have given up suppers, as incompatible with the profession I am obliged to follow; and on walking days my dinner consists of a cup of chocolate.

We ran like mad, swollen with our victory, to see if we could drive the Austrians out of Dresden; they laughed at us from the top of their mountains; I retraced my steps, like a little boy, to hide in spite in one of the most accursed villages in Saxony. Now we must drive them out of Freyberg and Chemnitz to have enough to live on and space for ourselves. It is, I swear to you, a dog's life [une chienne de vie - he uses that expression repeatedly], that, except for Don Quixote, no one has led but me. All this business, all this disorder that never ends, has aged me so much that you will hardly recognize me. On the right side of the head, my hair is all gray; my teeth are breaking and falling out; my face is wrinkled like the frills of a skirt, my back arched like a bow, and my mind sad and downcast like a monk from La Trappe. I warn you about all this, so that, in case we still see each other in the flesh, you don't find yourself too shocked by my face. Only my heart remains, it has not changed, and will preserve, as much as I breathe, the feelings of esteem and of a tender friendship for my good maman.

But lest you think coffee cups are it, she also gets snuffboxes! Her response, from Magdeburg, April 25th, 1761:

M. le Comte de Finckenstein asked me for a special audience on his arrival; he showed me the beautiful snuffbox which YM was kind enough to fill for me. Full of joy, I wanted to throw myself on it; but he took care not to let go until I had listened to his explanations on the gray colour, endless love, and on the little flowers called Forget-me-nots [since the original rhymes and has German, have that too: gris de lin, amour sans fin, et sur les petites fleurs nommées Vergissmeinnicht]. I was like crazy; I replied to all this: But this dear king, this good king who is willing to think of me! And here it is, Sire, all that my eloquence can provide to thank YM. I therefore find myself as if drowned in great pleasure; I take my chocolate with delight in my beautiful cups, and I will take good tobacco in my beautiful box. They are pleasant amusements while I'm waiting for that longed-for happiness of seeing YM face to face, devouring him with my eyes, and then closing them forever, if necessary. But this much-desired peace, where is it kept? Will we still have a summer filled with anguish? It is not of YM that I have the impertinence to ask these questions, it is of myself, and it is a little soliloquy that I make at all times, and where my answers to myself are not very satisfactory.

Next up, Fritz doesn't mince words (!) and makes plans for the reunion:

January 27th, 1762:
I am delighted, my good maman, that you have so much courage, and I strongly urge you to redouble it even more. Everything ends; so hopefully this damn war will not be the only eternal thing in this world. Since death dispatched a certain harlot from a hyperborean country [as in: Elizabeth of Russia], our situation has conveniently changed and become much more bearable than it was. It is to be hoped that some good events will still happen, which we can take advantage of to achieve a good peace.

You tell me about Berlin. I wish I knew all of you there together. But I would like, if you went, that you wouldn't be like birds perched on a branch, and that you could stay there with the proper dignity. This means that I am waiting for the moment when I will believe security established on good foundations, to write to you to return there. If all this ends well, honestly, I will bless heaven to see you again, my good maman, and to embrace and kiss you [embrasser]! Yes, I say embrace and kiss, because you no longer have another lover [amant] in the world but me, you can no longer give me jealousy, and I have the right to claim a kiss [baiser] as the price for my constancy and my attachment to you. You can prepare for it. Finette can say what she wants; she can dry up in annoyance, because since her late duke, she no longer has a [baiseur - google says "fucker", German says "Hurenbock", the two German translations at Trier say "nobody to kiss her" which seems literal and might be sanitized, but I'm not sure that there hasn't been some drift in meaning].

[cahn: Heh, it was selenak who informed me that "baiser," which I learned in my proper schoolgirl (and apparently old-fashioned) French as meaning "to kiss," is a way of colloquially saying "to fuck." (Hmm, poking around on google gives a couple of links that says that this meaning started in ~16-17th C (so definitely would have had that connotation by this time), and that in current French the verb form basically almost solely means "to fuck," (embrasser being used as "to kiss") although this wasn't always true. But it seems much harder to get the history of "baiseur" in particular.) So yeah, I think a "baiseur" literally might mean "someone to kiss," buuuuut it probably meant "someone to fuck." (But, confusingly, as far as I can tell, "un baiser" really does mean a kiss, and not a fuck.)

selenak: (Fritz definitely uses it in the second sense elsewhere, as when he's gossiping with the Marquis D'Argens about Émilie's sex life years after her death and says "she only let herself be fucked by poets and geometers". And I think he also uses it at least ambiguously when asking Henri de Catt if he's already, well, either kissed or fucked the local girl Catt was after and offers to write love poetry for him. (This is in the diary, not in the memoirs.) So... poor Finette, yes, I hope she didn't see the letter.]


Farewell, my good maman. Pardon the poor things I write to you; it is that I am alone, that I sometimes forget my troubles, that I love you, and that I take advantage of the pleasure of talking to you.

Finette, by the way, is Auguste Marie Bernardine de Tettau, lady-in-waiting to EC, born 1721. Fritz apparently gave her the "Finette" nickname and in the early days - 1742 - he occasionally sent her greetings through Jordan, like so: Send my jokes to the limping satyr [Pöllnitz], my regrets to Brandt, my compliments to Mme de Katsch, and my love to Finette. (She also visited Wilhelmine in 1747.) Telling you all this because she dies a couple of months later, and the Countess writes the following: I am convinced, Sire, that Your Majesty will have taken part in the death of Mademoiselle de Tettau, who has suffered for so long with so much strength, without the slightest change in her mind or in her mood.

(For more info, Lehndorff: [...] this girl had a very peculiar fate. She had come to court very young, at the time when the queen formed her court after the accession to the throne. Beautiful and amiable, she aroused general admiration. The king himself marked her in such a way that people thought there was more to it than mere esteem. The old Duke of Holstein was still madly in love with her before his death. This pleasant life lasted until 1747, when she suffered a neuropathy. She went to several baths but got weaker and weaker and was eventually paralyzed and wheelchair-bound for 15 years. A few years ago her only sister, General Saldern's wife, died, which depressed her completely, although she bore her suffering with the steadfastness of a hero.

