“But Ludmila was different, Father, she wasn’t of that world,” Heinrich told the astronomer, who, as he told Leibniz, had begun to worry about how upon the conclusion of the Prince’s murder confession he would suddenly turn the topic of conversation toward the mathematics of triangles.

Yes, Heinrich said, “Ludmila was different.” Her father would open one of Heinrich’s veins and she would silently hold the stone bowl and watch his blood rise in it, her eyes held level with its rim—possibly, the astronomer surmised, “to avoid the illusions of parallax.” Prince Heinrich: “I was squeamish, I couldn’t bear to look at my blood in that bowl, I got nauseous, it was pure princely squeamishness, but she wasn’t squeamish at all, she kept her eyes fixed on the bowl, on my blood, and when it had reached a certain level she’d say something softly in Czech to her father, who would close up the wound.” The Prince was mesmerized by her facility with his blood, her comfort with it. “Her upbringing had inculcated in her an entirely different attitude toward blood than mine had in me, and this astonished me, captivated me, and consoled me.” At the time he could not understand why it provided consolation. Now he understood. His malaise in those days, Heinrich explained to the astronomer, issued from his “horrific suspicion” that “everything everywhere was more or less the same.” He felt in all things and in all people, and even in all animals, a “creeping sameness.” Everything, in short, was the same, he felt, Heinrich told the astronomer/confessor, reported Leibniz. This suspicion, forged in the formalities of diplomatic ceremonies and the eerie regimentation of imperial dinners, had vexed him from his earliest childhood, but it had seeped far beyond its initial ambit, first from the public chambers of the Castle to the private ones, then to the animal kingdom and even to the stars, and it had now congealed into a “scary conviction” concerning “all things.” From the sameness of Castle life he was led inexorably to the sameness of life life, and from the absolute sameness of life life, seen from a strictly scientific perspective, he would be led, he feared, to “a bad conclusion!” “Even my sisters, apparently so different from one another, and from me, were actually more or less the same as one another and the same as me,” he realized. The distinctions the Prince had drawn between Margaretha and Katharina, and Katharina and Wilhelmina, and Wilhelmina and Margaretha, and between the three of them and himself, and him and his mother, and him and his father, and his father and his father’s father, and the Austrian Habsburgs and the Spanish Habsburgs, were all artificial, “These distinctions did not carve nature at its joints, Father, for nature, I thought, in horror, has no joints, I had the horrible image in my head of a jointless nature, a giant jointless nature.” Every distinction and thus every thought was contrived: “The world is an undifferentiated manifold, a giant everywhere-identical tapestry.” There were of course slight variations here and there, “variations in the stitching,” some things were things and some were people, some people were princes and some were pig farmers, some princes—and probably most pig farmers—were sleepers and some did not sleep well, but “more or less everything was the same, I felt, Father,” Heinrich told the astronomer. The Emperor saw in the novelties he collected in the North Wing evidence of different worlds, tears in the world-tapestry through which perhaps one could peep at God, but the Prince saw everywhere the same world, with no tears in it, and considered his father’s novelties to be the mere detritus of that sameness, “identical elements which my father was making even more indistinguishable by collecting them together in the same place, jarring them in the same sort of jars, subjecting them to the same principles of acquisition, restoration, and display. My father’s fabled cabinet of curiosities only contributes, I thought, Father,” the astronomer quoted Prince Heinrich as saying, “to the catastrophic sameness of the world.” It was catastrophic because if everything was more or less the same, then nothing could any longer surprise him, “and I am someone who has always taken great pleasure in being surprised.”