Frederick the Great's greyhounds: Biche, Alcmène and the dogs of Sanssouci

Frederick II, king of Prussia from 1740 to 1786, kept small greyhounds for most of his life. This page follows those dogs through the letters of his court: what he called them, how they lived in his rooms, the battle that took one of them away, the letters he wrote in a dog's voice, and the graves on the terrace at Sanssouci. Most of the letters come from the University of Trier's digital edition of his collected works, edited by Johann Preuss. The wider story of royal dogs is on the royal pets in history page.

A small greyhound in the king's rooms

The Deutsches Tierärzteblatt, the journal of Germany's federal chamber of veterinarians, published an article on Frederick and animals in 2013. It says his favourite dogs were Italian Windspiele, a small form of the greyhound. They went with him everywhere: on rides, on army exercises and even to war. They were free to go into every room of the palace. At dinner he laid pieces of meat on the tablecloth to cool, then fed the dogs from his hand. A favourite dog sometimes slept in his bed. If bad weather caught him on a walk in the park, he held one of the delicate dogs against his chest.

Franz Kugler's history of Frederick, illustrated by Adolph Menzel, adds more detail. The university's copy is the 1856 edition. Kugler says three or four dogs were always with the king. One was the favourite, and the others kept it company. The favourite lay beside him on its own chair, covered with cushions in winter. The dogs could choose the most costly sofas, and they had leather balls to play with. They followed him to the picture gallery at Sanssouci and into the gardens. When he went to Berlin for the carnival, they travelled in a coach pulled by six horses, with a servant to look after them.

The Tierärzteblatt says the king spoke to his dogs with "Sie", the polite German word for "you". Kugler gives the habit to the servant. In his version, the greyhounds took the front seat of the coach, the servant took the rear seat, and he spoke to them politely: "Biche, sein Sie doch artig! Alcmene, bellen Sie nicht so!" ("Biche, do behave! Alcmène, don't bark like that!").

The Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation, which cares for Sanssouci today, says the palace was the place where Frederick most liked to retreat in the company of his dogs.

What Frederick called his dogs

Today the breed is called the Italian greyhound. Frederick used a different name. In a letter to his brother William, Prince of Prussia, in April 1752, he called Biche "ma levrette anglaise", my English greyhound. The French texts of his works call these dogs levrettes, and Preuss's German comments call the same dogs Windspiele.

Small greyhounds also came to him from England as gifts. On 18 April 1747 he told his envoy in London to thank Lord Bolingbroke for "two little English greyhounds". In 1748 Villiers, a British diplomat who had served in Saxony and was leaving his post, sent two more. On 24 May 1748 Frederick thanked him for "two greyhounds that seemed to have escaped from the hunt of Diana". Frederick gave dogs away too. On 28 November 1749 Count Algarotti wrote to him that Schmidt, who was making the plates for a book, already pictured in his room the greyhound the king was giving him, and was getting ready to draw and engrave it.

The modern breed has a long written history. The Fédération Cynologique Internationale (FCI), the world federation of kennel clubs, calls it the Piccolo Levriero Italiano and gives Italy as its country of origin. Its standard says the breed descends from small sighthounds, dogs that hunt by sight and speed, that lived at the court of the pharaohs. The FCI says the breed reached Italy early in the 5th century BC and had its greatest growth at the courts of nobles during the Renaissance. The Royal Kennel Club in Britain says dogs of this type appear on tombs from ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire. The American Kennel Club names Anne of Denmark, Mary Beatrice d'Este of Modena, Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great and Queen Victoria among the breed's royal owners.

Biche and the Battle of Soor

The first war story comes from Frederick's own pen. On 30 September 1745, at the Battle of Soor, the king lost his baggage. Two days later, writing from the camp at Soor, he asked his former teacher Duhan to buy him new books, because he had been "pillé totalement", robbed of everything. Preuss adds that the king had lost his baggage in the battle.

Biche was part of that loss. In April 1752 Frederick used her as an example in a letter to his brother William. He told him that a vague complaint only gets a vague excuse, and that a complaint needs exact facts. Then he gave one: "Nádasdy, your partisan, took from me on 30 September 1745 my English greyhound called Biche, whom my servant Claus was leading." Put that way, he wrote, Nádasdy must either deny that he has the dog or give her back. Frederick wrote this letter in his own hand, seven years after the battle.

What happened next is less certain. Rödenbeck's chronicle of Frederick's reign says Biche went into Austrian captivity with the baggage. The wife of General Nádasdy kept her and had to be asked several times before she gave her back. When the dog returned, General Rothenburg let her quietly into the room where the king sat writing. She jumped onto the desk and put her front paws round his neck, and the king had tears in his eyes. Kugler tells a second story: that Biche once hid silently with the king under a bridge while enemy horsemen rode over it. Rödenbeck adds that the writer Büsching called both stories untrue, and that the 13th collection of anecdotes, printed by Unger in Berlin, defended them with named witnesses. They are good stories, and they remain anecdotes.

Letters in a dog's voice

In May 1748 Frederick and his sister Wilhelmine, Margravine of Bayreuth, wrote to each other in the voices of their dogs. Her dog was Folichon, and his was Biche.

Folichon wrote first. He argued that dogs have fewer vices and more virtues than people, and named loyalty, constancy, attachment and gratitude. He said he had grown thin and sad since he left Biche. He sent her a sofa and a bowl, so that she would think of him when she lay down and drink to his health.

