The Emperor gazed in contemplation at the horn. “The horn,” he muttered under his breath, “is everything, everything is the horn, and everything is also the bowl.”

Now the Court Chamberlain ambled over to the astronomer, who was still held fast by the guards, and said: “I told His Majesty: Your brother has sent us this sham mathematician, let us cut off his sham mathematical organ, that is, his head, and send it back to your brother in a box. And His Majesty, who is far more sensitive than I to the subtleties of the distinctions of the disciplines, replied: Not a mathematician, an astronomer.” The Emperor, scrutinizing the bowl, muttered: “Astronomy concerns appearances, not that which can be thought but that which can be seen.” The astronomer to Leibniz: “True.” The Court Chamberlain said: “So I said: Then let us pluck out his sham astronomical organs, his eyes, and send them back to your brother in a box. Basically I wanted to send the Emperor’s brother some ironical organ of yours, in a box. But do you know what His Majesty said? He said: No sham astronomer could perceive in the stars what this man has perceived in them.” The Emperor murmured: “In the gut, as you wrote. Disguised in the black robes of my Father Confessor.” The Court Chamberlain: “In short, my dear sir”—and with the lightest tap of his hands on theirs he freed the astronomer from the grip of the guards and then fussily smoothed the creases they had left on his sleeves—“you have His Majesty’s faith in you to thank for your life. And this is not a man who believes in just anyone! No, the Emperor is a skeptical soul, a true son of Pyrrho.” “In the fiftieth year, the crumbling of the walls of the chambers of the heart,” murmured the Emperor. “All things emanate from the One—the horn, the bowl, everything else, the jars, and so on.” To the Philosophical Transactions, Leibniz remarks parenthetically: “An echo not of course of Pyrrho but of Plotinus.”

The Court Chamberlain told the astronomer: “Perhaps you wish to express your gratitude…”

And the astronomer, who by now had probably gone pale, bowed at once to the waist and said: “Thank you, Your Majesty.”

Raising his eyes briefly from the bowl, the Emperor nodded solemnly.

And the Court Chamberlain said: “But perhaps you feel, and I don’t blame you, that this merely verbal expression of gratitude is insufficient recompense for all that the Emperor has given you: not only your life, but your house, your salary, your stewardship of the Imperial Observatory…” And the Court Chamberlain said he would now suggest how I might discharge my ostensible debt of gratitude, how I could, as he put it, “pay it off in full,” the astronomer recalled. And the Chamberlain leaned over to him and whispered: “Listen carefully, for though you may feel that there is an element of theater in all this, the theater, too, can frighten, you know,” and the Emperor evidently overheard this, for he murmured: “When the actors talk I am always afraid that I will suddenly stop understanding what they are talking about…” and the astronomer told Leibniz: “Although all this had seemed theatrical, it nevertheless had frightened me, so I did listen carefully. And as I did, it began to dawn on me how I might turn what he was telling me to my advantage.”