PRINCE HEINRICH WAS DEAD, Princess Margaretha after her brother’s death went no less mad than he had gone, Princess Wilhelmina was held captive by her husband the wary Count Palatine in his meticulously maintained but petite castle on the banks of the Schwarzbach at Zweibrücken, and as for Princess Katharina, musical Katharina, who, as you recall, the astronomer told Leibniz, had, according to the Court Chamberlain, been sent to Spain to visit her cousins at the court in Madrid of Philip III, the astronomer—after years of keeping an ear out for the opus he knew her capable of composing—learned at last that she had been sent to Spain, that much was true, but not to Madrid, and not to the court there, but rather to Toledo, where she took her vows, how willingly we do not know, and joined the silent Carmelite sisters of the Convent of Our Lady of Light. The astronomer said: “The world has not heard a peep from her since.”

Hence the field was cleared for the devout Matthias, and after Matthias for the fanatical Ferdinand II. Each of them, however, with that peculiar comical strut of constitutionality that marked German politics even in the depths of the war to come, when peasants feasted on human corpses, and imperial soldiers raped the daughters of respected burghers, and Swedes fed filth into the mouths of Bavarians until their bellies burst from the pressure, agreed, according to the astronomer, to abide by their predecessor’s Edict of the Tubes—“though you will see momentarily that this was less than forthright!”—and professed each of them an interest in the natural world.

Thus there was a forty-foot tube, and then a fifty-foot tube, and then a sixty-foot tube, the last of which conveyed to the astronomer’s eye 1,436 glittering stars.

He peered into his telescope and picked up his quill. “Nineteen minutes, darker and darker,” he said, and wrote something down.