Another poll and a vid

[selenak]

One of the best sources you get for 18th century sensational gossip and character portrats are envoy reports. They're an absolute gold mine, I swear. Of course, the envoys also complain a lot, which made me wonder...

Poll #25818 The Ambassadors' Club

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 21

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My 18th Century Dream Posting would be...

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Paris (Fashion, Literature, Music, Scandal - the best of everything)
1 (4.8%)

St. Petersburg (Future Czarinas to fall in love with! Amazing presents to be had!)
1 (4.8%)

Vienna (Mozart concerts with live Mozart! Pastry!)
4 (19.0%)

Dresden (gorgeous architecture, orgies, luxury)
3 (14.3%)

Venice (Carnival, Vivaldi, Goldoni)
3 (14.3%)

Berlin (post 1740) (as much literature, music and scandal as Paris, but way better hygiene)
1 (4.8%)

The Hague (cleanest European posting to be had! No absolute monarch to coddle!)
3 (14.3%)

London (free press, good music, easy language to learn)
5 (23.8%)

My 18th Century Nightmare Posting would be....

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Paris (often stinks like a pigsty, is expensive, lots of locals are snobs)
0 (0.0%)

St. Petersburg (Czar likes drinking competitions, winter is way too cold)
10 (47.6%)

Vienna (chastity commission WTF?)
0 (0.0%)

Madrid (King sometimes thinks he's a frog, only talks to envoys at night)
0 (0.0%)

Berlin (verbal abuse by monarch almost guaranteed for most of century)
1 (4.8%)

The Hague (anti-gay progrom gets up to 300 men killed)
3 (14.3%)

London (hideously expensive; fox-hunting wtf?)
1 (4.8%)

Ratisbon (boring; everyone argues about ceremony)
1 (4.8%)

Venice (Cholera, STDs, Lead Chambers)
5 (23.8%)

You missed out my 18th Century dream/nightmare posting entirely, which is...

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Salka Viertel, actress, scriptwriter (for Greta Garbo), saloniere, memoirist and activist was a very interesting woman in her own right, and a great portrayer of other interesting people in her memoirs. Her house was a central meeting point for the German-speaking exiles in the 1940s, which is how I first came across her. Here in this videa, she's discussed (in English) with her biographer Donna Rifkind and two German scholars. In between discussions, you get readings from Rifkind's biography about her and from Salka's own memoirs, The Kindness of Strangers. (If I have one criticism, than that the excerpt Rifkind is reading form her own biography right at the beginning describes something which is one of the great tragicomic set pieces in Salka's own book - the birthday party for Heinrich Mann where both brothers Mann with their speeches drove Salka's cook into despair - , and not only is it hard to improve from Salka' s own description (which has become legendary and gets quoted in every book about exiles in L.A.), but it doesn't say something about Salka herself. So if I was Rifkind, I'd have opened with a different excerpt. But that's me nitpicking, and if you haven't heard the story before, it's funny and sad and moving all on the same time, so no objections there, plus the later discussions are definitely Salka-focused. Also? Both the discussion and the readings are filmed in the Villa Aurora, which is the drop gorgeous mansion in Pacific Palisades where my doctoral thesis subject Lion Feuchtwanger spent his last twenty years in.

Watch on YouTube

Comments

[rachelmanija]

...the king thinks he's a frog?!

I voted for Vienna with the assumption that if I'm the envoy, I speak the local language. Amadeus convinced me that the pastries would make it worthwhile even without the music.

[selenak]

Sometimes (as in July 1727), Philip V. of Spain does indeed. For more details see this post, or if you just want to know about the frog bit, this subsection.

Amadeus makes a powerful case for the pastries, to be sure. :)

[mildred_of_midgard]

The oddness of him ever thinking he was a frog causes all of us to blow it out of proportion to its actual frequency. ;) "At one point in July (1728) he believed that he was a frog," according to one biographer. OTOH, that was one month after the new French envoy arrived, so that must have been...interesting for the envoy.

In addition to the posts Selena linked, the original one has a list of other symptoms Philip V had (the "First Mission" and "Second Mission" sections; skip the rest).

I know you can't diagnose at a distance like this, but if you had any interest, I'd be curious about your thoughts on the symptoms there and my discussion of bipolar vs. depression in the Mental Health section here.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Hilarious poll, hard to choose!

One of the best sources you get for 18th century sensational gossip and character portrats are envoy reports. They're an absolute gold mine, I swear.

They ARE. I'm so glad I decided to read Oster after we'd discovered that, because you read it early on, and me reading it a year later is how we picked up on Mr. "Disney" Stratemann!

Berlin (post 1740) (as much literature, music and scandal as Paris, but way better hygiene)

Except by the monarch, but don't worry, you won't see him (unless you're Mitchell and prepared to join him on campaign during the Seven Years' War). :P

[selenak]

I'm so glad you did, too, for I have a far less systematic mind than yours and it would not have occured to me to check out Stratemann after reading Oster - and how much would we have missed if you hadn't hit on this!

Berlin station: Valory would like to point out that since he joined the Silesian Campaigns for the first two wars, he saw a lot of the monarch, too. His own reccommendation to successors would be not to be allergic against tobacco snuff, and best bring a handsome secretary along.

[sovay]

Vienna (Mozart concerts with live Mozart! Pastry!)

Plus, depending on when in the eighteenth century, I could crash with my (bound to be horrified by my existence, tough luck) relatives.

I wouldn't mind Salonika. They were pretty stable that century.

[selenak]

Salonika: so they were, but I guess it had consuls rather than envoys, and weren't those drawn mostly from locals?

[muccamukk]

I once found the reports from the Savoy envoy at the Court of Charles I of England, which someone had translated into English and posted online, and MAN there's good gossip in there.

[selenak]

I bet! Of course, not every envoy delivers, but most I've checked out really provides the goods. And they're all writing without the benefit of hindsight. While this means they inevitably get some things wrong, it also means they'e not beefing up or denigrating knowing how Character X will turn out a few years hence.