I had originally said that I could only find a few posthumous references to Peter as Baron/Freiherr, and I thought it was a misunderstanding based on his wife's "Baroness" title. I've now found two occurrences from the 1740s: one in 1748 where the East Frisians were asking Fritz permission to make him a member of the local nobility/knighthood (Ritterschaft) despite the fact that he only had an estate (Visquard) in East Frisia through his wife, and his son's baptism record in 1745, which I had somehow missed/forgotten refers to him as "Baron de Keith."
But I've never seen him referred to this way by anyone who actually knew him, just in official documents where his wife is mentioned as a Baroness. Whereas their son Karl Ernst is a baron pretty consistently. So I'm inclined to think that Peter didn't use this title, but it was used as a courtesy title for him to avoid having his wife outrank him.
I'm not aware of that as a general practice, but it's all I can come up with.
Also! More interestingly. Back in the beginning of salon, I reported that Fritz & co. had been arrested on that Strasbourg trip. I'm starting to think I got that from *Tumblr*. The closest I can find in what I had read of real sources is MacDonogh's "Broglie had been keen to avoid a diplomatic incident by arresting the king." Maybe I misunderstood that in isolation, or combined it with something I had read on Tumblr, because I'm not finding it elsewhere. It's not in Voltaire, it's not in Bielfeld, it's not in Blanning, it's not in Asprey...
And as we later found, thanks to the good offices of selenak and felis, that it's not in Broglie's report or Manteuffel's or any of the other actual contemporary sources.
The only actual (non-tumblr) place I can think of (unless you can think of something else, Selena) that says they were arrested is Ziebura's AW bio, where she writes, "Frederick does not mention to Voltaire the inglorious end of their adventure, but Wilhelm notes in his autobiography that they were arrested." ("Friedrich berichtet Voltaire nichts von dem unrühmlichen Ende ihres Abenteuers, aber Wilhelm vermerkt in seinem Lebenslauf, dass sie arretiert wurden.")
Well, you may remember that I got my hands on a copy of that autobiography last year, and since I was researching that episode for my Peter Keith work, I went and looked at it just now.
Here's what it says:
Je Suivie le Roi Mon frere à Bareut et de la Strasbourg ou nous etant arrette qu'un jours nous nous rendimes a Wesell
Now, I looked at that with my recently improved French and immediately went, "I don't think that's what it says..." Then I asked Google Translate, and Google went, "I don't think that's what it says..."
Google and I agree that that says, "I accompanied my brother the king to Bayreuth, and from Strasbourg, where we only stayed one day, we went to Wesel."
I would be just willing to accept an alternate interpretation of "We were only arrested one day," but only if there were rumors flying around that they were arrested more than one day. And as we've seen, there weren't (unless I'm missing something).
Now, I'm far from fluent in French, but I think the easiest explanation here is that Ziebura is also less than perfectly fluent, and that she's fallen prey to a false friend.
Also, I want to add that Ziebura says that the autobiography was written in 1744, the year of the birth of AW's son (FW2), but Krieger, who published the autobiography with his commentary, says that we can't assume that; both drafts (there are two) break off in the middle of a sentence at the end of a page, one in 1740 and one in 1744, and it's clear (to him) that we're just missing the last part.
Update: I checked with a near-native speaker of French. He confirmed my reading and agrees that it looks like a case of a false friend. Mystery solved! There was no arrest.
Je Suivie le Roi Mon frere à Bareut et de la Strasbourg ou nous etant arrette qu'un jours nous nous rendimes a Wesell
Me: Yeah, that seems pretty straightforward, "where we had stopped just for a day," what's the prob -- oh. Yeah.
I see that your friend has confirmed, but yes, I remember memorizing arrêter as "stop" and being told that it did NOT mean "arrest" (in the police sense, rather than the, idk, "the motion of his hand was arrested in mid-air" sense) even in first-year French.
Good grief, yes, same here to both what you were saying. I imagine Ziebura was just very exhausted the day she transcribed this...
