Did happiness make one stupid? When he leafed through the Disquisitiones in the following weeks, he couldn't quite believe that the book was by him. He had to pull himself together before he could understand all the derivatives. He wondered if his intellect was sinking into mediocrity. Astronomy was a cruder science than mathematics. One couldn't solve the problems by pure thought; someone had to stare through an eyepiece until his eyes hurt while someone else had to tabulate the resulting measurements at mind-numbing length. The person who did this for him was a Herr Bessel in Bremen, whose only talent lay in the fact that he never ever made mistakes. As director of an observatory, Gauss had the right to requisition assistance—even if the foundation stone of this observatory hadn't even been laid yet.
He had asked for an audience more than once, but the duke was always busy. He wrote a furious letter and received no reply. He wrote a second, and when there was still no response to this, he waited so long outside the audience chamber that a secretary with tousled hair and untidy uniform eventually had to send him home. On the street he met Zimmerman and complained bitterly.
The professor looked at him as if he were an apparition and asked if he were really oblivious that there was a war on.
Gauss looked around. The street lay quiet in the sunshine, a baker was passing by with a basket of bread, the tin weathercock glinted dully above the church roof. The air smelled of lilacs. War?
It was true that he hadn't read a newspaper for weeks. Bartels hoarded everything. He went to his house and seated himself in front of a stack of old journals. Grimly he leafed past a report of Alexander von Humboldt's about the highlands of Caxamarca. Was there any damn place this fellow hadn't been? But just as he reached the war reports, he was interrupted by the crunching wheels of a column of wagons. Bayonets, cavalry helmets, and lances paraded past the window for the next half hour. Bartels came home panting to announce that the duke was lying in one of the coaches, shot at Jena, bleeding like an ox, and dying. Everything was lost.
Gauss folded the newspaper. In that case he could go home.
He mustn't say it to anyone, but this Bonaparte interested him. Supposedly he dictated up to six letters at the same time. Once he had found an outstanding solution to the problem of how to divide a circle with fixed compasses. He won battles by being the first to announce with absolute authority that he'd won them. He thought faster and deeper than other people, that was his whole secret. Gauss wondered if Napoleon had ever heard of him.
The observatory was not going to come to anything, he told Johanna at supper. He would have to keep observing the sky from his parlor, a complete disgrace. He had an offer from Göttingen. They wanted to build an observatory there too, it wasn't far away, and from there he could visit his mother every week. They could do the move before the baby arrived.
But Göttingen, said Johanna, now belonged to France.
Belonged to France?
How could he, of all people, be so blind to things that were obvious to everyone else? Göttingen belonged to Hannover, whose personal union with the English crown had been broken by the French victory, and Napoleon had now attached it to the new kingdom of Westphalia, to be ruled by Jérôme Bonaparte. So to whom would a Westphalian official swear his oath of office? Napoleon!
He rubbed his forehead. Westphalia, he repeated, as if it would become clearer if he said it out loud, Jérôme. What did that have to do with them?
With Germany, she said, it had to do with Germany and with where one stood.
He looked at her helplessly.
She already knew, she exclaimed, what he was going to say—that looked at from the future, both sides would cancel each other out and before long nobody would be getting excited about the things people were dying for today. But what difference did that make? Cozying up to the future was a form of cowardice. Did he really think that people would be more intelligent then?
Yes, a little, he said. Of necessity.
But we're living right now!
Unfortunately, he said, snuffed the candles, went to the telescope, and focused it on the overcast surface of Jupiter. The night was clear, and he could see its tiny moons more distinctly than ever before.
Soon afterward he presented the telescope to Professor Pfaff and they moved to Göttingen. Here there was general chaos. French soldiers racketed around at night and on the site of the future observatory, ground hadn't even been broken for the foundations, and the occasional sheep munched on the grass. He had to observe the stars from Professor Lichten-berg's old tower room above the town wall. And worst of all: he was forced to give seminars. Young men came to his apartments, rocked on his chairs, and left grease spots on the cushions of his sofa while he labored to make them understand anything at all.
His students were the stupidest people he had ever met. He spoke so slowly that he had forgotten the beginning of his sentences before he'd reached the end. It didn't do any good. He left everything difficult out, and stuck to the absolute basics. They didn't understand. He wanted to cry. He wondered if halfwits had a special idiom that one could learn like a foreign language. He gesticulated with both hands, pointed to his lips, and shaped sounds exaggeratedly, as if he were dealing with the deaf. But the only person to pass the examination was a young man with watery eyes. His name was Moebius, and he was the only one who appeared not to be a cretin. When he was the only one again to pass the second examination, the dean took Gauss aside after the faculty meeting and begged him not to be so strict. When Gauss got home close to tears, he found only uninvited strangers: a doctor, a midwife, and his parents-in-law.
He'd missed everything, said his mother-in-law. Head in the clouds again!
He didn't even have a decent telescope, he said, upset. What had happened?
