The Confusion

The Princess appeared to have forgotten that anyone else was in the room, and had not even said hello to Aunt Figgy or to Aunt Sophie. She stood for a moment at the base of the steps, the O of her mouth an echo of the big hole that was about to swallow her up. Even Frederick William shut up for a moment, sensing a frisson running through the assembled grownups, but not having the first idea why. That Princess Caroline of Ansbach had once been a little penniless orphan had been long forgot by most. But something about her pose there, below that hole in the Antarctic, unaware of all the people standing about, called to mind the orphan who had showed up on Sophie Charlotte’s doorstep five years ago, escorted by two Natural Philosophers and a brace of Prussian dragoons.

Then she got a smile on her face and climbed up through the hole. The grownups resumed breathing and applauded-giving Frederick William the diversion he needed to loop round behind the crowd and slam George August over the head with a book. Leibniz, who had not spent much time around children, watched this dumbfounded. Then he noticed Sophie regarding him with amusement. “It begins,” she said, “already the boys are vying for Caroline’s attention.”

“Is that what they’re doing?” Leibniz asked incredulously as George August,* who was five years older than, and twice the size of, his assailant, body-slammed Frederick William† against a smaller and more traditional sort of globe that had been shoved into a corner to make way for the new one. The papier-mache sphere crumpled inward and Frederick William ended up wearing it on his head, making him look like some antipodean creature with a monstrously oversized brain.

These antics had gone unnoticed, or been deliberately ignored, by Monsieur Molyneux, a Huguenot writer who had been haunting Berlin since his family had been wiped out in Savoy. “Why indeed should we not view the world as a cage in which our spirit has been imprisoned?” he reflected.

“Because God is not a prison-warden,” Leibniz answered sharply, but stopped when an elbow even sharper (Sophie’s) caught him in the ribs.

Princess Caroline had taken her seat: a swivel-stool mounted in the middle of the globe. Planting one of her party-shoes at the junction of the Twentieth West Meridian and the Fortieth South Parallel, so that the toe seemed to breach out of the South Atlantic like an immense white whale, she gave a little kick that sent her spinning around. “I’m rotating!” she reported, “the world is revolving around me!”

“Solipsistic, that,” somone remarked drily.

“It is more than that,” Leibniz said, “it is a profound question of Natural Philosophy. How indeed can we tell whether we do stand still in a rotating universe, or spin in a fixed cosmos?”

“Eeehuhh, I’m dizzy!” Caroline said, explaining why she had planted her feet, and stopped.

“There’s your answer,” Dr. Krupa said.

“Not at all. You assume that dizziness is a symptom-internally produced-of our spinning. But why might it not just as well be an effect exerted upon us from a distance, by a revolving universe?”

“No one should be forced to listen to metaphysics at her eighteenth birthday-party,” Sophie decreed.

“It’s dark in here,” Caroline said, “I can’t see the maps.”

Wladyslaw-a Polish tenor who sang the lead in just about every one of Sophie Charlotte’s operas-lit a fresh sparkler and handed it through the central Pacific Ocean to Caroline. Leibniz’s view of the girl happened to be blocked by Brazil, but he saw the inside of the sphere light up as the sparkler was drawn into the middle; the freshly buffed brass seemed to ignite as it sieved the light from the air and spilled it out in every direction. For a moment it seemed as if the globe-cage was filled with flame, and Leibniz’s heart ached and pounded with fear that Caroline’s dress had caught fire; but then he heard her delighted voice, and decided that the fear he felt was of something else, of some larger and longer calamity than the fate of one orphan Princess.

“I can see now all the rivers set in turquoise, and all the lakes, too, and forests of green tortoise-shell! The cities are jewels, which the light shines through.”

“It is how the world would look if it were transparent and you could sit in the middle looking outward,” said Father von Mixnitz, a Jesuit from Vienna who had somehow arranged to get himself invited.

“I am aware of that,” said Caroline, annoyed. A long, irritable silence followed. Caroline was quickest to forgive and forget. “I see two ships in the Pacific, and one is full of quicksilver, and the other is full of fire.”

“I do not recall putting those in the drawings,” Leibniz joked, trying to obey Sophie’s command to lighten things up a bit. “I shall have to have a word with the workmen about that!”

“Consider this, your royal highness,” continued Father von Mixnitz, “you may spin yourself all the way round, three hundred and twenty degrees-”

“Three hundred and sixty!”