He added: “Hence, I laughed.”

His laughter evidently perturbed the Prince, for a body came bounding out of the blackness …

To demonstrate the ensuing action the astronomer had to evict Linus from his lap. The cat meowed. “None of that,” the astronomer said. To Leibniz: “Watch, he’ll now sashay off with a show of indifference and begin licking himself zealously beneath the armillary sphere.” Leibniz: “A minor prophecy, perhaps, but an accurate one.”

Then, with difficulty, the astronomer stood up from his stool.

“A body, you see, bounded toward me out of the blackness,” the astronomer said, and with his own bent, shrunken body he mimed what he was describing. “Yes, a body emerged from the blackness: from nothing, suddenly, a body! The body obviously of the Prince. Somehow he had an obviously princely comportment despite being naked top to bottom and streaked here and there with some sort of dark and foul matter, such is the power of upbringing. At first I thought, He’s covered in mud from the river bottom, but from its texture and stink I realized it was more likely blood or feces, that is, matter of his own making. And probably I realized: It is too simple to say that he is sane. And all this time he is bounding toward me, bounding toward me so fast that the door separating him from me, however thick it was, seemed hardly sufficient, and I thought: He will splinter this thick door into a million pieces and I shall join my father in oblivion.”

But instead the Prince came to a halt on the far side of the door. “Like so.” And the Prince placed his hands on top of the astronomer’s and gripped them as firmly as they were gripping the iron bars. “Like so,” the astronomer said, and he found Leibniz’s hands, tightened them into fists, and gripped them with what Leibniz reported was startling strength. Then the Prince spat in the astronomer’s face. “Like so, ptew!” the astronomer said, and though he added, “I won’t actually spit in your face, of course,” Leibniz noted that the astronomer had, actually, spat in his face, when he had said “ptew” he had spat in his face. The astronomer tried to run away but could not, tried at least to wipe his face but could not do that either: the Prince’s grip was preternaturally strong. And so, wrote Leibniz, for his age, was the astronomer’s.

Then, quite calmly, while his saliva trickled down the astronomer’s cheek, Prince Heinrich said: