Unfortunately, this turned out to be the quack Thurneysser, who obtained a sample of her urine, heated it up, and concluded on the basis of this heated-up urine sample that her headaches were not real, and neither was the itching in her bones.
Never again was Princess Margaretha allowed to utter the word “headaches” in the Emperor’s presence, nor the phrase “the incessant itching in my bones,” nor was she permitted to refer to “the enlarged nodes in my neck.”
“There was nothing else I wished to discuss with him, so over the course of the decade since we spoke less and less, and nowadays we hardly speak at all,” the Princess told the astronomer as dessert was placed before her.
“What is doubtful,” Leibniz comments, quoting Descartes, in a reference it is tempting to read as ironic, that is, sympathetic to Princess Margaretha, though there is evidence, in his Hypothesis physica nova (1671) among other places, that Leibniz in his youth was a faithful Cartesian, “should be considered false.”
Only by the grace of God did her head gradually begin to ache less, did her bones become less itchy …
“Of course, I still itch, I still ache, but I keep it to myself, I don’t complain. If you asked my sisters they would probably say I’m a happy, healthy person, but of course they have absolutely no idea the amount of stoicism required to give off that impression.” She added: “The inner resources.”
Gottfried said: “It is not proper to spit the pit of a fruit into the palm of the hand.”
“Now what, you may wonder,” said Margaretha, “has all of this to do with the glockenspiels?”
“And what,” added the astronomer, peering into his telescope, “has all of that to do with my eyes?”
Not long after Margaretha collapsed on the floor of the Great Hall, her brother began to complain of a certain sound echoing faintly in his head. It was, as he described it, very, very faint, so faint indeed it verged on not being there at all, and caused him no pain whatsoever, it was even rather melodious, it was not the Devil’s Tritone or any such discordant thing, just a single pleasant note, yet the mere fact of hearing a note no one else could hear, and which moreover he could not reproduce for anyone, his efforts at whistling or humming producing, at best, something slightly different from what he heard inside his head, was, he insisted, indescribably frustrating. Margaretha said: “You can see where this is going.” She remembered lying in bed—her head swaddled in bandages, her bones itching, the nodes in her neck hugely enlarged—hearing her brother in her father’s throne room humming and whistling note after note while interjecting at intervals: “Like that, but not that. Like that, but not that.”
Gottfried said: “Rather, as in the Garden, we pluck it from our mouth with two fingers.”
“So,” said Margaretha, “our father sent for the Imperial Physician, the Imperial Physician examined Heinrich, concluded that the note he heard did not really exist, not really really, Father took his word for it, and that was that, right?” She bit into a peach. “Ha! Hilarious! No.” No, it never even occurred to her father to doubt his son’s putative pain, and he turned his realm upside down in an effort to assuage it, this pain so subtle and delicate and ethereal that Heinrich had great difficulty just describing it, “for the sound itself, he wanted us to know, needed us to know, was not unpleasant, that was not the problem at all, he’d often scream at us that we didn’t understand the nature of the problem at all.” (Once, Margaretha remembered, Heinrich tried to explain to her—her head still swathed in bandages apart from two eyeholes—that his inability to articulate why the inability to share with others the sound he heard was a pain, was itself a second kind of pain, a sort of metapain, or metadiscomfort: “I am afflicted not only by descriptive difficulties but also by the difficulty of describing those descriptive difficulties, and so on and so on. Against my will I find myself in perfect solitude.”) “Perhaps,” she said, biting into the peach, “Father respected the abstruse nature of his complaint, perhaps my pains were just too obvious for him, too much the pains of common folk, not kings, not to mention, of course”—she laughed—“too much the pains of a woman.” Whatever the case: When it came to the faint note echoing uncomfortably in her brother’s head, His Majesty spared no expense. First he summoned back to Prague the orchestral ensemble that had played at her mother’s birthday party, and which subsequently had crossed the Alps; they performed the same piece of music they had performed then, but the sound in question, according to Heinrich, did not appear in it, so evidently the concert was not the cause.
Margaretha said: “That alone cost eight thousand eight hundred thalers.”
A tattered notebook, which appeared to record in considerable detail the various expenditures her father had made on her brother’s behalf, had suddenly materialized, he knew not from where, perhaps from within the folds of her very voluminous skirt, the astronomer told Leibniz.
Gottfried said: “The stone fruits Adam and Eve ate unthinkingly and in all innocence, yet whose pits they plucked from their mouths properly, can no longer be eaten rightly, their pits disposed of rightly (such is our depraved state) without reflection.”
