Don’t be fooled by the granite obelisk across the street that looks something like the genuine article. Some local people believe that a history-minded person rescued the real whipping post from oblivion as a landscaping stone, wrapped it in burlap, and buried it near Four Corners. When word of the hiding place got around, the people who wished to preserve the post dug it up and hid it elsewhere. In both versions, a mob of enraged women surrounded the condemned, demanding she be set free without being whipped. Wilbour pondered a moment, and then judiciously said, “But ladies, if it happened there should be no ‘upright post’ then how could the law be carried out?” Taking his hint, the women worked together to pull down the whipping post, leaving it lying in the dirt. Es pflegt wohl auch der Landes Herr solche Strafe bißweilen in Vestungsbau zu verwandeln. Und zwar entweder beydes, oder nur die Landesverweisung nach ausgestandenem Staupenschlage." I posted the above excerpt from Cornelia Naumann's novel in my first post on Doris Ritter, thinking that other than the whipping scene observed through the window (and translated by me here), the dialogue was fictional. And indeed, we know that Princess Wilhelmine did not witness Doris's whipping. However, it turns out the meeting itself between these three protagonists (Princess Wilhelmine, her governess/confidante Dorothea von Sonsfeld and the King's personal valet/pet bully Eversmann) and most of the words exchanges are historically accurate, but took place several months later, in May 1731.

whipping | Whipping Girl by - Inkitt Chapter 31) the whipping | Whipping Girl by - Inkitt

My first source is a travel guide from 1732, published while Doris Ritter was actually in the Spinnhaus from 1730-33. The town of Spandau has a light-hearted entry which contains the sentence: " And finally there is also a Spinnhaus in the town, which is always full of womenfolk who have lived too gallantly", which I take to mean that at least in popular perception the Spinnhaus was a place specifically for immoral women, rather than general criminals. Wilhelmine wasn't really interested in the fate of commoners and mentions Doris only in passing as hearsay from a courtier (" ... a mistress of the Crown Prince was whipped and banished ..."), but the below extract does contain near-verbatim the above conversation from the novel in a different context: The edict doesn't say what "mild" or "sharp" welcomes mean, but I found this in an academic book about the history of prisons in Bremen:This is fascinating for me, but may not be to anybody else as there is no explicit forum-relevant content -- please ignore unless you're following me down the wormhole of my Doris Ritter obsession. A whip is an MP who, as part of a team, is responsible for other MPs attending Parliament and voting along party lines So, the four main buildings relevant to this story were all arranged around a single square, the Alter Markt (Old Market) in Potsdam:

Fiction Stories | The Disciplinary Wives Club Fiction Stories | The Disciplinary Wives Club

Can't you just feel Eversmann leering at the poor lady-in-waiting, and Wilhelmine's flesh crawling as she retells the scene -- having been threatened with incarneration herself seconds earlier, the prospect of whipping must have felt very personal to Wilhelmine.] The Church of St. Nikolai, Potsdam's main Lutheran church, where Doris's father held the post of cantor (master of the church music) and organist. This is where the prince first saw Doris when she was singing the solo soprano in mass, under her father's direction. It's interesting to me that the governments of many other countries, including Germany and England, which, though Christian, supported a literal interpretation of the bible, ignored this particular stricture. As they did many others, of course. I suppose the justification was that they applied only to legalistic Jews and certainly not to the far more compassionate and enlightened believers in the New Testament, who were free to punish miscreants with hundreds of lashes. Vector and Chiren are the main villains. Nova wouldn't be mentioned until the ending. The problem with Vector was that because of how often Nova used his body, the character had very little agency of his own. If Heinrich is right, the punishment meted out to Doris was considered even at the time to be wildly over the top compared to the supposed offence, and a sign of temporary insanity by the King.I have now started to write up a fictionalised version of Doris's story, but it's slow going -- I will start posting it in a separate thread once I have a few chapters down and am reasonably confident that I can complete it. This will closely follow the historical record as per my previous posts here, with plausible (and I hope suitably on-topic for Cruxforums) interpolations as to the details of Doris's public punishment where they were not recorded. In respect of the Marquise de Ferrand, there are ten separate edicts concerning her or her husband in the index -- many more than for Doris, I note, presumably a reflection of the high status of her husband, the Marquis de Ferrand. According to the index, he was a "Kammerherr", which is the German for "chamberlain", a senior offical at the Royal Court. Here are the screenshots of the index: Thanks for those kind words. I am writing, but don't really want to post until I'm fairly sure I will be able to complete the story -- nothing worse than stories that are abandoned a couple of chapters in. Yes, there would have been a welcome and farewell whipping in the Spinnhaus, but not necessarily for all prisoners. I found these passages in a Prussian edict issued by Friedrich II (Doris's old maybe-lover) in 1772, forty years after Doris, which (unlike the laws in my previous post) did apply to the Brandenburg province, i.e. Potsdam, Berlin and Spandau.