ONE MORNING A BOY knocked on the door of the observatory. From one look at his face, “which was my face, Herr Leibniz,” the astronomer concluded that the boy was his own son. He gathered from what the boy told him, after he embraced him and brought him in and warmed him by the fire, that the Count Palatine had concluded this, also. For as long as the boy could remember he’d often caught his father staring at his nose, he didn’t know why, the boy told the astronomer. When he had been drinking and thought the boy was sleeping the Count Palatine would sometimes steal into his bedroom and measure the boy’s nose between his thumb and his forefinger. Then, taking care to preserve the space between them, he would bring those two fingers to his own nose. “How many times had the boy awoken in the night to find this decadent drunk Wittelsbach Count hovering over him in the dark, comparing with his fingers the sizes of their noses,” the astronomer said. Of course when it dawned on him eventually that his father dreaded for some reason the growth of his nose, the boy tried everything in his power to stop his nose from growing, squeezing and squashing it, lashing it to his face with string, sleeping on his stomach with it pressed to his bed. “Basically the boy bound that nose in every conceivable way.” But no matter what he did, his nose continued to grow. Finally it could no longer be denied—not even by the Count Palatine, who, as the astronomer discerned from what the boy told him, although the boy did not seem to realize it, loved the boy deeply—that the boy’s nose wasn’t the Count Palatine’s nose, and so the boy was not the Count Palatine’s. The latter had no choice but to turn the boy out from his castle at Zweibrücken and let fall the portcullis behind him, which is what he did, with the brusque counsel through the iron grating that he find his true father, his father by blood, whom as far as the Count Palatine knew was a lunatic Jew bleeding the Empire fiscally dry by staring directly at the Sun through ever longer and ever costlier tubes somewhere in the mountains of Bohemia, near Schwarzenberg.

And now here the boy was.

The astronomer was overjoyed. In his absorption in the firmament he had forgotten his wish years earlier, at the instant Princess Katharina had struck with her mallet what she believed to be her father’s glockenspiel, for a child of his own. The mere sight of this face, a face he had not seen anywhere but in his own mirror since his last glimpse of his father in the Great Hall, caused him to tremble. Yes, he was overjoyed, at first! Very quickly, however, the astronomer realized that beneath the familiar face lurked an alien essence.