#pollnitz

Frederick's other favorite was Hans Hermann von Katte: eight years Frederick's senior and a Francke man. He was an officer in the elite Gensd'armes regiment who had been destined for the law, and had therefore had the chance to travel and study. He was cultured, he painted and played music. According to Pollnitz, Frederick 'carried on with him like a lover with his mistress'. Pollnitz and Wilhelmina are the usual sources for Katte, and both tend to run him down. Neither has anything nice to say about his looks, for example. The former calls him 'short and swarthy and extraordinarily defaced by the pox'. Wilhelmina thought him more dangerous than Keith and called him 'more repulsive than likable; a pair of black eyebrows hung almost over his eyes...A dark, pockmarked skin added to his ugliness...he posed as a wit, and a consummate libertine'. He wore his hair powdered, divided into three tresses, 'His features were neither handsome nor ugly, betraying his cleverness, energy and a certain aristocratic conceit'.