Then one morning Emperor Maximilian died. By noontime that same day Rudolf had boxed his father up in a marble sarcophagus sculpted by the astronomer’s father and by nightfall messengers were streaming forth from the Hofburg Palace toward the homes of Maximilian’s former ministers. Their services were no longer needed. First the new Emperor sacked his father’s Imperial Secretary, then the old Imperial Physician, after that the Imperial Mathematician, and then, at the stroke of midnight, the Imperial Botanist, a man who had grown “outstanding plants” to “outrageous heights,” who had introduced the persimmon and the pomegranate both to Europe north of the Alps, whose orchards erupted with “red apples the size of children’s heads.” If he’s sacking the botanist he’s sacking everyone, the astronomer remembered his mother saying; she stayed up all night waiting for the knock at the door. But the sculptor, then at the pinnacle of his powers, inhabiting an opulent stone mansion in the dead center of a city that hewed to the very contours of his head, atop which sat a black velvet cap with the phenomenal feather of some exotic bird, said: “He would never dismiss me, not in a million years!” the astronomer recalled, pausing now to peer into the telescope, pick up his quill, and write something down. That night his father slept soundly in his madness—for that’s what it was, madness. Whenever you refashion your physical surroundings to reflect on the outside the insides of your head you run the risk of going crazy, which is precisely what happened to his father in Vienna, a place that rather than resisting him, and thereby preserving his sanity, proved all too pliable in his fists. So he was stunned, stupefied, when as the Sun rose the knock that his wife had been expecting and that he thought unthinkable sounded at the door. That knock woke him from one form of madness only to plunge him into another. For shortly thereafter the Emperor moved his court from Vienna to Prague, from gilded Hofburg to grim Hradčany, and the astronomer’s family followed him north, leaving their stone mansion on the finest street in the center of Vienna for a drafty wooden house on the periphery of Prague so that his father could try to reclaim the title of Imperial Sculptor. His entire life was now oriented around reclaiming that title. How his father wanted that title back! He claimed he didn’t need it back, he actually wanted to not want it back, he probably wanted to be the kind of person who neither needed it back nor wanted it back, who thought that such things were meaningless, but everything he did, including transplanting the family to Prague, indicated, in contrast to everything he said, that he both needed it back and wanted it back, that it was for whatever reason meaningful to him, and the astronomer could tell even at his age that his father would never be happy again until he had it back. But Emperor Rudolf was no Maximilian, and Prague no Vienna. If Vienna resisted him too little, Prague resisted him too much, “also obviously a recipe for madness.” In Vienna he met too little resistance and went crazy, while in Prague he met too much resistance and went insane. Sculptures that made sense in Vienna made no sense at all in Prague. Vienna is famously a city of golden facades, Prague famously one of black spires emerging from the mist and penetrating the sky. Vienna under Maximilian was enamored of surfaces, Prague under Rudolf enamored of depths, and therefore his father, a sculptor of surfaces not depths, flourished in Vienna, to the point of madness, but failed in Prague, to the point of madness. “I myself, incidentally,” the astronomer said, “have had a lifelong affinity for depths and no interest in the surfaces of things,” while his own son, a tapestry-weaver “who will enter this tale later on, and in a most disturbing fashion,” was, like his grandfather the sculptor, interested only in surfaces, so the astronomer, a lifelong investigator of depths, was basically “bound on both sides by surface-lovers,” Leibniz quotes him as saying. In Vienna he had seen his father mold the whole world and emboss it with gold, while in Prague he watched him glue thousands of mirrors into a little box, peer into a peephole, and weep. Times had changed. “Probably for me it was a presentiment of his mortality,” noted the astronomer, bending over arthritically on his stool to stroke the head of his sleeping cat, whom he now identified to Leibniz as Linus and who still had not once in Leibniz’s presence opened his eyes. “Not only had this virtuoso of appearances pandered to the local taste for essences, and not only had he failed,” the astronomer went on, “but I myself told him he’d failed.” From that moment on he felt like the father to his own father, hence his bringing to his father the idea for the mechanical human head, abominable though he thought it was, “the way one brings home for one’s son a toy or trinket one cannot oneself see the value in.”