For a year her ailments got worse from day to day, in June she left Magdeburg to go to the bath in Freienwalde. In the middle of her cure, she got the news of the dethroning of Emperor Peter II. and the false rumor that Russia had declared itself against us. Since the Russians were only a few miles away, she had to flee in a hurry. She arrived in Berlin seriously ill and died there in September with excruciating convulsions. The Queen and all her friends weep for her sincerely.)

In conclusion: damn it, Fritz, let's hope Finette didn't get to see the January letter before her death.

Fritz' response to the news, October 19th, 1762:

You tell me about poor Finette. Alas! my good maman, for six years I no longer pity the dead, but the living. It is a dog's life that we lead, and there is no regret in losing it. I wish you a lot of patience, my good maman, and all the prosperity that is useful in these calamitous times, especially that you keep your good humour, the greatest and the most real treasure that fortune can give us.

Back to nicer things, we are not done with porcelain gifts yet, and I'm including this one for the decoration and the response:

Meissen, November 20th, 1762:

I am sending you, my good maman, a trifle to make you remember me. You can use this snuffbox for rouge, or mouche [artificial beauty spot, I was surprised to learn those existed already], or tobacco, or sugared almonds, or pills; but, whatever use you intend it for, think at least, upon seeing this dog, this emblem of fidelity which is painted on it, that the one who sends it to you surpasses in his attachment to you the fidelity of all the dogs in the universe, and that his devotion to you has nothing in common with the fragility of the material that was used. I ordered porcelain here for everyone, for Schönhausen [euphemism for EC, which Contess Camas uses as well, see below], for my sisters-in-law; in short, I am only rich now in this fragile material. I hope that those who receive it will take it for good money, because we are beggars, my good maman; we only have honor, cloak, sword, and china.

Her response from Magdeburg:

Nothing could better delight my heart and my eyes than the gracious letter and the charming snuffbox which I have just received. YM surely does not doubt my gratitude; but will he not find me too impertinent when I dare to remember that he gave me, several years ago, a box of Spanish tobacco, and that he was kind enough to tell me that he would give me more when I needed it? I have saved it so well, taking it only in the morning when I wake up, that I still have it, but so little, so little, that I tremble to see the end of it.

Now, it will be impossible for me to put big, ugly tobacco in this pretty snuffbox. I don't use rouge or mouche, let alone pills, which only serve to quarrel with my good friend Lesser when he wants me to take them, and who told me bluntly that when one is greedy and lazy, one must take medicine. I give him a thousand reasons for doing nothing, and he leaves me laughing and shrugging his shoulders. [...]

Schönhausen is delighted and full of gratitude for the porcelain he intended for her; finally YM has the gift of making people happy. The highest price is placed on everything that comes from his hand, and if he has, as he says, only honor, cloak and sword, with a good supply of glory, only modesty kept him from adding that he will always be the greatest king in the world and the object of the admiration and envy of other rulers.

He promptly sends her the tobacco only a few days later, too.

Fritz has a birthday coming up and the end of the war in his sights:

Leipzig, January 22nd, 1763:

Fifty-one, my good maman, is no trifle. It is almost the entire extent of Madame Clotho's spindle, which spins our destinies. I thank you for taking part in bringing me here. You are interested in an old friend, a servant for whom neither age nor absence ever change his feelings, and who now hopes with some sort of conviction to see you again and to embrace you, if you will allow it. Yes, my good maman, I believe that you will be in Berlin before Flora has embellished the earth with her gifts, to express myself poetically; and if I am sincerely delighted to see anyone in this capital again, it is you; but don't say anything. This is not poetic, and must be understood literally. [...]

The court finally returns to Berlin and I'm annoyed that Preuss only gives this one line of the Countess' report in a footnote:

I admit that I was delighted to be at the palace, where I arrived exasperated by all the entrances and harangues the Queen had to suffer on the way, which delayed our march at all times.

Fritz is looking forward to the reunion, but has to report another death, since Bayreuth!Friedrich just died:

So I'll see you again, my good maman, and I hope it will be towards the end of this month or the beginning of April, and I hope to find you as well as I left you. For me, you will find me aged and almost babbling, gray as my donkeys, losing a tooth every day, and half crippled by gout; but your indulgence will endure the infirmities of age, and we will speak of the old days.

Here is our good margrave of Baireuth who has just died. This causes me real pain. We are losing friends, and enemies seem to want to last forever. Ah! my good maman, how I fear Berlin and the voids I will find there! But I will think only of you, and I will delude myself on the rest. [...]

And that concludes the wartime letters.

Camas Letters II - Countess Camas Part Three (1764/65)
Post-war, there are only three small exchanges:

First, Fritz reports on summer with the relatives (July 1764 = engagement FWII) while Countess Camas seems to have been recovering from an illness:

My good maman, your letter and your keepsake gave me real pleasure, because they are signs that your health is improving. I am assured that there is no danger, and that you will recover completely. My sister [Charlotte] will be arriving in an hour. I admit that it gives me great pleasure. We are promised the great nephew. His love is as cold as his whole person; but what do you care? Try, my good maman, to put your nose in the air. The great outdoors is the sovereign medicine; it will put balm back in your blood, and make you whole. For me, I am sincerely interested. You know my old heart, which is still the same, and which is made to love you as long as it exists.

selenak: We are promised the great nephew. His love is as cold as his whole person; but what do you care?

Does he mean Charlotte's son? Because the phrasing is ambiguous, and I wonder about "great nephew" - could the translation also be "tall nephew"? Because future FW2 was taller than most in the rather small and medium sized family, and Fritz frequently remarks on how he's grown in his letters to other people in the 7 Years War years. It would make sense if he was summoned on the occasion of Charlotte's visit, though conversely it would also make sense if she brought her son along. "Prince Friedrich" is definitely future FW2 - Lehndorff refers to him by that name through the war and only settles on "Prince of Prussia" in the post war years, avoiding the first names thereafter.

felis: Ah, damn, didn't catch that google double translation error, it has to be "we will promise the tall nephew". (French: Nous allons promettre le grand neveu.) So, yes, definitely talking about FWII here, as everybody's coming to visit for his engagement ceremony. And of course he isn't in love with the bride, but it's kind of telling that "cold" is really not how you'd describe his love life otherwise, but certainly Fritz' relationship with him.]