It was a boy.
What did she mean, a boy? Only when he saw her eyes did he understand. And he knew at once that she would never forgive him.
He was distressed that he found it so hard to like the baby. People had said it happened of its own accord. But weeks after the birth, when he held the helpless creature who for some reason was called Joseph in his hands and looked at his tiny nose and disconcertingly complete tally of toes, all he felt was pity and shyness. Johanna took it away from him and asked with sudden concern whether he was happy. Of course, he said, and went to his telescope.
Since they had moved to Göttingen, he was visiting Nina again. She was no longer so young, and received him with the intimacy of a wife. He still hadn't learned Russian, she said reproachfully, and he apologized and promised to do it soon. He had sworn to himself that Johanna would never know of these visits, he would lie even under torture. It was his duty to keep pain from her. It was not his duty to tell her the truth. Knowledge was painful. There wasn't a day he didn't wish he had less of it.
He had begun a work of astronomy. Nothing important, not a book for the ages like the Disquisitiones, it would be overtaken in time. But it promised to be the most accurate guide to the calculation of orbits and trajectories there had ever been. And he had to hurry. Although he had just turned thirty, he noticed that his concentration was slipping and the pauses that people seemed to make before replying to something were getting shorter. He had lost some more of his teeth, and from week to week he was plagued by colic. The doctor advised smoking a pipe every morning and a lukewarm bath before going to bed. He was sure he would never achieve old age. When Johanna told him that another child was on the way, he couldn't have said whether he was pleased or not. It would have to grow up without him, that much was clear. He was anxious during the birth and relieved afterwards, and in honor of her stupid friend Minna the baby was named Wil-helmine. When he tried to teach her to count a few months later, Johanna said it was really too early.
Unwillingly, because Johanna was already pregnant again, he went to Bremen to go through the Jupiter tabulations with Bessel. During the week before the journey he slept badly, had nightmares, and was irritable and depressed for days. The journey was even wor
se than the one to Königsberg, the coach even narrower, his fellow travelers even more unwashed, and when a wheel broke, they had to stand for four hours in a muddy landscape while the cursing driver repaired it. The moment that Gauss, exhausted, with a heavy head and a sore back, had climbed out of the coach, Bessel asked him about the calculation of Jupiter's mass from the disturbances in Ceres’ trajectory. Had he worked out a consistent orbit yet?
Gauss saw red. He didn't have it yet, what could he do! He had spent hundreds of hours on it. The thing was unimaginably difficult, a torture, dammit he wasn't young any more, people should spare him, in any case he didn't have long to live, it had been a mistake to launch himself on this rubbish in the first place.
Very subdued, Bessel asked if he'd like to see the sea.
No expeditions, said Gauss.
It was really close, said Bessel. A mere stroll! In fact it was another laborious journey and the coach rocked so violently that Gauss got his colic again. It was raining, the window didn't shut tight, and they were soaked to the skin.
But it was worth it, Bessel kept saying. The sea was something one had to see.
Had to? Gauss asked where that was written.
The beach was dirty and even the water left something to be desired. The horizon seemed narrow, the sky was low, and the sea looked like soup under a scum of mist. A cold wind blew. Something was burning nearby and the smoke made it hard to breathe. The body of a headless chicken washed up and down in the waves.
Fine. Gauss blinked into the haze. And now they could go home, yes?
But Bessel's entrepreneurial spirit was unbounded. It wasn't enough to see the sea, one also had to go to the theater!
The theater was expensive, said Gauss.
Bessel laughed. The professor should consider himself a guest, it would be his honor. He would hire a private coach, they would be there in no time at all!
The journey took four agonizing days and the bed at the inn in Weimar was so hard that Gauss's back pain became unbearable. Besides which the bushes along the Ilm made him sneeze. The court theater was hot, and sitting for hours a trial. The play being performed was a piece by Voltaire. Somebody killed somebody else. A woman cried. A man complained. Another woman fell to her knees. There were monologues. The translation was elegant and melodic, but Gauss would rather have read it. He yawned till the tears ran down his cheeks.
Moving, wasn't it, whispered Bessel.
The actors flung their hands up in the air, paced endlessly back and forth, and rolled their eyes as they spoke.
He thought, whispered Bessel, that Goethe was in his box today.
Gauss asked if that was the ass who considered himself fit to correct Newton's theory of light.
People turned around. Bessel seemed to shrink into his seat and didn't say another word until the curtain fell.
As they were leaving, a gaunt gentleman came to speak to them. Did he have the honor to be addressing Gauss the astronomer?
The astronomer and mathematician, said Gauss.
The man introduced himself as a Prussian diplomat, currently posted to Rome, but en route to Berlin where he would take up a position as director of education in the Interior Ministry. There was a great deal to do, the German educational system needed to be reformed from the ground up. He himself had enjoyed the finest education, now he had the opportunity to offer some of it to others. He stood very straight, without leaning on his silver stick. Moreover, they were alumni of the same university and had acquaintances in common. That Herr Gauss was also active in mathematics was something he hadn't known. Uplifting, wasn't it!
