The year preceding his departure to Linz was denounced by him as pregnant with misfortune and misery. "In the first place I could get no money from the court, and my wife, who had for a long time been suffering under low spirits and despondency, was taken violently ill towards the end of 1610, with the Hungarian fever, epilepsy, and phrenitis. She was scarcely convalescent when all my three children were at once attacked with small-pox. Leopold with his army occupied the town beyond the river, just as I lost the dearest of my sons, him whose nativity you will find in my book on the new star. The town on this side of the river where I lived was harassed by the Bohemian troops, whose new levies were insubordinate and insolent: to complete the whole, the Austrian army brought the plague with them into the city. I went into Austria, and endeavoured to procure the situation which I now hold. Returning in June, I found my wife in a decline from her grief at the death of her son, and on the eve of an infectious fever; and I lost her also, within eleven days after my return. Then came fresh annoyance, of course, and her fortune was to be divided with my step-sisters. The Emperor Rodolph would not agree to my departure; vain hopes were given me of being paid from Saxony; my time and money were wasted together, till on the death of the emperor, in 1612, I was named again by his successor, and suffered to depart to Linz. These, methinks, were reasons enough why I should have overlooked not only your letters, but even astronomy itself." Kepler's first marriage had not been a happy one; but the necessity in which he felt himself of providing some one to take charge of his two surviving children, of whom the eldest, Susanna, was born in 1602, and Louis in 1607, determined him on entering a second time into the married state. The account he has left us of the various negotiations which preceded his final choice, does not, in any point, belie the oddity of his character. His friends seem to have received a general commission to look out for a suitable match, and in a long and most amusing letter to the Baron Strahlendorf, we are made acquainted with the pretensions and qualifications of no less than eleven ladies among whom his inclinations wavered.