I will show your letter, my good maman, to my sister, who will be charmed by what you think of her. I regret, in truth, not to enjoy your presence here; but I find that you have great reason to spare yourself, and ultimately, I could profit very little from your amiable company, for we are, like in a general diet of the Holy Roman Empire, surrounded by thirty princes and princesses; and besides, my infirmities prevent me from attending all the banquets. I am at the great feasts, and I try to get some rest in between. The old baron [Pöllnitz] is an insult to my crippled legs; he ran with Prince Frederick and overtook him. For me, who is dragging one foot, almost like a turtle, I match the speed of their run as well as a paralytic who would attend a ballet by Denis.

Good evening, my good maman; I hope to see you again when my legs come back to me, and I can climb the palace stairs that lead to your paradise.

Second, EC is seriously ill with fever (autumn 1764 or 65), Camas asks for help/Cothenius, and Fritz sends his own opinion on the matter (no medicine, lots of tea and warmth). Her response:

Your Majesty is certainly a more skilful physician than the good Lesser, although in your prescription there is not a word of Greek or Latin; but your letter caused infinite satisfaction to the Queen, in whose eyes I saw, for the first time, a little liveliness. [...] [The doctor] absolutely followed YM's ideas, gave no medicine, and made the Queen take a lot of tea, making her lie in bed in even perspiration. I asked him to put his ideas on the attached paper. I do not know the terms of the art, and I do not trust my knowledge. The worry in which I am perhaps makes me see things badly; I can only be at peace when the fever and the oppression are over.

With regard to my health, which YM is kind enough to care about, I will take the liberty of telling him that, from the waist up, things are quite well, but that my legs often have difficulty to support me. I am an old house whose foundations are crumbling. I hope, however, that, before I fall, I will still have the good fortune to sometimes do a nice curtsy for YM, and to assure him of all the respect and attachment imaginable. YM will allow me, I hope, to give him news of the Queen until her recovery. S.-C. de Camas.

The final letter is a sad one, Fritz' response to a condolence letter from Countess Camas (not included, only referenced in a footnote once again) in the wake of Sophie's death, November 1765, which causes him to ruminate on all the losses in the family:

I am very much obliged to you, my good maman, for taking part in the loss we have just suffered. It is a loss for all honest people, for my sister was a truly virtuous person. I knew long ago that men are mortal; I witnessed that her health was threatening ruin: but that did not prevent me, my good maman, from feeling keenly the privation of a sister whom death tore from me like a limb. Nature, a tender friendship, a true esteem, all these feelings claim their rights, and I feel, my good maman, that I am more sensitive than reasonable. My tears, my regrets are unnecessary; however, I cannot erase them. Our family seems to me a forest in which a hurricane has knocked down the most beautiful trees, and where from distance to distance you can see some thinned out fir tree hanging on by its roots, only to contemplate the fall of his companions, and the damage and devastation the storm has wrought. I hope, my good maman, that this breath of death will turn away from you, that we will keep you for a long time, and that I can often reiterate to you the assurances of my old and faithful friendship. Federic.

[selenak: I recognize that image! He also uses it when writing to Heinrich about the death of sister Friedrike (the Ansbach sister) later. Incidentally, that Fritz is affected by the deaths of Sophie and Friederike, the two Cinderella sisters, in a way, among the siblings (as in, the two with the worst husbands and the two who didn't share their siblings fondness for music and books), speaks well of him.]


Fritz's mystery affliction
I came across some cryptic allusions from Fritz, cross-referenced a couple of other sources myself (see below), but wanted to ask if anybody knows for sure what was going on there.

First, letter to Camas from Berlin, January 1st, 1736:

[...] If the first day of the year, according to popular tradition, is the foreshadowing of the rest of the year, I expect to make great progress in the school of adversity during this one. I started out with a sick body and a distressed mind. An inhuman colic has been following me very severely for some time; it undermines me, and if it continues to increase, I can easily predict where it will lead me. At the same time, I have a just cause of affliction, which is sensitive to me to the bottom of my heart; it does not come from there, but from another part; it devours me, and all the more because I hide my sorrow. You who know me, you will be able to judge if I am able to resist double attacks like this. However, I drag myself along as I can, and until I feel defeated. However, it seems to me that it relieves me to have told you about my troubles. I beg you to take part in them, and not to preach to me either a morality beyond my reach, or a heroism which renders me insensitive to the events of life. I have a tender and compassionate heart, and I feel the misfortunes that happen to my friends as strongly as if they happened to me. Finally I could tell you too much, and imperceptibly, without thinking about it, I could reveal to you what it is about, having once resolved to keep this matter a secret, not out of mistrust of your discretion, but because one judges differently the causes of the sorrows of others. One considers it ridiculous to grieve; the other says it's not worth the trouble; in the end, everyone knows for himself where the shoe pinches, and it is enough that he knows it, he must be silent.

Farewell, my dear Camas; my compliments to the wife. Love me always a little, I beg of you, and count on the perfect esteem that I have for you.
Frederic.

[mildred_of_midgard: quick note doing my duty as resident classicist: for those who don't recognize this, it's an allusion to Plutarch's Life of Aemilius Paulus.

A Roman once divorced his wife, and when his friends admonished him, saying: "Is she not discreet? is she not beautiful? is she not fruitful?" he held out his shoe (the Romans call it "calceus"), saying: "Is this not handsome? is it not new? but no one of you can tell me where it pinches my foot?"]

And a week later: [...] My colic is getting better; but as regards my sorrow, I do not feel any decrease. I speak to myself, I reason, I moralize; but I feel that temperament still has the upper hand over reason. In the end, dear Camas, that of adversity is a hard school; I was, so to speak, born and brought up in it; it takes away a lot from the world, it shows the vanity of the objects it presents to us, their lack of solidity, and the inconstancy that the revolution of time brings with it. For someone my age, these are unpleasant thoughts; the flesh is loath to them. My temperament, which naturally leads me to joy, is like a dislocated limb wishing in vain to perform its ordinary duties. I prefer to keep myself from writing to you until I have reestablished peace and calm in my agitated mind, so I can talk to you about less sad and less disagreeable matters.

The next letter to Camas is from March and doesn't have anything to say on the matter.