This said, the brain works in mysterious ways even for princes who have French as their first language, see Fritz writing to Heinrich to arrange their post AW meeting in Dresden, and using a a French word which puzzled me until I figured out he must have been thinking in German and used the literal translation, proving this could happen even to Fritz. (Who had just marched to Zorndorf and back in the company of German soldiers and without his usual full entourage of French speakers, which might explain it.)
Good grief, yes, same here to both what you were saying. I imagine Ziebura was just very exhausted the day she transcribed this...
Either that, or she was just going from memory. You and I have written some stuff in salon that would make me question your command of German and my command of English if I thought we had written it while staring at the text in question, but no, we were summarizing what we remembered.
This said, the brain works in mysterious ways even for princes who have French as their first language, see Fritz writing to Heinrich to arrange their post AW meeting in Dresden, and using a a French word which puzzled me until I figured out he must have been thinking in German and used the literal translation, proving this could happen even to Fritz.
Very true! Bilingualism is complicated. It's possible Ziebura was very fluent in French, but had a moment of what linguists call "linguistic interference" and what laypeople call "a brain fart." ;)
(Who had just marched to Zorndorf and back in the company of German soldiers and without his usual full entourage of French speakers, which might explain it.)
I remember memorizing arrêter as "stop" and being told that it did NOT mean "arrest" (in the police sense, rather than the, idk, "the motion of his hand was arrested in mid-air" sense) even in first-year French.
So did I! But that doesn't mean a word can't have multiple meanings, or that the meaning can't change over time. We've seen "Sodomie" change meanings in German since the 18th century, from "sexual deviance including homosexuality" to "bestiality".
And looking at Larousse, I see "Appréhender quelqu'un par autorité de justice ou de police, l'incarcérer" *is* a possible meaning for "arrêter", it's just not the most common one that you and I would learn in first-year French.
What convinced me that this wasn't "we were arrested" was the "qu'", which I didn't learn in first or second year French could mean "only/just/no more than." I only learned that in the last couple years of French practice, which is why I referred to my "recently improved" French. So either AW is saying they were only arrested one day, or that they only spent one day there, and then it becomes a question of pragmatics. Saying you went to a whole other country but only for one day: totally normal. I myself would say "I've been to Prague, but only for one day." Casually mentioning you were arrested but only for one day: only makes sense if that's not a big deal (compared to something that is a big deal). Since it *would* have been a big deal for the King and Crown Prince of Prussia to be arrested, that reading only works for me if there are claims that they were arrested for more than one day. Since I'm not seeing those claims, "only spent one day" is the only reasonable reading I can get out of this.
The reason I asked my friend: Larousse says that "arrêter" means "spend time" when it's reflexive, i.e., I would expect AW to have written "nous nous etant arrette." I wanted to check that my reading was still okay without the extra "nous". Since my friend says it is, we're good.
Speaking of words that can have more than one meaning, I meant to add that our friend "douceurs" that we ran into in the Leining letters and which Selena translated "sweets" and I commented I only knew it as "gratuities" in English...I have now run into the "gratuities" meaning in both the Keith papers *and* the Berlin Kriminal Senat's judgment on Pfeiffer. (Either that, or they're giving out candy in some weird contexts. :P) So it seems that had both meanings, or else Leining was borrowing from French.
Okay, I can't find it in Duden, but the Digitale Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache defines "Douceur" as "Trinkgeld", i.e. tip, and says it's old-fashioned. Since I can't come up with any other reading of the Leining sentence than the way Selena read it, i.e., with Fritz being the recipient, and since there's a food context, "Douceur" might actually have only meant "tip/gratuity" in German, but Leining was thinking in French, where it does mean "sweets" in the plural. I've often found it hard in these older texts to tell if someone is using the French word instead of the German word ad hoc, because the French word was the first one to come to their mind, or because they're speaking German and the French word was a widely used French loanword in German.
