Then the Emperor issued a proclamation: Whoever could produce, for all to hear, the note that Prince Heinrich heard in his head, would be rewarded with riches beyond measure. Pilgrims poured into Prague, thousands of them, tens of thousands! They came bearing zithers and lutes and flutes and fiddles and horns. From the East came strange men lugging by oxcart gargantuan drums stretched with the skins of unfamiliar creatures, celebrated castrati risked the wrath of the chorus master of the Sistine Chapel Choir to make the journey from Rome, Jews came from every corner of Europe with ram’s horns in their hands, and from the Siberian steppe three men and three women conveyed on a plank of wood an old man of exceptional frailty, perhaps their father, who to all appearances was near death by the time they arrived in Bohemia and no longer among the living by the hour he was brought into the Great Hall, and yet still generated, without opening his eyes, an unfathomable sound from deep in his throat.

And Heinrich said: That isn’t it.

Scholars at the University of Leiden conducted a huge study of Heinrich’s head, the most extensive head study yet conducted, which, if we believe Leibniz’s account of the astronomer’s account of Margaretha’s account of it, might even be termed, at the risk of anachronism, a psychological study, and theorized the type of sound that was likely to lodge itself in such a head, and produced a newfangled instrument, partway between a church organ, a heavily modified hurdy-gurdy, and an early oboe, which, when a key was pressed, and a crank turned, and a tube blown into, generated a noise never before heard on Earth.

And the Emperor peered over at Heinrich, and Heinrich said: That isn’t it.

Over and over their father peered anxiously at Heinrich and over and over Heinrich said: That isn’t it. That isn’t it. That isn’t it.

And the drummers whipped their oxen eastward, and the castrati returned to Rome, and the Jews went home with their ram’s horns, and the old Tatar was buried by his children on the outskirts of Prague, and the Leiden scholars took up once again their traditional disciplines.

Gottfried: “After the Fall no one dines rightly save by means of reflection.”

“Imagine,” said Margaretha, riffling through her notebook, “just the cost of administering all this! I’m not even referring to the reward, I’m just talking about the administrative costs—the administrative costs alone!”

You can think about the solicitude in her father’s eyes, or you can examine the record of his expenditures, “They tell the same tale,” she said.

Wilhelmina tiptoed hastily past the door, pinching in each hand a piece of her gown, “which really did fit her well,” Leibniz quotes the astronomer as saying, in such a tone, Leibniz notes, that a man with eyelids might have winked.

Gottfried: “It is no longer possible to eat a stone fruit properly without the concept of a stone fruit.”