On the Sunday in question, the Sun had risen, but the turret on account of the tapestries over the windows was still dark and Ludmila in Katharina’s nightgown was still asleep. Heinrich picked her up and put her in the pump. She had slipped into bed late the night before so even this did not wake her. But when he began to pedal the treadle and thereby to remove the air from the globe in which she found herself trapped she awoke and started to scream. Heinrich: “Her screams touched me, I’m human after all, it’s hard to hear such a human scream without imputing the scream to a human being. I almost stopped the experiment then and there, and I might have done so had I not remembered this mechanical head”—he indicated with his head the Head of Phalaris in his arms—“which, rudimentary as it was, mimicked nevertheless the sound of a man. Your father’s head gave me the courage to continue, Father.” Of course, the astronomer told Leibniz, peering into his telescope, such an assertion lay bare the disordered nature of Heinrich’s head, as he’d had the astronomer’s father’s mechanical head in his possession no longer than a few days—although as we’ve seen, Leibniz noted to the Philosophical Transactions, the disorder may have been in the astronomer’s head instead, or in addition, for those few days were likely a few years. Feeling ridiculous now in his costume, and unnerved by the Prince’s willingness to play along with his farce, but not wishing to disrupt the tale, the astronomer tugged on his hood, held up his staff, and intoned: “Go on, my son.” Heinrich said: “I continued to treadle, the pump continued to evacuate the air, Ludmila continued in the motions of her body and the color of her face to give outward signs that she like the bird was suffering, but obviously none of these motions and none of these colors were effects that could not have been generated by a craftsman of sufficient genius.” Then, all of a sudden, her behavior changed: between gasps, she began to apologize. “Yes, Father,” Heinrich said. “She apologized to me!” This baffled him. He thought: What in God’s name does she have to apologize for, when really I should be apologizing to her, for developing doubts about her actuality, and then putting her in this pump! It emerged, however, that she did have reason to apologize. She confessed—“and this, she must have assumed, was why I was doing this to her!” the Prince cried—to an affair with her compatriot the stonemason, she loved him and he her and their love had long ago been consummated, she was sorry to have hurt Heinrich but he after all had hurt her far worse, and the truth is—she could barely breathe now—she hated Heinrich, she detested him, he repulsed her, and she was certain he would go straight to hell, the stonemason was everything Heinrich was not, mentally of course, “mentally, she said, and this of course was absurd, he was a million times my superior,” the Prince recalled, and he told the astronomer that this was so ludicrous that it did not wound him, but physically, too, yes, and somehow she summoned the energy to laugh, a mocking laugh he had never heard from her before, physically, too, My Lord, she said, there’s no comparison between you and the stonemason, no comparison at all—not in how you think, not in how you fuck. And in the gargantuan glass globe she collapsed and lost consciousness. “Now, it is true,” Prince Heinrich told the astronomer, “that the affair was news to me. And it’s true, as you may have heard Greta claim, for I know she likes to ascribe Ludmila’s passing to this, to something very base, rather than something very philosophical, that I went into a jealous rage. Yes, Father, I went into a jealous rage—true. But it is not true that that jealous rage of mine killed her. Quite on the contrary, it saved her life!” In his rage he despised her, he said, and in despising her she became real to him again, a being again, a different being from him, a despised being, of course, but a being nevertheless, a mechanism never elicits such fervor pro or contra. The Prince shattered the glass globe with an elbow and on his knees in the shards of it he held Ludmila’s limp body and wept over her and prayed over her and breathed into her mouth. Whatever he did did the trick; she came back to life, gasping for the air he was giving her. “We underestimate pneumatics,” the astronomer said to Leibniz. Heinrich told the astronomer: “All day long we stayed intertwined, talking and copulating, copulating and talking, and in our talking and copulating both we felt for the first time that we were getting to the bottom of the other person, I told her about my father and my sisters, how I really felt about them, I told her things about them I have not even told you, Father, intimate and complicated things, the truth, the truth! And she told me about her father, i.e., about Zikmund, whom she loved like no one else in the world yet who had more or less abandoned her to me, and all of the complicated feelings that entailed, she shared thoughts and feelings of remarkable intimacy and astounding complicatedness, and she even told me at my urging about the stonemason, every single thing about him, even at my urging how he made love, at my urging she told me what he looked like, everywhere, and what they had done, in detail, and in return I told her about my demons and doubts, how I had come to question her inner life, she was a quick study on this and soon wielded the same thought process against me, how do I know you think, how do I know you have a mind, how do I know you’re not a machine, she cried cleverly, et cetera, and in this way we peered all the way down into each other’s depths, never in my life had I peered into someone so deeply or let them peer so deeply into me, deep, deep, unbelievably deep! Yet at bottom there was between us a substrate of mutual loathing that safeguarded for each of us the autonomy and actuality of the other. The perverse pleasure of a jealous rage … The salubriousness of jealousy,” he said, per the astronomer, “which is nothing else but resistance … And it is good for a prince to feel such resistance, so rarely does the world resist him, something is only real to you when it resists you, and so makes you rage.” (Is it fanciful to discern in such sentiments the seed of Leibniz’s later contention that “the nature of body does not consist in extension alone,” as the Cartesians liked to insist, but also in the solidity of bodies, in their impenetrability, in their exclusion of other bodies, in their ability, in short, to resist things?) Heinrich: “That day she seemed so real to me, so real, more real than ever before.” That night, however, as she slept, and he did not, and he watched her sleep, her body rising and falling with each breath, Ludmila sank back into a profound and, as he could plainly see, irreversible unreality, and he was assailed once again by his former suspicion that her head was hollow and void or else filled like a clock with gears upon gears, and it was then (“I confess!”) that he inflicted such injuries upon her head in his effort to open it up and look inside, cutting off her ears, plucking out one eye, shattering her teeth, and finally splitting open her skull. The severity of her maiming should not imply, he noted, that it was done in violence, no, it was done with equanimity, in a philosophical mood, it is just not as easy as one might think to open a human head. Upon doing so, and finding that her head was neither hollow nor filled with gears, he flung her corpse in Ina’s gown to his hogs in the menagerie down below, and he’d put one foot on the sill to fling himself after her before it dawned on him that he had not been wrong, what had appeared organic to him would not appear so to someone much smaller, or to someone equipped with a magnifying glass of sufficient power, “or a tube like yours, Father”; seen by such a small person, or under such a powerful glass, or through a long enough tube, what appeared to be organic, pinkly, soggily, squeamishly organic, would show itself to be mechanical through and through, little but toothed wheels turning one another in vast empty silent spaces.