Only outwardly was his son his son. “Inwardly he was a Wittelsbach.”

The boy showed little interest in the quadrant, none at all in the clock, hardly any even in the extremely long tube. No sooner on that first night had they begun their astronomical investigations than the boy declared that he was bored, and asked to be taken to the aviary to see the astronomer’s falcons. The revelation that the astronomer had no aviary and kept no falcons shocked the boy silent. He recorded the coordinates of another three stars before looking up from the ledger and demanding to see the single oldest and most foreign coin in the astronomer’s entire coin collection; when the astronomer reached into a pocket and tossed him a thaler minted the year before in Joachimsthal the boy burst into tears and could not be consoled. He had spent too much of his brief life in that small castle on the Schwarzbach at Zweibrücken. He was a fop like his foster father. The astronomer: “He had come to me too late.” The astronomer thought of Prince Heinrich’s walks with Princess Katharina and reflected: “A young person is an astoundingly pliable thing. A personality unlike a nose can in its infancy be bound and shaped.” Beneath the surface of this seven- or eight-year-old boy beat the heart of a jaded and dissipated middle-aged dynast and aesthete.