The boy showed little interest in the quadrant, none at all in the clock, hardly any even in the extremely long tube. No sooner on that first night had they begun their astronomical investigations than the boy declared that he was bored, and asked to be taken to the aviary to see the astronomer’s falcons. The revelation that the astronomer had no aviary and kept no falcons shocked the boy silent. He recorded the coordinates of another three stars before looking up from the ledger and demanding to see the single oldest and most foreign coin in the astronomer’s entire coin collection; when the astronomer reached into a pocket and tossed him a thaler minted the year before in Joachimsthal the boy burst into tears and could not be consoled. He had spent too much of his brief life in that small castle on the Schwarzbach at Zweibrücken. He was a fop like his foster father. The astronomer: “He had come to me too late.” The astronomer thought of Prince Heinrich’s walks with Princess Katharina and reflected: “A young person is an astoundingly pliable thing. A personality unlike a nose can in its infancy be bound and shaped.” Beneath the surface of this seven- or eight-year-old boy beat the heart of a jaded and dissipated middle-aged dynast and aesthete.

Now perhaps—thought the astronomer optimistically—the boy was pliable still, he was still, after all, fairly young! And he put reading material into the boy’s hands, books that would teach him how he, his father, saw things, what he took for real and what for illusory, what for the causes of our torment on Earth and what if anything for the consolations; but though the boy tried to feign an interest in them these books “obviously bored him half to death.” Euclid bored him, Campanella bored him, Grosseteste bored him, Friar Bacon bored him. Even if he didn’t take an interest in optics, the astronomer thought he might take an interest in his father’s interest in it, but he did not, though of course he said that he did. When the astronomer seemed engrossed in the tube the boy probably forlornly scanned the spines on his shelf for military histories, dynastic panegyrics, old volumes of light Latin verse. “The question of the fundamental nature of things did not grip him.” How many stars there were, how they were distributed, and how they were constituted—what the stars were—held no fascination at all for the boy in spite of the astronomer’s unflagging efforts over months and then years to interest him in such elemental questions; no, whatever allure the stars had for the boy lay only in their aesthetic potentialities, their vulnerability to versification, their more or less inexhaustible metaphorical application (“their ability,” the astronomer explained, “to mean anything”), and the decorative charm they possessed when shimmering above the landscapes the boy sketched of the surrounding mountains and valleys. In sonnet after sonnet he extolled the virtues of heavenly entities of whose nature he was wholly ignorant; in sketch after sketch their light was exploited to illumine one or another alpine scene. The astronomer responded coolly to such poems and drawings and the boy did not know why. “How could he have understood that the lordly way he put the world to his own artistic use was his Wittelsbach birthright? That though my blood ran in his veins his head had been formed by a Wittelsbach upbringing? That from that dissolute Bavarian dynasty he had inherited the chutzpah to transform the world at his will into aristocratic amateur art? That that which licensed his foster father the Count Palatine to bathe nude in the Vltava River before all the plebs and the potentates of Prague licensed also his own aloof aestheticization of the world?” It must have seemed cruel when he dismissed the boy’s sonnets as Wittelsbach doggerel, his landscapes as Wittelsbach doodles, when he cut short the boy’s attempts to converse with him about the stars on the grounds that what each of them meant by that word was too different for them to conduct a conversation; but although he must have seemed cruel, the astronomer was grieving. Often, like the Count Palatine, he observed the boy sleeping, though unlike the Count there was nothing he could measure with two fingers to quantify their divergence.