FOR YEARS HE HAD REHEARSED in his head the words with which he would beg for forgiveness if his son ever returned. As little blame as the boy bore for the nose that grew inexorably on his face, he bore even less—the astronomer intended to say—for the mind that formed inexorably in his head. How can anything that pops into existence from one moment to the next be held to blame for anything at all? The astronomer intended to say all this and much more besides. But when his son reappeared one morning at the astronomer’s door, the boy, who was now a grown man, tall and strong, though unkempt, and oddly unsteady on his feet, and with a glimmer in his eye which his father took for sincere derangement, fell to his knees before his father could, and buried his face in his father’s belly, and wept. “The perfect picture of the prodigal son,” the astronomer told Leibniz, putting an eye socket to his telescope. The boy, or now the man rather, said: “O the things I have seen, the things I have seen, Father!” and over and over repeated the phrase: “My accursed Wittelsbach detachment!” And then he cried: “My aloofness, Father! My absolute aloofness, my unbearable aloofness!” He cried: “The aloofness I imbibed with my mother’s milk, you tried to warn me, I know it, an aristocratic aloofness you tried to warn me about!” and he shrieked the words: “Breitenfeld! The bridge at Dessau! Magdeburg! Magdeburg! Magdeburg!”

It was some time before the man recovered his composure sufficiently to tell what had happened to him in the order in which it had happened.