“Except for all those Jacobites who want Sophie dead,” Caroline returned.

This was a bit like sticking her leg out in front of Mrs. Braithwaite when she was trying to tiptoe, skirts hiked up, down a turd-strewn alley. The Englishwoman faltered and pinkened but did not come to a full stop. As everyone in Hanover, including Caroline’s husband, had noted, she was the very soul of poise and grace. “The other characters and events of your last nine years-the handsome and brave young Prince, the long war against an evil King, a lost kingdom across the sea, rightfully yours, which sends emissaries-”

“Emissaries,” Caroline said, “but other busy persons too, not fit for f?ry-tales at all.”

Mrs. Henrietta Braithwaite, Caroline’s dame du palais and English tutor, was also the official mistress of Caroline’s husband. Caroline did not really object to her “brave young Prince” having sex all the time with the wife of an Englishman-and a rather dodgy Englishman at that. On the contrary. Sex with the Electoral Prince George Augustus had been mildly pleasant more often than it had been downright painful. But most of the time, like trimming one’s fingernails, it had been a body-chore that no longer seemed gross after it had been done a few hundred times. Four children-one Prince, three Princesses-had ensued so far, and there would probably be more, provided George Augustus did not spill all of his seed into Henrietta Braithwaite. The arrival of this Englishwoman at the Court of Hanover two years ago, and her speedy promotion to maitresse en titre of Young Hanover Brave (as Caroline’s husband was styled by Whiggish Brits), had relieved Caroline of one of the less fascinating tasks that she had to put up with as a wife and a Princess, and given her more time to sleep at night and to read during the day. So there was not anything like rancor between her and Henrietta.

But relations between one who was a Princess and one who was not were governed, not by what the Princess was really feeling and thinking, but rather by certain forms that were supposed to ensure the steady functioning of the Court, and, by extension, the s?cular world. By those lights, Caroline-who was married in the sight of God to George Augustus, and who had been endowed by her mother with the incredible and priceless faculty of generating new Princes and Princesses-stood in the same wise, to the likes of Henrietta Braithwaite, as Hera to some dung-flecked shepherdess who had lately been rolling in the clover with Zeus. Caroline was expected to remind Mrs. Braithwaite of her inferiority from time to time, and Mrs. Braithwaite was expected to receive it meekly and submissively. As how could she not, for the grandchildren of Caroline would reign over the British Empire while the Braithwaites would spend their lives losing at cards and killing themselves with gin in mildewy London salons.

“It is with the greatest pleasure that I shall read the next chapter of your royal highness’s f?ry-tale,” Mrs. Braithwaite predicted. “In this Household it is an oft-told tale that when your royal highness was stricken with the smallpox, two years after your wedding, his royal highness George Augustus spurned the counsel of the physicians, and placed his own life at risk to sit by his young bride’s bedside and hold her hand.”

“It is true. George did not leave my bedside until I was well.”

“To me-as to every other woman who can never hope to be the object of such pure adoration-that is a f?ry-tale we would fain read over and over, until the pages crumbled,” said Mrs. Braithwaite.

“I may write it then,” answered Princess Caroline, “or I may keep it to myself, as a thing rightfully mine, and not to be shared with any who does not merit it.”

Some two years earlier, at a courtly soiree that had brought many noble persons together, Princess Caroline had overheard another Princess saying something rude about Sophie. The words that had passed between them were long since forgotten. What was remembered was that Caroline had thrown a punch at the other Princess. It happened to land on the jaw. The other Princess was carried out of the room, feigning unconsciousness.

It was not really in Caroline’s nature to do some of the cruel things that a Princess was required to do. But as her f?ry-tale had mentioned, she well knew that being a Princess was the only thing that had kept her from ending up as a child whore in a Saxon mining-camp. So to pretend otherwise-to play with the ancient laws of Princesshood-was idle.

Suddenly weights were falling and springs unwinding in the belfry of the big old church across the square from Leibniz’s house. A large piece of metal was mercilessly pounding on a bell, which stood still for it, quivering and moaning. Here in the Leine Schlo? it was time for Caroline to leave off of the ritual drubbing of Mrs. Braithwaite, and to go out on her daily excursion to Herrenhausen. A skirmish of curtseys got the Englishwoman out of the Presence without violating any etiquette-laws.

Minutes later-having nipped into several nurseries and schoolrooms along the way to kiss her little Prince and Princesses good-bye-Caroline was in the courtyard of the Leine Schlo? telling the stable-hands that they had got it all wrong. Herr Schwartz, the retainer who was in charge of the stables, had reached an age when he phant’sied he could foretell the weather by the pains in his joints. Today, his hip and his elbow were united in prophesying rain. Accordingly, he had given orders for the coach-and-four to be made ready. But Caroline’s senses assured her that it was a perfect sunny day, and too sultry to be pent up in a wooden box. So she chided Herr Schwartz, in a playful way, and ordered that her favorite mare be saddled. The mount was led out, ready to go, before she had finished uttering the command-Herr Schwartz knew her well enough. She hitched up her skirts, ascended a little Barock stair, and perched on the saddle. A few moments later she was riding out onto the street without so much as a look back. She knew that a small escort would be not far behind; or if it weren’t, the persons responsible for deploying her escort would be sent down in disgrace and replaced with others.

Anyway, the Leine Schlo? was not the sort of thing any cultivated person would take the trouble to look back at. The hundred or so paces that separated it from Leibniz’s house vaulted an architectural chasm. Leibniz’s house was much bigger than a bachelor really needed, because he cohabited with a library. It was one of those Hapsburg wedding-cakes, thickly frosted in high-relief friezes of queer and heinous goings-on from the Bible. Next to it, the Leine Schlo? need never worry about accusations of gaudiness. In a continent that was now freckled with more or less embarrassing knock-offs of Versailles, the Leine Schlo? was Proud to be Dowdy. It was trapped between the sluggish Leine on one side and an ordinary Hanover street on the other, and so it would never have gardens or even a decent forecourt. To be sure, embedded in the heart of the Schlo? was a single, stupefyingly gaudy room called the Rittersaal, built by Sophie’s husband thirty years ago after Leibniz had come back from Italy bearing evidence that he was at least as Royal as his Sophie. But no common person riding along the street or floating down the river past the Schlo? would dream that anything colorful, ornate, decorative, or lively was contained in those walls. It was a mashing-together of several blocky, four-storey wings ventilated by many rectangular windows, all of a common size, and arrayed in rows and columns. The first thing Princess Caroline saw every day, when she opened her eyes, parted her bed-curtains, and glanced toward her window to check the weather, was two intersecting stone walls of window-grid, marching off in an infinite logarithmic progression.

Merely seeing it would put Leibniz into a funk. What was only boring to Caroline was troubling to him, because he felt partly responsible. The Doctor had grown up in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War when many towns did not have buildings at all-only ruins and shanties! The structures that survived were round-shouldered half-timbered things, as same and yet as various as a basket of apples. But the buildings of today were informed by geometry; which meant that each one betrayed the particular Idea of geometry that its architect had drilled on in school. A hundred years ago this might have meant parabolas, ellipses, surfaces of revolution, involutes and evolutes, and parallel curves. Now it meant Cartesian rectilinear coordinates-the cruel gridiron to which all of those soaring arcs had been lashed fast by the toiling algebraists. A plaything for hares had fallen among the tortoises. The non-helpless minority of Christendom-those who could read, who could travel, who were not starving-had (Leibniz brooded) got only the most superficial notion of what had been happening in Natural Philosophy and, rather than going to the trouble of actually understanding it, had fastened on to the Cartesian grid as a relic or fetish of enlightenment. A result was grid-buildings. Leibniz could not bear to look at them because more than anyone else he was responsible for Cartesian coordinates. He who had launched his career with an epiphany in a rose-garden! So he and Caroline tended to meet, not in the waffle iron of the Leine Schlo? but out beyond the ramparts along the gently curving banks of the Leine, or at Sophie’s garden.