Anyway, the Leine Schloß 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 Schloß 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 Schloß 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 Schloß 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 Schloß 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.