“With respect, My Lord, she is mad, there is nothing to understand, and no enigma either,” the Chamberlain said. “And it is precisely because she is mad that Matthias has seized upon her as the solution to his Heinrich problem. That’s what he’s plotting in Frankfurt as we speak, My Lord. In defiance of you.” The Emperor suddenly flung the horn, and then the bowl; they clattered across the floor. “Fiend!” he cried. “Scoundrel!” And then: “Bring me the bowl! Bring me the horn!” Attendants returned the items to his hands and the Emperor contemplated them in turn. The Chamberlain turned to the astronomer: “You see, His Majesty’s most treacherous and power-hungry brother has the most to lose if a man of Heinrich’s fortitude and intellectual autonomy were to take the throne. Archduke Matthias knows full well that the Emperor’s son is positively uninfluenceable, his cranium a keep.” “A keep for a cranium—a kind of cranial keep,” the Emperor murmured, adding: “An uninfluenceable son. Against Matthias’s ideas pertaining to the Protestants?” “Just so, My Lord, very astute,” said the Chamberlain. “Archduke Matthias wants an emperor into whose vulnerable head he can insert his own ideas regarding the Protestants, he cannot be emperor himself but he can put his poisonously anti-Protestant ideas into an emperor’s head, if that head is sufficiently porous. But is Heinrich’s head porous, My Lord? Is it vulnerable?” The Emperor raised both horn and bowl and cried: “No!” “No, Heinrich’s head is exceedingly well fortified, you raised him right, My Lord, an impregnable head, walls thirty feet thick, forty feet, fifty feet! A fortified head that another man’s sentences cannot hope to penetrate, much less inhabit. And Matthias knows that.” The Emperor: “Yes, I raised Heinrich to be an independent thinker, basically I was continually fortifying his head against the world, for Matthias that’s a catastrophe, he knows that Heinrich’s head’s walls are thirty to fifty feet thick and can’t be penetrated or inhabited by his anti-Protestant sentences, Matthias knows that!” The Court Chamberlain: “But Matthias also knows that Margaretha’s head is as vulnerable as Heinrich’s head is impregnable, our sources in Frankfurt tell us that to Albert and Ernst and the seven Electors Matthias makes much of her hardheadedness, of her supposed hardheadedness that is, but our sources in Styria tell us that at home he speaks of nothing but her invented headaches, the phantom itch in her bones, the outrageous size to which she inflates in her mind the nodes in her neck, he speaks of nothing in short but the signs of her lunacy, of the traffic streaming from inside her head to outside it, and presumably also—what interests Matthias more—from outside to inside. In private he meditates on his niece’s useful softheadedness, but in public he expounds on her supposed hardheadedness, not to mention of course her convenient status as your eldest child, and hence what he insists is her fitness in these troubled times for the office of Holy Roman Empress. In doing so Matthias not only flouts the Golden Bull promulgated in 1356 at the Diet of Metz in which Charles IV unambiguously restricted the elective dignity of Holy Roman Emperor to men but also directly defies Your Majesty’s own express wishes.” The horn and the bowl clattered across the floor. The Emperor cried: “Bring me the horn! Bring me the bowl!” He contemplated them in turn and then murmured: “I know that I am dead and damned, and demons move my muscles.”