So having seen MacDonogh say that Broglie had been keen to avoid a diplomatic incident by arresting the king, and having seen Mitford say that Fritz was nearly arrested, I wondered where that was coming from.
Well, searching for something Peter Keith-related, I found this gem in Fritz's description to Voltaire of the Strasbourg episode:
This general [Broglie] wanted to know who this Count Dufour was, a foreigner who, having barely arrived, was getting involved in assembling a company of people he did not know. He took the poor count for a purse-snatcher, and prudently advised M. de la Crochardière not to be taken in by him. Unfortunately, it was the good marshal who was.
Saxons: Purse-snatcher, eh? Well, he's not wrong...
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Re: Random stuff
But I've never seen him referred to this way by anyone who actually knew him, just in official documents where his wife is mentioned as a Baroness. Whereas their son Karl Ernst is a baron pretty consistently. So I'm inclined to think that Peter didn't use this title, but it was used as a courtesy title for him to avoid having his wife outrank him.
I'm not aware of that as a general practice, but it's all I can come up with.
Also! More interestingly. Back in the beginning of salon, I reported that Fritz & co. had been arrested on that Strasbourg trip. I'm starting to think I got that from *Tumblr*. The closest I can find in what I had read of real sources is MacDonogh's "Broglie had been keen to avoid a diplomatic incident by arresting the king." Maybe I misunderstood that in isolation, or combined it with something I had read on Tumblr, because I'm not finding it elsewhere. It's not in Voltaire, it's not in Bielfeld, it's not in Blanning, it's not in Asprey...
And as we later found, thanks to the good offices of
The only actual (non-tumblr) place I can think of (unless you can think of something else, Selena) that says they were arrested is Ziebura's AW bio, where she writes, "Frederick does not mention to Voltaire the inglorious end of their adventure, but Wilhelm notes in his autobiography that they were arrested." ("Friedrich berichtet Voltaire nichts von dem unrühmlichen Ende ihres Abenteuers, aber Wilhelm vermerkt in seinem Lebenslauf, dass sie arretiert wurden.")
Well, you may remember that I got my hands on a copy of that autobiography last year, and since I was researching that episode for my Peter Keith work, I went and looked at it just now.
Here's what it says:
Je Suivie le Roi Mon frere à Bareut et de la Strasbourg ou nous etant arrette qu'un jours nous nous rendimes a Wesell
Now, I looked at that with my recently improved French and immediately went, "I don't think that's what it says..." Then I asked Google Translate, and Google went, "I don't think that's what it says..."
Google and I agree that that says, "I accompanied my brother the king to Bayreuth, and from Strasbourg, where we only stayed one day, we went to Wesel."
I would be just willing to accept an alternate interpretation of "We were only arrested one day," but only if there were rumors flying around that they were arrested more than one day. And as we've seen, there weren't (unless I'm missing something).
Now, I'm far from fluent in French, but I think the easiest explanation here is that Ziebura is also less than perfectly fluent, and that she's fallen prey to a false friend.
Also, I want to add that Ziebura says that the autobiography was written in 1744, the year of the birth of AW's son (FW2), but Krieger, who published the autobiography with his commentary, says that we can't assume that; both drafts (there are two) break off in the middle of a sentence at the end of a page, one in 1740 and one in 1744, and it's clear (to him) that we're just missing the last part.
Re: Random stuff
Re: Random stuff
Me: Yeah, that seems pretty straightforward, "where we had stopped just for a day," what's the prob -- oh. Yeah.
I see that your friend has confirmed, but yes, I remember memorizing arrêter as "stop" and being told that it did NOT mean "arrest" (in the police sense, rather than the, idk, "the motion of his hand was arrested in mid-air" sense) even in first-year French.
Nice find :D
Re: Random stuff
This said, the brain works in mysterious ways even for princes who have French as their first language, see Fritz writing to Heinrich to arrange their post AW meeting in Dresden, and using a a French word which puzzled me until I figured out he must have been thinking in German and used the literal translation, proving this could happen even to Fritz. (Who had just marched to Zorndorf and back in the company of German soldiers and without his usual full entourage of French speakers, which might explain it.)