Gauss didn't understand.
The performance.
Oh, yes, said Gauss.
The gentleman understood perfectly. Not quite the right thing at this moment. Something German would have been more appropriate. But it was hard to argue with Goethe about such matters.
Gauss, who hadn't been listening up till now, asked the diplomat to repeat his name.
The diplomat bowed and did so. He too was a scientist!
Curious, Gauss leant forward.
He researched old languages.
Ah, said Gauss.
That, said the diplomat, sounded rather disappointed.
Linguistics. Gauss shook his head. He didn't wish to be offensive.
No, no. He should say it.
Gauss shrugged. Linguistics was for people who had the precision for mathematics but not the intelligence. People who would invent their own makeshift logic.
The diplomat was silent.
Gauss asked him about his travels. He must have been everywhere!
That, said the diplomat sourly, was the other von Humboldt, his brother. A case of mistaken identity, and not the first time it had happened. He said goodbye and left with small steps.
That night the pain in his back and stomach gave Gauss no rest. He twisted and turned this way and that and quietly cursed his fate, Weimar, and most of all Bessel. Early next morning, Bessel wasn't yet awake, he ordered the coach to be hitched up, and instructed the driver to take him to Göttingen at once.
When he finally arrived, his traveling case still in his hand, alternately bent double because of his stomach pains and leaning over backwards at an awkward angle to ease his spine, he went to the university to enquire when construction would begin on the observatory.
There wasn't much sound from the ministry right now, said the official. Hannover was a long way away. Nobody knew anything precise. In case he had forgotten, there was a war on.
The army had ships, said Gauss, ships needed to be sailed, navigation needed astronomical charts, and astronomical charts weren't so easy to make at home in the kitchen.
The official promised to have news soon. What was more, there were plans to resurvey the kingdom of Westphalia. The herr professor had already done work as a geodetic surveyor. They were looking for an industrious person who could count, to be leader of the enterprise.
Gauss opened his mouth. Using every ounce of willpower he managed not to scream at the man. He closed his mouth again and left without saying goodbye.
He wrenched open the door to his apartments, called out that he was home and wouldn't be leaving again any time soon. He was pulling off his boots in the hall when the doctor, the midwife, and his mother-in-law stepped out of the bedroom. Ah, wonderful, this time he wouldn't have to reproach himself. Smiling broadly, a little too exuberantly, he asked if it had arrived yet and if it was a boy or a girl and most of all, how much it weighed.
A boy said the doctor. He was dying. As was his mother.
They had tried everything, said the midwife.
What happened after that was beyond his capacity to recall clearly. It seemed as if time were racing both forwards and backwards, and multiple possibilities had simultaneously opened and closed. One memory had him at Johanna's bedside, as she opened her eyes for a moment and gave him a look that was empty of all recognition. Her hair was sticking to her face, her hand was damp and limp, the basket with the infant was standing next to his chair. This was contradicted by another memory in which she was no longer conscious when he stormed into the room, and a third, in which she died at that very moment, her body pale and waxlike, and a fourth in which the two of them had an appallingly clear conversation: she asked if she had to die, after a moment's hesitation he nodded, whereupon she told him not to be sad for too long, one lived, then one died, that was how it was. Only after six o'clock in the afternoon did things come together again. He was sitting at her bedside. People were whispering in the hall. Johanna was dead.
He pushed back the chair and tried to accustom himself to the thought that he would have to marry again. He had children. He had no idea how one brought them up. He couldn't run a household. Servants cost money.
Quietly he opened the door. This, he thought, is it. Having to live although everything was over. Arranging things, organizing things: every day, every hour, every minute. As if there were still some sense in it.
 
; He was a little comforted when he heard his mother arrive. He thought of the stars. The short formula that would summarize all their movements in a simple line. For the first time he knew it would always elude him. Darkness fell slowly. And slowly he moved toward the telescope.
THE MOUNTAIN
By the light of a guttering oil lamp, while the wind blew past carrying more and more snowflakes, Aimé Bonpland was trying to write a letter home. If he thought about the preceding months, it was as if he'd lived dozens of lives, all of them similar to one another and none of them worth repeating. The journey up the Orinoco seemed like something one read about in books, New Andalusia was a prehistoric legend, Spain no more than a mere word. He had begun to feel better meanwhile, some days he was already free of fever, and even the dreams, in which he strangled, dismembered, shot, burned, poisoned, or buried Baron Humboldt under stones, were becoming less frequent.
He paused for thought, and chewed the end of his quill. Somewhat higher up the mountain, surrounded by sleeping mules, his hair covered with hoarfrost and a little snow, Humboldt was working out their position using the moons of Jupiter. He had the glass cylinder of the barometer balanced on his knees. Beside him, wrapped in blankets, their three mountain guides were asleep.