What if he had not gone? What if—“and nothing would have been easier!”—he had taken the stairs that wound down Hradčany Hill, crossed the Old Stone Bridge, left Prague, left Bohemia, left the Holy Roman Empire, left Europe? What if he had not gone? What if he had not gone! Again and again he demanded What if he had not gone? until it dawned on Leibniz that the old man was actually waiting for an answer, and Leibniz proposed: “You would still have your eyes?” And the old man smiled. “I would still,” he said, “have my eyes.”

THE ASTRONOMER TOLD LEIBNIZ: In one hand the Emperor held the horn of a unicorn and in the other he held a stone bowl into which the blood of Christ had once flowed. The Emperor whispered into the ear of the Court Chamberlain, and the Court Chamberlain said: “Your horoscopes spoke of the Emperor’s imminent demise.” And before the astronomer, in confusion and consternation, could object vociferously that this was not so, that he had spoken nothing of death, that he had foreseen for the Emperor only health and life, the Court Chamberlain said: “And in foreseeing that you have demonstrated your acumen in deciphering the stars.” Under his breath the Emperor murmured: “I know that I am dead and damned.”

And he gazed in contemplation at the horn in his hand.

The Court Chamberlain leaned toward the astronomer and whispered: “He is now in his fiftieth year, the very year that claimed his father.”

The Emperor looked up from the horn, whispered into the ear of the Court Chamberlain, and the Chamberlain said: “He will die, as you have foreseen, either as his father did, of a weakness of the walls of the chambers of his heart”—and the Emperor whispered in his ear—“or (exactly as you wrote) as did Henri III, the last of the House of Valois, stabbed in the abdomen by a Catholic fanatic attired in the vestments of his Royal Confessor.” He added: “As you wrote.” Under his breath the Emperor murmured: “In the gut! In the gut! As you wrote.”

And he gazed in contemplation at the bowl.

The Court Chamberlain leaned toward the astronomer and whispered: “He perused your horoscopes with admiration. The most brilliant prognostications he has ever seen! he said. And this is a man whose nativity was cast by Nostradamus himself.”

Leibniz: The astronomer thought: Have my words been altered before they reached the Emperor’s eyes? Or has he in his lunacy seen in them prophecies that weren’t there?

The Emperor gazed in contemplation at the horn.