Second, he also wrote a - similarly cryptic - letter to Wilhelmine, which is lost, but we have her response from January 29th and she has a theory: Your letter has me seriously worried; I don't understand what the cause of your grief may be, and why you want to bury yourself on your property. I hardly dare to say what I suspect, but I'm afraid you are in debt and don't know how to pay it back. Please tell me openly whether I guessed right; because maybe I'll find ways and means to rid you of this worry.

Volz has a footnote saying that Fritz returned 5000 taler to her after he became king, but there's no way to tell when she lend him the money or if it's related to this. Given that he's building Rheinsberg around the time, and that he has the vague "morality beyond my reach" line in his letter to Camas, Wilhelmine's guess might be it? But on the other hand, some of what Fritz writes to Camas seems a bit too much for just money troubles and the "it does not come from there, but from another part" made me think of the STD thing again. And then there's the question where his "tender and compassionate heart" and the "misfortunes of my friends" come in.

Finally, thanks to selenak's write-up, I found a couple of possibly relevant entries in the secret diary of the Seckendorff nephew, which present several possible causes, from general FW-related misery to very specific, procreation-related misery:

December 25th, 1735:

The prince royal, who dined with us, was very thoughtful, and the king still increased his reverie by forcing him to empty, following our example, a full great glass of Tokay.

I didn't realize FW kept doing that so late in the game.

January 17th, 1736 (using Selena's translation):

Biberius tells me about the secrets, that Junior confided in Pöllnitz. The King encourages him to produce children, had him made a marital bed out of velvet. Biberius does not believe, that Junior will survive the father, but that pessimus Wilhelmus will succeed one day.

Confiding in Pöllnitz, really, Fritz? You know better. But, more to the point, I wonder if this was the crux of the matter, i.e. FW having too much interest in Fritz' sex life or lack thereof, plus, apparently, still rumours of changing the succession if there's no child. I see from the rest of the write-up that the Manteuffel talk about producing an heir takes place later in the same year, too.

That's all I got, but maybe you guys know more? Other possible sources I thought of start later (Suhm) or aren't available (Keyserlingk).

selenak: I wonder if this was the crux of the matter, i.e. FW having too much interest in Fritz' sex life or lack thereof, plus, apparently, still rumours of changing the succession if there's no child. I see from the rest of the write-up that the Manteuffel talk about producing an heir takes place later in the same year, too.

Yes, and rumors about FW changing the succession in favor of AW would still go around as late as 1739 since they show up in Fritz' correspondence with Wilhelmine that year (where he tells her he's sure AW is on his side and is being honest, helping as much as he can and not scheming against him). Though again, if FW pushing him to produce an heir was the key cause of his January 1736 misery, I think he'd have been more explicit about it in his letters to Camas at least.

....I think Gröben is back as a suspect for spreading STD and getting into gambling debts as well, is what I think. (Not least because this reminds me a bit of the whole Reisewitz matter in the originally censored part of the Lehndorff diaries (i.e. those passages in volume 2 from 1752/1753 when Heinrich has just found out Reisewitz has been skeevy with his (Heinrich's money) and his emotional reaction as described by Lehndorff matches that of Fritz above; and he does cover Reisewitz' debts.) It would also explain why he was being cryptic with Wilhelmine as well, because I think if money had been the only problem, he'd have told her point blank.

mildred_of_midgard: The first thing that came to mind when I saw the date was EC, which I see you guys discussed. FW is on him about the succession, and he's going to have to move in with her soon. That said, on further reading, I join you in rejecting this hypothesis. Not only does it not fit the further clues he drops, but I don't think he would hesitate to confide in Wilhelmine. If he couldn't say, "I'm really afraid I'm going to have to start sleeping with her regularly or she's going to tell on me to Dad," he could at least bitch about having to move in with her, and vent that way. And he seems to have had no trouble saying "I can't sleep with my wife out of passion" to other people, so...I agree with [personal profile] selenak that I don't think that's it.

That said, if anyone is planning on writing 1736 fanfic, fear of having to sleep with her regularly might be something preying on his mind. ;)

So, putting the clues I have together:

- It primarily concerns someone else.
- He's worried about one of his friends.
- He's afraid of being told not to worry so much.
- It doesn't come from the heart.

The last one doesn't seem to fit with the other three. I'm not sure what to make of that. Like you guys, my first reaction was Gröben and the STD! But Gröben's gambling debts make at least as much sense, maybe more. We know that Fritz was lending/giving money to his friends during these years, that was one reason he was pumping everyone he knew for money. (Or at least that's what he claimed, but I believe it.)

If it were just his own debts, he would say so and ask for money, but someone else's debts and general poor life choices might worry him.

Alternately, given what we know about Fritz's tendency to be very distressed when his loved ones are sick, it could be that. Now, normally he would just say so. But there are at least two people he might worry about that he couldn't necessarily say he was worried about.

- Duhan, who he's not supposed to be in contact with, and who's apparently struggling with depression in the 1730s.
- Fredersdorf, whom he's not supposed to have feelings for.

Now, he seems to have secure lines of communication with Wilhelmine, and she certainly respects the heck out of Duhan, so I *think* Fritz would have said he was worried about Duhan if that were it.

Could Fredersdorf be sick? And Fritz is worried about him (especially if Fritz is in Berlin and Fredersdorf had to stay in Ruppin, but even if not), and he can't admit it, because people are going to be like, "He's a valet. You can get another one." And he can't go, "HE'S MY BOYFRIEND LIFE PARTNER!"

You know, while a friend's gambling debts or another form of trouble a friend could have gotten into could be it, my current headcanon is Fredersdorf being seriously sick.

The only thing that doesn't fit is "it comes not from my heart but from another part," but I can't quite figure that line out at all.

felis - It doesn't come from the heart.

Okay, so. This one isn't quite as clear as it seems in English I think. I left the google translation as it was, because it was one possible version, but the original French goes as follows: Avec cela, j'ai une juste cause d'affliction, qui m'est sensible jusqu'au fond du cœur; elle ne vient point d'ici, mais d'autre part; - the "not from the heart" is one possible interpretation of the "d'ici" phrase I'd say, but you don't have to read it that way, because "ici" can mean a lot of things and it's unclear if it's actually related to "coeur". He could even be talking geography and saying his affliction doesn't come from Berlin but from somewhere else! Which would fit your theory.

selenak, replying to mildred_of_midgard:

I could believe both, except that I think Fritz could pass off being worried for Fredersdorf being sick to Camas as being a good feudal lord concerned for a faithful servant, so I'm still betting on Gröben and a combination of STD and gambling debts. Not least because I don't think Fredersdorf's health problems had kicked in yet, though I could be wrong about this. Of course we don't have letters between him and Fritz from that era. And the thing is, by the later 1730s, Fritz definitely wasn't hiding that Fredersdorf wasn't an exchangeable servant to him; see Bielfeld's description of Fredersdorf as: The Prince's first valet, Herr Fredersdorf, is a tall, beautiful man, who has wit and intelligence. He's polite, attentive, skillful, smooth, likes his possessions but still likes splendour. I believe he'll play a large role one day. And if Bielfeld had noticed, Camas probably had as well.