Biche answered from Potsdam. She accepted the gifts and his paw, and she made a joke about her master. "You, my master and I are of the same species," she wrote, and only laziness, and not wanting to run on four legs, stopped her master from calling himself a greyhound. She signed it "Votre fidèle Biche", your faithful Biche.

Wilhelmine replied on 7 June 1748 that she preferred Biche's letters to all the letters of Cicero. On 15 June Frederick answered her. He wrote that animals are often useful to us for explaining our feelings more naturally and more frankly, and that La Fontaine, who wrote his fables with animals, knew this. He added that Biche had good sense, and that he saw people every day who behaved less sensibly than she did.

When the dogs died

Biche died at the end of 1751. On 29 December 1751 Frederick wrote to Wilhelmine about "a domestic grief" that had upset his whole philosophy. He had lost Biche, and her death brought back the loss of all his friends, above all the friend who had given her to him. "I was ashamed that a dog had affected my soul so much," he wrote. He explained that his quiet life and the dog's faithfulness had bound him to her, and that her suffering had moved him. Then he gave his reason: a person who can be indifferent to a faithful animal will not be more grateful to his equals, and if one must choose, it is better to feel too much than to be hard.

Preuss dates Biche's death to the end of December 1751. He dates the letter to Fredersdorf about the "ten doctors", the one covered in our article on royal dogs in history, to 1751 or 1752. The Tierärzteblatt puts that letter in the summer of 1753. In the same letter Frederick ordered that his dog Mene, whom Preuss identifies as Alcmène, should take nothing but whey, the watery part of milk.

Alcmène's turn came in 1763. On 9 October 1763 Frederick wrote to his brother Henry: "I have a domestic grief; my poor dog is going to die." He consoled himself, he said, with the thought that if death does not spare crowned heads, poor Alcmène could not expect a better fate. The Tierärzteblatt tells a stronger story: that a favourite dog called Alcmène was too ill to go with him to army exercises and died suddenly while he was away, and that he hurried back to Potsdam, had her dug up, laid out in his library, and said goodbye to her in tears. The name was used more than once. A dog called Alcmène was alive in February 1779, when Frederick, writing from Silberberg, sent his compliments to "the little Alcmène". Preuss identifies her as his greyhound.

Other names appear in the letters. On 30 November 1767 Frederick wrote a short poem in the voice of his greyhound Diane to the Princess of Prussia. Diane announced two puppies and asked the princess to be their godmother. On 9 August 1775 his sister Amélie wrote that she shared his sorrow at "the tragic death of the beautiful Thisbé". Kugler adds Arsinoe: once, while an article on the souls of animals was being read aloud, the king held Arsinoe on his lap and told her that she had a mind, whatever the writers said.

Horses with the names of statesmen

Frederick also cared about his horses. The Deutsches Tierärzteblatt says that when he became king in 1740 there were more than 4,000 horses in the royal stables, and that all of them were now given names. Kugler says Frederick named his own horses after men of his time to suit their character: Brühl, Choiseul, Kaunitz and Pitt. When Britain made a separate peace with France in 1762, which Kugler calls a breach of its alliance with Prussia, a horse called Lord Bute was sent to pull orange trees with the mules. An old roan called Caesar was allowed to walk freely in the palace garden at Potsdam.

His last riding horse was Condé, a grey gelding born in England in 1766 and ridden by the king from 1777. The Tierärzteblatt quotes the Marquis Lucchesini, who read aloud to Frederick, on how Condé trotted behind the king during conversations and sniffed his coat pockets for slices of melon and figs. After Frederick's death the horse went to the stud at Neustadt an der Dosse, and in 1790 to the new veterinary school in Berlin, where it died on 18 April 1804 at the age of 38. Its skeleton now belongs to the Institute of Veterinary Anatomy at the Free University of Berlin.

The graves on the terrace

Kugler says the favourite dogs were buried one after another beside the statue of Flora at Sanssouci, under stone plates with their names. In January 2005 the Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten reported that the palace's sculpture workshop had lifted eleven sandstone plates to clean and conserve them. The paper read the names in two rows: Alcmene, Thisbe, Diana, Phillis, a second Thisbe and a second Alcmene, and a name read as Bigos or Gigos; then Diana, Pax, Superbe, "Hasenf", taken to mean Hasenfuß, and Amouretto. It said the first dog buried there was Biche, and that one greyhound was buried inside the king's own tomb. Rödenbeck adds that Biche received a small memorial at Sanssouci, and that Frederick kept her descendants around him until the end of his life.

Frederick's will, signed in Berlin on 8 January 1769, gives his wish: "I have lived as a philosopher, and I want to be buried as one, without display, without luxury, without pomp... let me be buried at Sans-Souci, at the top of the terraces, in a tomb that I have had prepared." The editor adds that his first draft, of 11 January 1752, already said the same. The same newspaper report says his successor, Frederick William II, judged the narrow tomb unworthy and buried him in the crypt of the Garrison Church instead. The Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation says his wish was granted only on 17 August 1991, when he was reburied on the top terrace.

A greyhound in a period portrait

The cover of this page shows a whippet from the studio examples, painted in the Regency Era style, in a cream and gold gown in a green park. The article what was the Regency era explains the period behind that style. The military dog portraits article covers the Military General style.

For other royal dogs, read about Charles II and his spaniels or the borzoi and the Russian tsars. If your own dog is a slim greyhound, the portrait studio takes one clear photo of up to 5 MB, and you can choose any of the 15 styles. The gallery shows finished portraits.