Although he had long since stopped conducting his nocturnal observations, the sleeplessness of old age gradually returned him to the schedule of his youth, and on the night in question he lay in bed wide awake as his son snored. He experienced, Leibniz wrote, an unusual urge: to see the night sky, but to see it as he had seen it in his childhood—not through the tube, in other words, but with the naked eye. “I wanted to see with my own two eyes the New Star with which I had once tied into knots the old Aristotelians of Prague,” he told Leibniz. Quietly, without waking his son, he crept out of the observatory and gazed in stupefaction at the stars, in stupefaction and satisfaction, for those were his stars, he’d catalogued them completely, and he strolled here and there, and gazed every which way, and strolled and gazed and strolled and gazed until the moment (“Three minutes, darker and darker, it is almost upon us!”) when, out of nowhere, he collided with something soft, “with something very soft and very velvety, Herr Leibniz.” He asked Leibniz: “Do you understand?” He added: “I had to think: Am I crazy? And what was worse is I had to think: I am not crazy, there really is a bolt of very soft, very black velvet standing aloft here in the middle of the hills studded with twinkling bits of salt and quartz and other minerals!” How big, he wondered, naturally enough, is this bewildering bolt of soft black velvet? And after running his hands along it up and down and side to side he realized—“I had to think: Am I crazy?”—that it was very big indeed, that it soared high overhead and encircled the observatory completely. “This was a truly huge bolt of prettily ornamented black velvet which girdled my observatory hemispherically with a radius of precisely two hundred and thirty feet, so I determined.” He asked Leibniz: “Now do you understand? I had not yet connected this mystifying bolt of black velvet to the Empire’s victory over Gustavus Adolphus, you my dear Leibniz probably have, you probably see the link between the velvet and Lützen, you are a bright young man! Two minutes.” While the astronomer was inspecting the velvet and wondering what it was doing there, he saw that his son had now awoken, and had emerged from the observatory, and was sprinting toward him as fast as he could, and crying something unintelligible, and it was only then (“I’m not crazy but I am slow!”) that it dawned on him that his son was still the Imperial Embroiderer, had never ceased being it, that he was still Ferdinand’s loyal subject, and that this enormous vault of black velvet into which the astronomer had been made to stare for ten, twenty, thirty years: this was his son’s magnum opus, a tapestry not of the Sack of Magdeburg but of the night sky over Bohemia, rotated incrementally overhead minute by minute every night by a hidden crew of astronomically astute assistants. With a few exceptions—the rings of Venus!—the tapestry was remarkably accurate, his son must have had an intimate and sophisticated understanding of the astronomer’s work in order to weave it, “it suggested to me a prolonged period of time during which he had done nothing but study my work, scrutinize it, live with it, in it. I would almost have been proud of him for what he had made, were it not for the purpose to which he had put it.” That is what the astronomer was thinking when his son ran up to him, dug his fingers into his sockets, and tore out his eyes, so he could never again demand from the Emperor another tube. The astronomer burst into laughter: “Of course, when I came to and discovered that my eyes were gone, he tried to convince me that I like some latter-day Oedipus had plucked them out myself, with my own two hands! Sixty seconds.”