They came now with ringing things, with church bells and cowbells, with hand bells and sleigh bells, with wind chimes and triangles and cymbals and glockenspiels, and Heinrich narrowed it down to the last of these: what he heard in his head was the sound of a glockenspiel. “The moment he said that, Father set out to purchase every glockenspiel in Europe.” Each one Heinrich would hit with his mallet once or twice or at most three times and then discard. Every day a new glockenspiel, a new very expensive glockenspiel, and since “the manufacturers of musical instruments aren’t idiots,” said Margaretha, the prices began going up like crazy, “May third,” she read, “two hundred and thirty thalers, May fourth, four thousand thalers, May fifth, eleven thousand thalers,” the sums her father shelled out per glockenspiel would have cured her a hundred times over, “body and soul.” He was actually rapidly depleting the Imperial Treasury … Meanwhile, Protestants in the Palatinate were running amok … There were rumors, she recalled, that her uncle Matthias, Archduke of Austria, was amassing at his castle in Styria an army with which he planned to march on Prague and wrest the crown from his older brother … Also, incidentally, Heinrich received every day—and from the platter of fruit and pastries she disdainfully picked up and let fall a wrinkled little orange—a crate of these Seville oranges, the most expensive type of orange, and Heinrich’s favorite orange … A sour orange, she said … “I prefer sweet oranges, so did my mother, she loathed sour oranges, I loathe them, too. We used to get lots of sweet oranges here but ever since she died Father has bought only sour oranges, Seville oranges” … That is to say, Heinrich’s oranges … “I love oranges more than anything, but ever since Mother died I haven’t eaten a single orange, too sour!” … The Turks, meanwhile, were, if various reports were to be believed, massing along the border with Transylvania … Protestants in Hesse-Kassel were running amok … Protestants in Baden-Durlach were running amok … Protestants in Brandenburg were running amok … Protestants in Hungary were running amok, too … Radical Anabaptists had seized the free imperial city of Schweinfurt … The Pope, she said, was rumored to be extremely unhappy … The Papal Nuncio to the Kingdom of Portugal was said to have said that it’d be a good thing for Heinrich and Christendom both if someone were to strangle the bastard in his sleep … “Even Willa was grumbling, although it occurs to me now she probably already had her future wedding in mind” … The Empire was actually on the verge of collapse due to the ringing in Heinrich’s head … Still, every day, a new expensive glockenspiel … And another crate of Seville oranges … “Ah, the beauty of a father’s blind devotion!” cried Margaretha, and she burst into laughter, and plucked from her mouth with two fingers the pit of her peach. Gottfried: “Yet just as the pit lies within the stone fruit, at its center, so the concept of the pit, the stone, lies within the concept of the stone fruit, at the center of it. Though we are left in dining as in dancing as in polite discourse at the mercy of our reason, God in his goodness has ordered the world such that our reason is sufficient—precisely sufficient! Yes, our reason is but a dim light yet the world is fashioned so as to shine quite luminously in it!” Margaretha: “Who knows what might have happened to the Habsburg Empire had not Heinrich declared one morning without a trace of shame that the ringing in his head had disappeared overnight.”