Having devoured Nancy Mitford’s Frederick the Great, which gave me a burning desire to visit Potsdam, the site of Frederick’s beloved palace of Sans Souci, I became curious about the  other people and places mentioned in the book.  For instance, this man Voltaire.  Who was he?  And Madame de Pompadour?  Cardinal de Fleury?  None of these people were showing up in our weekly viewings of The Remarkable Life of Friedrich von der Trenck.

Sans Souci

It occurred to me that Miss Mitford might have written other books.  Returning to the library, I looked up her other works in the card catalogue.  Sure enough, it listed Madame de Pompadour and The Sun King.

I loved the sparkle and wit of her prose, even as a 10-year-old.  Of course, a good deal of her wit went over my head.  I also loved her personal insights.  I noticed, for instance, that in The Sun King she was able to offer a first-hand comparison of the toilet facilities at Versailles and Buckingham Palace, which then, unlike now, was not open to the general public.

Since the great courtesan was Frederick’s contemporary, I decided to borrow Madame de Pompadour first.  Thus it was that I discovered the teeming, scheming labyrinth of Versailles in the mid-18th century.

I remember exactly when my lifelong preoccupation with the 18th century began.

When I was 10 years old, my parents, who had emigrated from Berlin to our small city in Ontario, took me to our local German-Canadian club on a Wednesday evening to watch the first instalment of what I later learned was a 1972 German television series called The Remarkable Life of Frederick, Baron von der Trenck.*  In those pre-downloading, pre-DVD, even pre-VCR days, we sat on folding chairs in the club’s dance hall to watch the show on a large portable screen, as if it were a home movie.

The 6-part series follows Trenck’s soldierly and romantic adventures through the courts of Frederick the Great of Prussia, Elizabeth of Russia, and Maria Theresa of Austria, as he navigates the 2 great conflicts of the mid-eighteenth century, the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War.  I was enthralled from start to finish, and would fidget impatiently through the dull preliminary featurettes that preceded each weekly instalment.  Though I boyishly admired Trenck’s manly exploits, the character who really transfixed me was Frederick II of Prussia, whom my parents, good Berliners, invariably and affectionately referred to as der Alte Fritz (Old Fred).

Frederick the Great