Re: Random stuff
Either that, or she was just going from memory. You and I have written some stuff in salon that would make me question your command of German and my command of English if I thought we had written it while staring at the text in question, but no, we were summarizing what we remembered.
This said, the brain works in mysterious ways even for princes who have French as their first language, see Fritz writing to Heinrich to arrange their post AW meeting in Dresden, and using a a French word which puzzled me until I figured out he must have been thinking in German and used the literal translation, proving this could happen even to Fritz.
Very true! Bilingualism is complicated. It's possible Ziebura was very fluent in French, but had a moment of what linguists call "linguistic interference" and what laypeople call "a brain fart." ;)
(Who had just marched to Zorndorf and back in the company of German soldiers and without his usual full entourage of French speakers, which might explain it.)
That does make sense.
French loanwords
So did I! But that doesn't mean a word can't have multiple meanings, or that the meaning can't change over time. We've seen "Sodomie" change meanings in German since the 18th century, from "sexual deviance including homosexuality" to "bestiality".
And looking at Larousse, I see "Appréhender quelqu'un par autorité de justice ou de police, l'incarcérer" *is* a possible meaning for "arrêter", it's just not the most common one that you and I would learn in first-year French.
What convinced me that this wasn't "we were arrested" was the "qu'", which I didn't learn in first or second year French could mean "only/just/no more than." I only learned that in the last couple years of French practice, which is why I referred to my "recently improved" French. So either AW is saying they were only arrested one day, or that they only spent one day there, and then it becomes a question of pragmatics. Saying you went to a whole other country but only for one day: totally normal. I myself would say "I've been to Prague, but only for one day." Casually mentioning you were arrested but only for one day: only makes sense if that's not a big deal (compared to something that is a big deal). Since it *would* have been a big deal for the King and Crown Prince of Prussia to be arrested, that reading only works for me if there are claims that they were arrested for more than one day. Since I'm not seeing those claims, "only spent one day" is the only reasonable reading I can get out of this.
The reason I asked my friend: Larousse says that "arrêter" means "spend time" when it's reflexive, i.e., I would expect AW to have written "nous nous etant arrette." I wanted to check that my reading was still okay without the extra "nous". Since my friend says it is, we're good.
Speaking of words that can have more than one meaning, I meant to add that our friend "douceurs" that we ran into in the Leining letters and which Selena translated "sweets" and I commented I only knew it as "gratuities" in English...I have now run into the "gratuities" meaning in both the Keith papers *and* the Berlin Kriminal Senat's judgment on Pfeiffer. (Either that, or they're giving out candy in some weird contexts. :P) So it seems that had both meanings, or else Leining was borrowing from French.
Okay, I can't find it in Duden, but the Digitale Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache defines "Douceur" as "Trinkgeld", i.e. tip, and says it's old-fashioned. Since I can't come up with any other reading of the Leining sentence than the way Selena read it, i.e., with Fritz being the recipient, and since there's a food context, "Douceur" might actually have only meant "tip/gratuity" in German, but Leining was thinking in French, where it does mean "sweets" in the plural. I've often found it hard in these older texts to tell if someone is using the French word instead of the German word ad hoc, because the French word was the first one to come to their mind, or because they're speaking German and the French word was a widely used French loanword in German.
Re: Random stuff
Well, searching for something Peter Keith-related, I found this gem in Fritz's description to Voltaire of the Strasbourg episode:
This general [Broglie] wanted to know who this Count Dufour was, a foreigner who, having barely arrived, was getting involved in assembling a company of people he did not know. He took the poor count for a purse-snatcher, and prudently advised M. de la Crochardière not to be taken in by him. Unfortunately, it was the good marshal who was.
Saxons: Purse-snatcher, eh? Well, he's not wrong...