HIS DUTIES AS Imperial Astronomer, the Court Chamberlain informed him, were threefold, the astronomer told Leibniz. First, “and, needless to say, the only duty of any significance to me,” he was to deploy his astral tube to map the starry heavens more accurately and more precisely than ever before, to compose, that is to say, a star catalogue of unprecedented accuracy and unprecedented precision, “and also, I volunteered, unprecedented prodigiousness,” for he was confident, as he informed the Court Chamberlain, that with his marvelous device he would not only see all the known stars more clearly than they had yet been seen but also see unknown stars that hitherto had been too dim or distant to see. Second, he was to cast horoscopes for the Emperor, whose actions, and particularly whose thoughts, were—according to the Court Chamberlain, who claimed to be speaking on behalf of the Emperor, i.e., conveying the Emperor’s thoughts on this as well as all other matters, although the astronomer would later learn there were those in the Castle who held that the Court Chamberlain, the only official with unrestricted access to the North Wing, where the Emperor dwelled all day among his monstrosities and wonders and increasingly often slept at night, was systematically misrepresenting the Emperor’s thoughts and wishes in order to amass power for himself, “Nothing he tells you ought to be taken at face value!” the Imperial Antiquarian hissed once in passing after seeing the astronomer emerge from the Court Chamberlain’s office—while not exactly determined by the stars, “and in this sense His Majesty’s thoughts are perfectly free,” nevertheless inclined by the stars, i.e., subject to their influence, “and in this sense His Majesty’s thoughts are, if not quite coerced, still drawn in certain directions, or so His Majesty thinks, not constricted but still coaxed hither and thither.” Of course, as the Court Numismatist once mused—and he, the astronomer, had found the argument compelling—it was in the Court Chamberlain’s interest to install in their heads a picture of a sovereign not wholly in control of his own faculties, for the less power the Emperor seemed to have over his own head the more the Court Chamberlain seemed, perhaps only in their eyes but in their eyes was half the battle, or more than half, to have over it. The Court Numismatist said: “One sometimes has the sense that the Emperor’s apparent madness has been filtered through, if not concocted by, an exceptionally rational mind, a calculating and conniving mind, that this is really a manipulative sane man’s madman, a madman whose seeming madness is in truth serving some very ambitious sane person’s purposes.” It was, of course, also possible, conceded the Court Numismatist, that the Court Chamberlain was a genuinely loyal servant to a genuinely mad monarch; this was the view of the Court Cartographer. A third theory, promulgated only by the Distiller-Royal, and he only hypothetically, as a sort of amusing thought experiment, was that the Court Chamberlain was himself quite mad, and that we therefore knew very little and perhaps nothing at all about the actual state of the Emperor’s mind. “And so,” the Court Chamberlain went on, “if you would, each morning, and on the holy days each evening, too, determine by means of your tube the influence on His Majesty’s mind of Mercury and Mars and Saturn and so on, the Emperor would be most grateful.” The third and final duty of the Imperial Astronomer was to tutor the Emperor’s bastard son as well as his three illegitimate daughters in the subjects of the quadrivium—“for it is the Emperor’s most fervent wish” (according to the Court Chamberlain) “that each of his children and his son in particular be conversant in the mathematical arts, that is to say, in arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.”