Then the Emperor issued a proclamation: Whoever could produce, for all to hear, the note that Prince Heinrich heard in his head, would be rewarded with riches beyond measure. Pilgrims poured into Prague, thousands of them, tens of thousands! They came bearing zithers and lutes and flutes and fiddles and horns. From the East came strange men lugging by oxcart gargantuan drums stretched with the skins of unfamiliar creatures, celebrated castrati risked the wrath of the chorus master of the Sistine Chapel Choir to make the journey from Rome, Jews came from every corner of Europe with ram’s horns in their hands, and from the Siberian steppe three men and three women conveyed on a plank of wood an old man of exceptional frailty, perhaps their father, who to all appearances was near death by the time they arrived in Bohemia and no longer among the living by the hour he was brought into the Great Hall, and yet still generated, without opening his eyes, an unfathomable sound from deep in his throat.
And Heinrich said: That isn’t it.
Scholars at the University of Leiden conducted a huge study of Heinrich’s head, the most extensive head study yet conducted, which, if we believe Leibniz’s account of the astronomer’s account of Margaretha’s account of it, might even be termed, at the risk of anachronism, a psychological study, and theorized the type of sound that was likely to lodge itself in such a head, and produced a newfangled instrument, partway between a church organ, a heavily modified hurdy-gurdy, and an early oboe, which, when a key was pressed, and a crank turned, and a tube blown into, generated a noise never before heard on Earth.
And the Emperor peered over at Heinrich, and Heinrich said: That isn’t it.
Over and over their father peered anxiously at Heinrich and over and over Heinrich said: That isn’t it. That isn’t it. That isn’t it.
And the drummers whipped their oxen eastward, and the castrati returned to Rome, and the Jews went home with their ram’s horns, and the old Tatar was buried by his children on the outskirts of Prague, and the Leiden scholars took up once again their traditional disciplines.
Gottfried: “After the Fall no one dines rightly save by means of reflection.”
“Imagine,” said Margaretha, riffling through her notebook, “just the cost of administering all this! I’m not even referring to the reward, I’m just talking about the administrative costs—the administrative costs alone!”
You can think about the solicitude in her father’s eyes, or you can examine the record of his expenditures, “They tell the same tale,” she said.
Wilhelmina tiptoed hastily past the door, pinching in each hand a piece of her gown, “which really did fit her well,” Leibniz quotes the astronomer as saying, in such a tone, Leibniz notes, that a man with eyelids might have winked.
Gottfried: “It is no longer possible to eat a stone fruit properly without the concept of a stone fruit.”
One day, while trampi
ng around town terrorizing the local maidens—“For, as you shall see, sir, my brother, even at the height of his supposed mental illness, and notwithstanding how esoteric and how refined he wished this illness to seem, how profound, was never too ill or too profound to exploit the powers of his office to obtain for himself the pleasures of the flesh”—the Prince cried suddenly: That’s it! That’s it! That’s the sound! And he pointed at a little bell that hung round the neck of a gaunt goat being driven to the butcher by its equally gaunt goatherd and his three skeletal sons, who in bafflement and distress trailed the royal retinue up the steep stairs to the Castle, begging the men who had seized their animal to give it back. Imagine how their grief turned to joy when the goatherd was told that the sound of his goat’s bell matched the ringing in the Prince’s head, and that this entitled him to unimaginable wealth! Sacks of gold were hauled out one after another; the old goatherd trembled and wept; his sons laughed and danced. Margaretha noticed, however, that her brother, who had blissfully been ringing that goat bell into one of his ears, had now cocked his head. And then he said: “Wait—it’s actually slightly different. It’s like this, but it’s not this.” And the sacks of gold were hauled back into the Castle and the gaunt goat was thrust back at the old man and before he and his sons understood what was happening the gate had clanged shut in their faces. Margaretha said: “And I remember saying to Heinrich: Shouldn’t we give them something, at least? And Heinrich said: Who? And I said: The goatherd and his sons. And Heinrich asked, in complete sincerity, and I shall never forget this, it is echt Heinrich: Why would we give them anything? It wasn’t quite the right sound.” She added: “Not quite the right sound, why give them anything: This is also our father’s philosophy toward me, I point out to Katharina, and she runs off to the Music-Making Room.” As Margaretha slipped out to press a few thalers into the palm of the poor goatherd, she heard Heinrich exclaim: “But at least we know it’s in the bell family.”
The Organs of Sense Page 10