Crüger to Müller, Easter Tuesday 1635
Peter Crüger, “Crüger to Müller, Easter Tuesday 1635,” Nova Kepleriana 4, 1635, 111–112, transcribed in Plain Old Text, https://sources.vjbe.net/stable/qv2es.
Nova Kepleriana 4 1635, p. 111–112 Summary
Part of Die Keplerbriefe auf der Nationalbibliothek und auf der Sternwarte in Paris
Crüger reports a visit from Kepler's son Ludwig: the widow and children are stranded at Frankfurt, Kepler's papers are kept at Sagan, and the Emperor's debt might be used to win Tycho's observations for an edition at Danzig.
Source: Peter Crüger's letter to Philipp Müller of Easter Tuesday 1635, written at Danzig, reporting what Kepler's son Ludwig, passing through Danzig with the English ambassador, had told him of his stepmother and her children, of his father's papers, and of Tycho's observations. The original is in the Bibliothèque de l'Observatoire, Paris (B, 1, 9; 89, 9. Cc. 49). Printed in extracts in Nova Kepleriana 4, ed. Walther von Dyck and Max Caspar, Abhandlungen der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Math.-naturw. Abteilung 31, no. 1 (Munich, 1927), 111–112.
English translation of the Latin extracts printed in Nova Kepleriana 4 (1927), made for Plain Old Text. Each paragraph translates the corresponding extract of the original; the omission marks (…) are the 1927 editors’. Italics follow the editors’ emphasis.
Last winter Ludwig Kepler,Kepler's son by his first marriage (1607–1663), later a physician at Königsberg; he had published his father's Somnium in 1634. son of our great Kepler, a candidate in medicine, came here with the King of England’s envoy, and spent time with me familiarly on several occasions, but afterwards went on into Ducal Prussia. He told me how things stood with his stepmother and the other children: that they had reached Frankfurt (on the Main) in the greatest danger, and had been left there since December (about the time the English envoy passed through), with little money; that he had been forced to share with his stepmother what he had brought together, and is now in need of money himself.
Of the writings left by his father, he reported that the others are not free to sell them, since they have passed to him as his inheritance, and that they are well kept in chests at Sagan. He left me a detailed list of them all.
Of Tycho’s observations he said that they belong to the Emperor and to Tycho’s heirs, but that the Emperor owes Kepler’s heirs some thousands, for which debt he had also obtained a special letter of promise about two years ago:
It is to be paid as soon as it can be.
If he could sell the Emperor’s bond to the Jesuits living here, even remitting a third, he was thinking of dealing with Tycho’s heirs so that the observations might be obtained from the Emperor; and then he, Kepler, would see to the publication both of them and of the other posthumous writings, and that in a place where the Council would bear the costs and there would be a suitable corrector and director; and such a place, he hoped, could be Danzig. There the matter must rest for now. Meanwhile, if only the Swedish war would cool down! Our Council, if I were still alive then, would not, I hope, be unwilling.