Now with Wilhelmine, both a sick Fredersdorf and an STD and gambling debts ridden Gröben would be reasons to be cryptic - whereas simply accumulating more and more debts would not be - so that's not a tell in either direction.

Lastly: there's the way STD keeps coming up, both as a rumor about Fritz in his younger days (so established and wide spread that a visiting tourist like Boswell hears about it in 1764), and by Fritz himself when wanting do make a dig at others. In one of those poems mocking the rest of Europe which Voltaire wasn't supposed to take along, he's accusing Louis XV. to have it, for example; but more interestingly, there's the way he uses it in the Marwitz letters to Heinrich, completely out of the blue. I mean, he goes from mocking Heinrich and Marwitz for pining to saying "oh, and btw, that guy is a total slut with STD!" Given the way Fritz used Heinrich to play out his own life again with reversed roles, this makes me suspect he had at some point crushed on someone who turned out to have STD. (Could have been Algarotti, of course, except that his reaction to Algarotti having STD is so very blasé.)

mildred_of_midgard: I'm not wedded to the "Fredersdorf is sick" hypothesis, but I'm going to play devil's advocate here.

I could believe both, except that I think Fritz could pass off being worried for Fredersdorf being sick to Camas as being a good feudal lord concerned for a faithful servant

Worried, yes. Making sure Fredersdorf is taken care of, sure. Having stress-related illness, that's as bad as colic, because of it? I suspect the reaction would be similar to this one letter I saw, probably in the Fairchilds servants book: a noble teenage boy, maybe about 14 years old, has just had his tutor/governor/whatever taken away. Several months later, he writes to his father, begging for his tutor back, because he can't be happy without him. The boy is clearly having stress-related illness and depression from the separation from the guy who'd been parenting him for the last several years. The father writes an uncomprehending letter back that the son's filial regard for his tutor does them both honor, but it's time to move on.

I suspect losing sleep over your valet falls into the same category. You were the one who said Fritz couldn't write to anyone about Fredersdorf's death even after the guy had publicly been first minister for 15 years and Lehndorff was calling him the Prussian Pompadour, because Fritz didn't have a vocabulary for how much Fredersdorf had meant to him! Fredersdorf also never seems to have come up in the Fritz/Wilhelmine letters, granted that the complete correspondence hasn't been published.

Not least because I don't think Fredersdorf's health problems had kicked in yet, though I could be wrong about this.

They don't need to have; it's the 18th century. Do we know when Fredersdorf had smallpox? Or any number of other infectious diseases?

And the thing is, by the later 1730s, Fritz definitely wasn't hiding that Fredersdorf wasn't an exchangeable servant to him; see Bielfeld's description of Fredersdorf

I would be very surprised if Fritz wasn't trying to keep it at least partly on the down low as long as FW was alive. Bielfeld lived at Rheinsberg, and I have definitely read, though I forget where now, that many or all of his letters were composed later in life. That's why when I reported him writing in 1740 that Fritz would someday be called great, I said I didn't know if that was written with the benefit of hindsight.

Okay, Carlyle definitely says the letters were not sent through the post office but were written after the fact. I don't know if a more reliable source says that or if modern scholarship has weighed in. But given what some of the people in our fandom have gotten up to, Bielfeld's letters could be anywhere from Catt-like self-insert fanfic, to Lady Mary redacting her letters for publication by removing repetition and creating a narrative. I just don't know.

But I wouldn't put somebody who authored and sold a book of his own letters in his own lifetime, in 1763 to boot, i.e. right after Fritz had won the Seven Years' War and this book was guaranteed to sell, up there with Preuss collating letters from the Prussian archives after Fritz's death, in terms of evidence that a given passage was written in the year the passage is claimed to have been written.

Even if the Fredersdorf passage is totally genuine, Bielfeld writing in October 1739 (almost the exact time the "rising sun" ceiling was painted), and staying at Rheinsberg and being a Freemason in the Rheinsberg lodge with both Fritz and Fredersdorf (assuming Bielfeld can be trusted on that), is far from the same as Camas corresponding long-distance with Fritz in January 1736, in terms of their respective insights into Fritz's relationship with Fredersdorf.

Now, it could be a friend's STD and/or (the friend's) gambling debts, certainly! Or something else we haven't thought of. But if you're right that Fritz couldn't talk about Fredersdorf's death even after a publicly known relationship that had lasted over 25 years, talking about Fredersdorf's illness after 5 years, when he must have been trying not to let FW catch on, must have been at least as difficult.

selenak: a noble teenage boy, maybe about 14 years old, has just had his tutor/governor/whatever taken away. Several months later, he writes to his father, begging for his tutor back, because he can't be happy without him.

Wasn't that in fact future FW4 to FW3, with the governor in question this guy? (Result: yet another dysfunctional authoritarian Hohenzollern on the throne later on. Yay!)

But if you're right that Fritz couldn't talk about Fredersdorf's death even after a publicly known relationship that had lasted over 25 years, talking about Fredersdorf's illness after 5 years, when he must have been trying not to let FW catch on, must have been at least as difficult.

This is undoubtedly true. I also readily concede the possibility/likelihood of Bielfeld doctoring, editing or writing his letters with the benefit of hindsight. However, I'm still too stuck on the "not from the heart, but from another part" phrasing - as surely worrying about Fredersdorf being threateningly ill would have been very much a matter of the heart to Fritz -, and on the fact we don't even know that Fredersdorf was ill to begin with to subscribe to this theory.

mildred_of_midgard: Wasn't that in fact future FW4 to FW3

Since I don't remember where I got that from, if you do, then that's probably the one I'm thinking of!

