“It took a long time for my eyes to adjust to the darkness,” the astronomer remembered, peering into the telescope, picking up his quill, and writing down a long string of numbers. At last he saw the outline of a bed, but the Prince was not lying on it. He saw a three-legged stool, but the Prince was not sitting on it. Where, then, was the Prince? You should leave! he thought, and it was only by summoning the countervailing thought, The world, as you’ve established, is entirely pointless save possibly for the composition of a star catalogue that is genuinely complete, that he was able to prevent himself from fleeing. His eyes, meanwhile, continued to adjust. He stepped on something that crunched delicately underfoot like a dead bird, the phrase “a dead songbird” popped into his head as soon as he stepped on it, though it was obviously unlikely, he realized, to be a dead bird; and he remembered Margaretha’s forewarning that he would find citrus peels littering the turret floor; but when he squatted down to inspect what he’d stepped on he saw that it really was a dead bird, a dead songbird, not the desiccated rind of a tangerine. The floor of the turret was littered, as he saw now, not with citrus peels but with these dead birds, as well as with large shards of glass. “Soon enough,” Leibniz quotes him as saying, “I would learn what the dead birds had to do with the shards of glass, and what the birds and the glass had to do with the various bits of brass tubing that also (as I now saw as my eyes continued to adjust) littered the floor, and what the birds and glass and bits of brass had to do with Ludmila, the young doomed only child of Zikmund the Imperial Bloodletter.” As the astronomer’s eyes adjusted still further they alighted on his father’s mechanical head, which lay toppled over onto one side just a few feet away and appeared (“through its two mournful eyeholes”) to be peering at him queerly. And when his eyes adjusted fully he saw that Prince Heinrich lay right behind it, also on his side, one ear to the floor, also peering at him queerly. Heinrich did not blink, and it occurred to the astronomer that he, “and therefore my dream of a complete star catalogue,” was dead. Then, however, he blinked, he wasn’t dead. He wore breeches now, and white stockings, possibly a positive sign, as against his past nudity, though “I knew I could deduce nothing very definite about the state of his mind from the fact of his breeches, the fact of his stockings.” Tugging on his hood to better hide his face and adopting again the tenor that had struck him so at the foot of the wall of the monastery, of sympathy as infinite as it is indifferent, the astronomer asked the Prince whether there were any sins he wished to confess. The Prince was silent. And for several minutes he remained silent, his two glassy eyes fixed almost unblinkingly on the astronomer’s face, which he, the astronomer, had to hope was sufficiently hidden by the hood. What is he seeing when he stares at my face, under this hood, in this light? the astronomer had to wonder, wrote Leibniz. Then (“Did I observe a slight smirk or did I invent it?”) the Prince pulled the mechanical head into an embrace, shot out his legs in a “curiously catlike” stretch, and said: “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been thirteen years since my last confession.” And then: “Her name, Father, was Ludmila.”