“Ten years ago, Your Majesty, My Lords and Ladies,” proclaimed Herr von Ulm, Prince Heinrich told the astronomer, “you saw with your very own eyes that the law prohibiting the indefinite motion of bodies—the alleged law, legislated to us by the logicians—has no basis in fact, it is an artifact of their reason, a whim of their madness, the logicians inscribe their proscriptions of the perpetuum mobile in a thousand thousand books but Nature does not read their books and she need not heed their laws. With your own eyes you saw how my wondrous wheel moved of its own accord, your own eyes proved it to you! I daresay Your Majesty’s own eyes refuted the logicians.” Margaretha scoffed. She of course had not believed in that wheel, and she now signaled this disbelief to their father with the scoffing sound that remained for him (Heinrich) her most salient trait. After months of his being confined to his turret, Greta’s face, her jaw aside, was already growing blurry to him, but the scoffing sound she produced often in her throat remained clear as a bell. Prince Heinrich told the astronomer: “Wilhelmina and I, too, of course, had had doubts about von Ulm’s wheel, but only Margaretha took our father seriously enough to signal to him with her constant scoffing sound that she thought he was wrong, that there was a small person turning the wheel from the inside, et cetera. Of the three of us, not counting Ina, Willa once said to me, possibly ironically, only Greta truly respects Father, only Greta reveres Father, it is because she loves him so much (like a god even! Willa said) that as long as they live a friendly word will never pass between them. She told me: You and I were happy to leave him his delusions about the wheel, if it made him happy to think it revolved on its own we were happy to let him think that, but not Margaretha! Greta had to make him see the person pedaling inside it, for her everything depended on Father’s seeing that person pedaling and admitting that he saw him, whereas for you and me Father’s seeing that person pedaling away in there was a matter of indifference. You might say: You and I have given him up for mad, whereas Greta has never given him up. I’m tempted, Willa said, to say that of us three, not counting Ina, only Margaretha is a good child, only her devotion is undying, only she loves Father the way a child should love her father … To which,” Heinrich went on, “I replied: Maybe, maybe … I was thinking: Maybe she’s onto something—but maybe she’s overthinking things, maybe Greta just hates Father, maybe Greta’s apparent hatred for him, which it is tempting to see, paradoxically, as love, is simply hatred, straight, scathing hatred, Father, expressed incessantly by her scoffing sound. And I thought: And I do love him, I do—in my own way—respect him, I did care if he saw the man in the wheel dripping with sweat turning it from the inside, maybe not as much as Margaretha cared if he saw him but more than Wilhelmina did. I do take him seriously, I do, I thought…” the Prince told the astronomer, who now peered into his telescope and murmured: “Everything is darkening now, it is getting darker and darker, can you see that, Herr Leibniz? How everything’s getting gradually darker out there?” And Leibniz said that he did see it, everything was getting darker, and the astronomer said, “And a bit gloomier, yes?,” and Leibniz said yes, it was all a bit gloomier, and to the Philosophical Transactions he reported that the sky through the askew slat did in fact seem slightly darker, slightly gloomier, though he did not know of course if this was just a matter of suggestion, if he just was seeing what the astronomer wanted him to see. He wrote: “There was now hardly more than a half hour until the promised eclipse, yet the astronomer, in his tale, still had his eyes. How, I thought, will he have time to lose his eyes, to narrate, that is, the losing of his eyes, in the next thirty-some minutes, when we seem, in his tale, and in the Prince’s tale within his tale, no closer than when we began to a juncture at which they might suddenly be gouged out?”