However, I'm still too stuck on the "not from the heart, but from another part" phrasing

Okay! A native speaker friend of a friend has weighed in, and her interpretation is that Fritz is saying that, although he feels the pain from the bottom of his heart, it's not his heart *qua biological organ* that's causing the pain, but his mind that's causing his (metaphorical) heart emotional distress.

Which is absolutely consistent with the rest of the letter and makes perfect sense to me. And which does not help us distinguish between Groeben and Fredersdorf. ;)

selenak: :) I'm glad we had the native speaker input, but it's just ic for Fritz remain an engigma, isn't it?

Digression on "morality"
felis: Given that he's building Rheinsberg around the time, and that he has the vague "morality beyond my reach" line in his letter to Camas, Wilhelmine's guess might be it?

mildred_of_midgard: Okay, so, based on my reading of Fritz's correspondence, where this theme crops up over and over again, I'm 99% sure "morality" is referring to Stoicism here. He's afraid of being told to take a stiff upper lip stance, accept that bad things happen, and console himself with philosophy.

It goes with:

as regards my sorrow, I do not feel any decrease. I speak to myself, I reason, I moralize; but I feel that temperament still has the upper hand over reason. In the end, dear Camas, that of adversity is a hard school; I was, so to speak, born and brought up in it; it takes away a lot from the world, it shows the vanity of the objects it presents to us, their lack of solidity, and the inconstancy that the revolution of time brings with it.

And he's saying he loves his friends too much to be indifferent to their sorrows, so please don't tell him to be a good Stoic.

Which. Fritz. Is what he *always* says when he's worried or grieving someone, and then the moment someone *else* is worried or grieving, he writes a condolence letter going, "I know from experience that philosophy is basically useless at a time like this, but remember your philosophy!"

This is Fontane on Fritz when Henricus Minor (our term for AW's son Heinrich, to distinguish him from birthday boy Heinrich) dies:

Rittmeister von Wödtke brought the sad news to the king. The King was moved to a rare degree. One of the high officers comforted the king and urged him to calm himself. "He ["er" of direct address] is right," Fritz answered, "but he doesn't feel the pain that this loss has caused me." "Yes, Your Majesty, I feel it; he was the most promising of princes." The King shook his head and said, "He has the pain on his tongue, I have it here." And so saying, he laid his hand on his heart.

But when Duhan's father dies, this is one of Fritz's better condolence letters:

It is certain that the most severe tests, which we are obliged to pass in this world, are when we lose people forever who are dear to us. Constancy, steadfastness, and reason seem little help to us in these sad circumstances, and we only listen to our pain in these moments. I feel sorry for you with all my heart, seeing you in such a situation. [...] What is more common than being born and dying? However, we are always astonished at death, as if it were something foreign to us, and uncommon.

Console yourself, my dear Duhan, as best you can. Consider that there is a necessity which determines all events, and that it is impossible to fight what is resolved. We only make ourselves unhappy, without changing anything in our condition, and we spread bitterness over the happiest days of our life, the brevity of which should invite us not to grieve so much with unhappiness.

The struggle between reason and philosophy on the one hand, and compassion and grief on the other, tormented Fritz for his entire life. When Biche died, he wrote to Wilhelmine along the lines of, "I know a good philosopher wouldn't be this torn up over a dog, and I'm kind of embarrassed. But I don't want to be the kind of person who wouldn't be torn up over losing their favorite dog! Dogs are worthy of love and grief!! *sob*"

The fact that this is consistently his discourse when it comes to death makes me think that in January 1736 someone is worryingly sick and he can't talk about it. Which makes me think of Fredersdorf. But I'm not ruling out other people's STDs or gambling debts either!

Okay, so, based on my reading of Fritz's correspondence, where this theme crops up over and over again, I'm 99% sure he's referring to Stoicism here.

Ohhhh. Nice. I definitely read his "moralize" in the second letter that way, but because he also has the heroism part in the first letter - which I took to mean just that, stoically withstanding things - I took the "morality" part more literally in that case, precisely because he's being so cryptic and seems worried that Camas might disapprove - and "worried for a sick friend" seems like something that Camas wouldn't object to or even fail to understand and sympathize with, unless the source of the illness is the problem - or the identity of the friend, as per your theory. Hmmm.

mildred_of_midgard: And yes, the "either morality or heroism" gave me pause for the reason you mention, but I *think* I would still take it as referring to Stoicism rather than conventional morality, just because it's such a common trope in Fritz's letters. And redundancy in the form of parallel clauses is a stylistic device in both the Bible and Roman literature (Cicero is *all over* it), and all their imitators since. Your interpretation isn't impossible, though!

felis: I think this take on "morality" is definitely in keeping with Fritz' use of it, not to mention that it would make sense for him to pick one concept that's more philosophy-based (morality) and one that's more military-based (heroism) to express a similar thought. (The combination of both sides is what drove Voltaire nuts after all. ;))

[ETA: see also his use of "morality" and the difficulty in a letter to Suhm, item 4 in this post.]


Valory
Finally, once he became king, [Fritz] sent Camas on a diplomatic mission to Paris and while there are a couple of letters in the Political Correspondence from that time, they all contain only official politics, largely written by secretaries, and nothing personal. Camas did meet Voltaire, though, who gets the last word here, from a letter he wrote to Fritz in September: If kings are the images of the gods, and the ambassadors the images of kings, it follows, Sire, by Wolff's fourth theorem, that the gods are chubby, and have a very agreeable physiognomy. Blessed is this M. de Camas, not so much because he represents Your Majesty but because he will see you again!

