“By process of elimination, he would be the obese Catholic?”
“Yes. He appropriated the Duchy and raised an army to defend it. By the time news of this coup de main had made its way to the Venetian brothel where Ernst August and Georg Wilhelm had set up their headquarters, ’twas a fait accompli. Later, like good brothers, they worked out a settlement. John Frederick got the great prize, and was made Duke of Hanover. Georg Wilhelm became Duke of Celle. Ernst August—despite being a Protestant—remained the Bishop of Osnabrück. The odds and ends of the clan ended up here in Wolfenbüttel—you have just met them. Now, Ernst August and Sophie had already resolved to make their little fiefdom into a Parnassus, a kingdom of Reason—”
“So they hired you, naturally.”
“No, actually, there was a lot of that going round at the time. John Frederick wanted to do the same at Hanover.”
“It must have been a good time to be a savant.”
“Indeed, one could name one’s price. John Frederick had more money and a vast library.”
“Right, now I am starting to remember it. Huygens told me that after he taught you everything he knew concerning mathematics—which would have been round about the early 1670s—you had to leave Paris and take a job in some cold bleak place.” Fatio looked significantly out the window.
“’Twas Hanover actually—a distinction without a difference, as to you it would seem very like Wolfenbüttel.”
Leibniz ushered Fatio into an entrance hall dominated by frighteningly massive staircases.
Sounding a bit perplexed, Fatio said, “Rather a lot of people must have died then, for Ernst August to become Duke of Hanover—”
“John Frederick died in ’79. Georg Wilhelm still lives. But it was Ernst August who became Duke of Hanover, by dint of this or that sub-clause in the agreement made between him and his brothers—I’ll spare you details.”
“So Sophie got to merge her Parnassus with John Frederick’s—of which you were the crowning glory—”
“Really you do flatter, sir.”
“But why did I have to come down here to meet you? I’d expected to find you at Hanover.”
“The Library!” Leibniz answered, surging past the younger man and hurling himself against an immense door. There was a bit of preliminary cracking and tinkling as ice shattered and fell from its hinges. Then it yawned open to afford Fatio a view across several hundred yards of flat snow-covered ground to a dark uneven mountainous structure that was a-building there.
“No fair making comparisons with the one Wren’s building at Trinity College,” Leibniz said cheerfully. “His will be an ornament—not that there is anything wrong with that—mine will be a tool, an engine of knowledge.”
“Engine?” Fatio, who was well-shod, pranced out into the snow in pursuit of Leibniz, who had given up any hope of preserving his boots and shifted to a sort of plodding, stomping gait.
“Our use of knowledge progresses through successively higher levels of abstraction as we perfect civilization and draw nearer to the mentality of God,” Leibniz said, as if making an off-handed comment about the weather. “Adam named the beasts; meaning, that from casual observations of particular specimens, he moved to the recognition of species, and then devised abstract names for them—a sort of code, if you will. Indeed, if he had not done so, Noah’s task would have been inconceivable. Later, a system of writing was developed: spoken words were abstracted into chains of characters. This became the basis for the Law—it is how God communicated His intentions to Man. The Book was written. Then other books. At Alexandria the many books were brought together into the first Library. More recently came the invention of Gutenberg: a cornucopia that spills books out into specialized markets in Frankfurt and Leipzig. The merchants there have been completely unreceptive to my proposals! There are too many books in the world now for any one mind to comprehend. What does Man do, Fatio, when he is faced with a task that exceeds the physical limits of his body?”
“Harnesses beasts, or makes a tool. And beasts are of no use in a Library. So—”
“So we want tools. Behold!” Leibniz proclaimed, taking his hands from his coat-pockets just long enough to direct a sort of shoveling gesture at the looming Pile. “It must be obvious to you that this was a stable* until quite recently. I will stipulate that this is a mean beginning for a library and that you will be able to elicit howls of laughter from the Royal Society and from any salon at Versailles by describing it to them…”