WITHIN A WEEK the astronomer had his three-foot-long ninefold-magnifying tube, within a month he had ordered and obtained a telescope four and a half feet in length that magnified objects thirteen times, and before the year gave out the astral tube which he trained at the heavens was as long as the astronomer himself was tall, enlarged the world some sixteen times, and disclosed to the eye no fewer than 1,202 stars. Matters might well have continued in this fashion, “and my eyes, my dear Leibniz, have remained right here in my head,” were it not for the fact that Wilhelmina—only eight months after her nuptials to the decadent scion of the House of Wittelsbach, in a small, sullen ceremony at which a decrepit factotum of the Castle scattered the flower petals to which Katharina had once laid claim, and during which no one in the chapel beamed more strenuously than Margaretha—gave birth in Zweibrücken to a baby boy who appeared to have been carried to term. The suspicions of the Count Palatine, who besides bathing nude in the Vltava was known mainly for his zest for masques, falconry, drink, poetry, old foreign coinage, and decor, as well as for his academic interest in the art of war, were stoked by one or another of the astronomer’s corruptible colleagues, who for a presumably trivial sum informed the irate aristocrat that the Princess’s mathematics tutor had on at least one occasion emerged from her fitting room in a state of dishevelment. The old man apparently grinned, and then peered into his telescope; a note of diffidence here enters Leibniz’s text; the conjecture of one contemporary Leibnizian, having scoured his archives, is perhaps relevant in this regard, that Leibniz in his long life never loved, and was never loved. In any case, as the Count Palatine in his finery and with his sash of white and blue galloped eastward from the Rhineland with a hundred cavalrymen, intending to demand satisfaction from the astronomer, the latter, with the forbearance of the Emperor, absconded from Prague, first by carriage, then by horse, and lastly by foot, concluding with a frenzied ascent of this very mountain, an ascent during which he was very nearly driven mad with visions, around every bend, behind each tree, at first of the Count Palatine, but then of his mother, of his father, his father in his prized plumed cap holding out his many-mirrored box—“he had fixed it, he cried, he had fixed it!” said the astronomer to Leibniz—but even in a state delirious enough to confuse the visions of my father for the real thing I knew nevertheless that he had not fixed it, he had by no means fixed it, what do you even mean fixed it, fixed it how, with more mirrors? Meanwhile his mother or his vision thereof said not a word, she did not even look at me, the astronomer told Leibniz, she was fixated on the velvet cap on my father’s head, it was dusty, incredibly dusty, she was wondering how it had got so dusty, and how she would ever dust it. As my father bore down upon me I wanted her to look at me, just my mother looking at me I felt would save me from him, but she was wondering how to dust his cap, it had got so dusty, and the dust showed up so clearly against the black. “I remember thinking, vis-à-vis my father and his box, You’ll never fix it, and vis-à-vis my mother and that cap, You’ll never dust it.” Then he saw that his visions of his father had a mechanical rather than a corporeal head on his shoulders and his mother, too, had a mechanical instead of a corporeal head, and he recalled that both of them were dead—Leibniz observes that the astronomer hadn’t mentioned his mother’s death—and it occurred to him at that moment that he had actually ascended the entire mountain and stood now on the peak of it, “right here, right where we now sit, my dear Herr Leibniz,” and the final vision he had before fainting was of an astronomical observatory, seemingly perfectly circular but, for reasons touching on the workings of the senses, actually departing from perfect circularity at an infinite number of points, “a polygon, not a circle,” which the Emperor duly constructed for him and equipped as he wished with a tube nine feet long, with the power to make objects seem twenty-five times larger than they actually are, and with which the astronomer brought the number of entries in his star catalogue to 1,277.