December 1739:

We have two new envoys here, Rudenskjöld and Valori. The first is a witty, clever man who has a lot of knowledge and world. The second is a fool, very coarse, and so deeply absorbed by the salacious, that the man of quality is totally lost in it; [...]

selenak: Hang on, what? In that order? That would be a very negative first judgment on Valori, author of some of the best Fritz portraits in writing by a contemporary, and friends with his younger brothers.

felis: Yep, in that order! Fritz definitely didn't like Valori, I remember that he said as much in his letters to Voltaire and regretted that he replaced La Chetardie ... wait, let me have a look ... okay:

October 10th, before meeting him: I don't know who and how this M. Valori is, but I've heard it said that he doesn't have the tone of good company. (Pleschinski translates "kein angenehmer Zeitgenosse" - no idea who told Fritz that)

And then in December around the same time as the Camas letter: This M. de Valori, so long announced by the voice of the public, so often promised by the gazettes, so long arrested in Hamburg, has finally arrived in Berlin. It makes us very much regret La Chétardie. M. de Valori shows us every day what we lost with the first. It is now only theoretical courses of the Brabant wars, trifles and minutiae of the French army; and I constantly see a man who believes himself vis-à-vis the enemy and at the head of his brigade. I always fear that he would take me for a counterscarp or a work with horns, and that he would dishonestly assault me. M. de Valori almost always has a migraine; he has not the tone of society; he does not soup; and it is said that the headache does him too much honor to inconvenience him, and that he does not deserve it at all.

Also: Valori says that you were exiled from France as an enemy of the Roman religion, and I replied that he had lied about it.

There you have it!

selenak: Well! That’s very interesting, given that Valori - like Mitchell three wars later - will go into the field with him. Also because Valori is one of the longest lasting envoys and one of the best liked by people other than Fritz. (According to Lehndorff, he even had intended to settle down in Berlin as a retirement place when politics changed irrevocably.) As mentioned, he was great friends with the Divine Trio, and far from being a dull conversationalist, he came up with one of the best bonmots about Fritz. (“It’s impossible to have more esprit than he does, but very possible to make better use of it.”) And like I said, the characterisation he gives of Fritz, written in the early 1750s, is one of the best portraits around. It’s quoted almost in full in the “Friedrich der Große und Maria Theresia in den Augen ihrer Zeitgenossen” anthology which I summarized and excerpted at Rheinsberg.

Of course, if Fritz takes that much against him on sight it puts a new light on Valori and Darget ending up in “The Palladion”, but it does make me wonder what Valori’s actual offense was. Seeing too much? Hitting it off too well with the brothers?

And so no one has to look it up, here’s Valory’s portrait of Fritz after a decade of acquaintance:

I begin with his portrait. His face is compelling. He's small and of noble bearing. His figure isn't regular; his hips are too high, and his legs are too strong. He has beautiful blue eyes which are a bit too strongly pronounced, but easily reflect his moods, so their expression varies depending on his state of mind. If he's dissatisfied with something, their gaze is threatening, but nothing is more soft, gracious and captivating than if he's in a mood to please. His hair is thick, mouth and nose agreeable, his smile charming and witty, but often bitter and mocking. When his soul is peaceful, the softness of his gaze can charm anyone. His health varies, his temper heated, and his personal life style contributes quite a lot to heating his blood. He used to drink incredible amounts of coffee. One day, I dared to tell him that he drank too much coffee; he admitted as much and said he was trying to abandon the habit. "I now drink only six to seven cups in the morning", he said, "and after supper only one."

The King is extreme in anything he does. His main character flaw is his misanthropy. A virtuous and enlightened man is his ideal, and in his opinion the most foolish people are called honorable men. In general, he finds only a few to have wit, and he doesn't esteem the so colled common sense which as opposed to wit can provide a right and sound judgment. Anyone has their share of the later, and only a ruler of judgment can esteem everyone correctly, and if a man has his right place, he can surprise even the most witty people. The King talks a lot and very well, but he listens very little, and mocks every objection.

One can be hardly more daring than he is; hence his contempt for humanity. He speaks out against vice with surprising eloquence. The same is true for morals, the most beautiful traits of which he seems to have learned to name by heart. But he's so little consequential and believes so little in what he says that his own claims refute him only fifteen minutes later.

He does have principles regarding administration, and, if I may say so, even about temper and disloyal reports. Fortunately what he decides when in a mood isn't set in stone; he usually returns to a correct judgment. If, however, his decision is made, he has no regard for etiquette. As soon as something he has come up with and pondered thoroughly appears right to him, he abandons all restraint in order to execute it. He is extremely suspicious; if he was less so, he'd be content to have come up with good ideas and would delegate their execution to his ministers, who are more sensible than he is and would soften any too great harshness.

Again: he has contempt for humankind and believes people are born to obey without talking back. This explains the excess in his behavior and the obvious paradoxes which amaze all who managed to get closer to him. I always have tried to analyze the immediate causes he named for his rejections, as well as the reasons why he hurt or flattered those close to him. In most cases, I had to admit his reasons were good, though not the form they took.

He owes the conquest of Silesia (...) to his boundless energy. (...) The good status of his troops and his magazines which were equipped with all that was needed to start a campaign with a strong army heightened his audacity and made him reckless for as long as he was confronted by only a handful of troops dispersed across a few Silesian fortresses. As soon as he was confronted with a proper army, he got conscious of all the dangers he faced. I dare to say he even exaggareted them in his mind. His consistent fortune has nourished his boldness for a while, but since then he thought about this and has admitted he owes much to luck. His enemy in a distance is always politics. The later often get scorned as being dependent on the moment, especially the Saxons, and yet during the campaign of 1744, they caused him the deepest trouble, but he punished them thouroughly for it in 1745. In this last campaign, he has shown the talents of a great general. But he believes to have all the talents, both those of a King and of a writer, which is a strange brew; we see the great man occupy himself with trifles.

The arts have become his weakness, in the same way as his royal father had a weakness for anyone above six feet. He pursues the reputation of a polymath - the poet, the orator, the musician are starting to dominate the King in him. His many troops force thriftiness on him, and yet I dare say he's too thrifty. It is impossible to possess more ésprit than he does, but very possible to make a better use of it. He's never more charming than if he wants to please you, and he always wants this to flatter his love of self. Once he has charmed you, he neglects you and regards you as his slave, who is there to obey him in a servile manner and to put up with all his moods.

He's harsh and masterful towards his brothers. He holds them in an utter dependency which he himself never got used to when having it on his father who made everyone tremble. This father knew him very well and once told him: "When you are lord and master here, you will betray everyone, for you can't help yourself. You are false to the core of your being, and a betrayer. Be careful, Friedrich! Make that first betrayal as complete as possible, for you won't manage to fool them a second time." I have a trusthworthy second source for this anecdote, for it has been confirmed to me by the crown prince, his worthy brother. I hope thus to have drawn some traits of his character for you. In totem, he remains an enigma.

felis: You know what, now I'm wondering if Algarotti is the one who talked to Fritz about Valori, although the negativity doesn't really seem like him (he visited Rheinsberg about two weeks before the October letter to Voltaire).

