"She cried but she took"

[mildred_of_midgard]

selenak: There is a famous but apocryphal quip by Fritz which gets quoted on this a lot, but no one has ever been able to find it in any of his letters or even in his described conversations in other people's memoirs, so biographers were reluctantly forced to admit that it was probably invented after the fact by other people but sounded so much like something he would have said that it stuck.

gambitten: The origins of this quote were investigated by Jürgen Luh here. To sum it up, "she cried but she took" or variations thereof are basically a summary of what French Ambassador Prince Louis de Rohan wrote about MT in a 1772 dispatch. Many years later a certain Maletzki, an editorial secretary of the "Communist International" newspaper and fabricator of various Fritz related quotes, published in 1922 that "Friedrich II once said(...) 'she cried but she took'". And this was picked up by Egon Friedell in 1928 in his extremely successful "Cultural History of Modern Times" book series, and was accepted by historians for many years from then on.