Voltaire himself didn't know Valori before November/December 1740, when he seems to have spent some time at his place, because he promptly sets his Algarotti poem at Valori's:

Mais quand, chez le gros Valori,
Je vois le tendre Algarotti
Presser d'une vive embrassade
Le beau Lugeac, son jeune ami,
Je crois voir Socrate affermi
Sur la croupe d'Alcibiade;

selenak: Something else going back to Volz reminded me of is that in addition to the famous portrait of Fritz written by Valory in the 1750s, there is one from just before FW's death, dated Berlin, March 18th 1740, reflecting both the early coolness between them but also shows Valory doing what Suhm does not, and certainly Voltaire (who didn't know FW) never did, seeing the similarity between FW and Fritz. BTW, I have a theory, based on Crown Prince Fritz' "a soldier but not a mind" judgment on Valory, as to what the problem was - Valory, who was sent as envoy to FW, after all, played up his military credentials in order to make a good impression (he'd been a general), which makes sense if you need to win over a King who prizes soldierliness over everything and who doesn't like the French and accuses them of being effeminate and what not in every other sentence. Now, subsequent years show Valory was very much culturally interested, and he definitely was smart and could be witty, but I bet he kept that hidden when first meeting up with FW, and Fritz judged him by that. So, here's Valory a month and a half before Fritz becomes King:

As far as his character is concerned, the Crown Prince entirely resembles his father, the King, except that he's far better at dissembling. Regarding his ability to lie I speak going by the judgment of those who know him best and who want to be closest to him. After their conviction, one will have to start with the study of his character from scratch, because he will be quite different as a King than he has been as Crown Prince. But they don't know what exactly he'll do, whom he'll give his affection to, whether he'll entrust the business of state to the same people, whether he'll give influence to the nobility or whether he'll rely on his ministers whose gifts the ruling King hasn't been able to esteem as they deserve.

Thulemeier FW's secretary for foreign affairs -whose insight and wisdom I value highly doesn't want to pass judgment on the future, but he's convinced that the Crown Prince will act very differently than suspected once he's on the throne. In his view, those who count on his favour fool themselves. The great tasks awaiting him, the need for able coworkers in order to reverse the political mistakes his father has made and to use the rich heritage awaiting him will inevitably force him to neglect the sciences and to give his trust to those whose insight can be useful to him, and he will try to get to know those whose name has been blackened towards him.

One expects great things from this prince; he could soon achieve the love of his subjects and the admiration of his neighbours. The discontent with the present government is universal, and everyone reacts badly if one tries to remind the people of the good qualities of the ruling King. Even the fear of him doesn't hold back the most gruff statements anymore. So if his successor shows even a bit of clemency and selflessness, all his other mistakes will be forgiven, if he does make them...

Concealed pregnancy scandal
Early in 1763, Countess Camas tells him about a lady of the court who got pregnant. He has opinions on the matter, as does she:

Fritz: [...] The affair which has just happened is quite ordinary; there is no court, no convent even where this does not happen. I am very indulgent when it comes to the weaknesses of our species, I do not stone ladies of the court who have children. They perpetuate the species, unlike these fanatical politicians who destroy it with their fatal wars. One is not always master of oneself; one takes a poor girl in a moment of tenderness, one says such pretty things to her, one makes her a child: what harm is there in that? I confess to you that I like these too tender temperaments better than the chastity dragons who tear their fellow human beings apart, or these vexatious women who are fundamentally wicked and evil. Let this child be brought up well, let the family not be prostituted, and let this poor girl get out of court without scandal, while sparing her reputation as much as possible.

Countess Camas: I suspected, Sire, that Your Majesty would make fun of me a little, but that at the same time he would have pity for this poor girl, who, however, does not think herself as unhappy as I find her. She wants to go to Stettin, to see her sister Madame de Lepel, and she is too convinced that her lover will marry her first thing after the peace. The Queen has taken care to have the child placed with a nurse through Mr. Lesser, who at the same time takes care of everything necessary for the childbirth. Everything is done quietly, no one at court talks about it; but that does not prevent that everyone whispers about it in town. Finally, despite the compassion I have for her, I must admit that we are happy to be free of her; her character is worth nothing, and her too great inclination towards love is, in my opinion, the least of her faults.

I was just looking through Lehndorff for a different anecdote and he actually talks about a scandal concerning a pregnancy in early 1763 as well! If that's the same one, which would make sense, the scandal horse has definitely left the barn. He is even less complimentary about the person in question, calling her unworthy and detestable, a liar and a gossip, and someone who managed to deceive the Queen and even Countess Camas for a while. He also says the father is an Austrian officer. Huh.

selenak: Austrian father: not that unusual, if you consider that the captured enemy officers socialized a lot with the Prussian court ladies, were drafted as dancers and what not. (Unless Fritz especially gave order for the officers in question not to.) But it explains why she'd think he'd marry her after the war (according to Countess Camas), not during. Having just found the relevant entry in Lehndorff when you pointed it out, I guess this Countess H. is probably the same person. In terms of Lehndorff's negative characterisation, on the one hand, he does have a double standard and is prone to cry out "MESSALINA!" intermittently at young women behaving the same way noble young men do, otoh, he doesn't do this all the time (see the very positive entry about the Austrian Ambassador's mistress in 1756, for example, and with Countess Bentinck, he goes from bristling at her from liking her. So IDK how reliable his judgment is here. Otoh, what he's most angry about is that she's been lying to both the Queen and Countess Camas when they had promised to help her and handle everything discreetly, i.e. the unnecessary lie more than the sex, and it would make sense that this is what makes Camas herself annoyed with the woman, too.

felis: OMG, I just realized that a preceding sentence from Fritz' letter, which I cut because I thought it was unrelated, was actually very related: Verily, my good maman, you are quite an expert, and I congratulate you on being so well versed in dropsy. She obviously told him that the woman had insisted that she wasn't pregnant at first, saying that she just had a spot of dropsy and that's why she was gaining weight, which the queen and Camas initially believed! And that's also why Camas thought Fritz would mock her a bit! Lehndorff, thank you for the context. Again. (See, Preuss, this is what happens when you exclude one side of the conversation.)