Galileo's Dream

So Galileo returned to Florence, willing to believe that Urban had given him permission to describe the Copernican explanation as a theoretical construct—a mathematical abstraction that could account for the observed planetary motions. And if he made the supposition convincing enough, the pope might then give it his approval, as he had the various arguments in Il Saggiatore. And then all would be well.

And so, over the next several years, he wrote his Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems, which was known around the house as the Dialogo. He wrote it in fits and starts, between interruptions required by the grand duke, or by his family situation, or by illnesses; but always one way or another he kept at it, as if under some kind of compulsion.

In those years, the first question every day was whether Galileo would be well enough to get up. Every time he was ill, it could be just a febbre efimera, a one-day fever, or on the other hand something that would fell him for a month or two. Everyone feared his illnesses as being little catastrophes in the household’s routine; but of course the plague also was abroad, and so his complaints could always be the harbinger of something much worse. One day, one of the workshop’s glassblowers died of plague, which gave them all a terrible fright. Galileo closed the workshop, so the artisans had nothing to do; they shifted out to the field, the barn and granary, the vineyard and cellar. Bellosguardo now served as farm to the convent of San Matteo, and that took a lot of work. And it was true that out in the open air, the plague seemed less of a danger. Out under the sky, tall clouds billowing over the green hills, it looked safer.

Some could not shake the plague fear, however. Galileo’s son Vincenzio and his new wife Sestilia, a wonderful woman, moved away from Florence for a time, leaving their infant behind in the care of La Piera and a wet nurse. Why they left the babe no one could understand, and everyone assumed it was yet more of Vincenzio’s spineless ditherings. No one could figure out why Sestilia Bocchineri had married him. There was a lot of gossip about it. Galileo’s household at this time numbered about fifty people, including still the family of his brother Michelangelo, who played on in Munich. Views on the explanation for Sestilia were split between the notion that Galileo had found her in Venice and paid her to marry his son, or that God had noticed Galileo’s uncharacteristic visit to the house of the Virgin Mary, in Loreto, the month before Sestilia had appeared in their lives, and had therefore rewarded his devotion. This sacred home of the Virgin Mary Casa Santa, had landed in Loreto during the Crusades, after flying across the Mediterranean from the Holy Land to escape destruction at the hands of the Saracens. Galileo on his return from his pilgrimage had been heard to remark that the place had a pretty good foundation, all things considered, but God could have ignored that impertinence and blessed his family anyway. There had to be some explanation for a girl as good as Sestilia going for a sponge like Vincenzio.

Every morning, rain or shine, was punctuated by the awful sounds of the maestro waking up. He would groan no matter how he felt, then curse, then shout for breakfast, for wine, for help getting out of bed. “Come here!” he would bark, “I need to hit somebody.” After drinking several cups of tea or watered wine, he would get up and dress, go out and limp around his garden, inspecting the many varieties of citrons he had planted in big terra-cotta pots, on the way down to the jakes to relieve himself. On his way back up he would limp, moaning again, and often stop in the bean and wheat fields, fingering the stalks and leaves.

When he returned to the house they could tell whether he was feeling in good health that day or not. If he was, then all was well. The house would begin to buzz with the work of the day. If he wasn’t, he would crawl back into his bed and cry hoarsely for La Piera, the only one who could deal with him in these crises. “Pee!—air!—aaaaah!” Then everyone would fall silent, and a gloom would settle on the place as we prepared to wait out another period of illness. There were so many of them.

But if things were well with him, he would go to a big marble-topped table that he had had set up under the arches on the front side of the villa, in the shade and the cool, out of the rain but in the clean air, and the light that he required. He sat before it in a chair with cushioning contoured to support his hernia, which allowed him to take off his iron truss. His Padua notebooks and the fair copies made by Guiducci and Arrigheti lay stacked on the desk according to a system that the servants all had to respect unfailingly or else they would be kicked and struck and horribly cursed. As the morning progressed, he paged through these volumes thoughtfully, studying them as if they had been written by someone else; and then, leaving one or two of them open, he would take up blank sheets of parchment, his quill and inkpot, and begin to write. He would only write for an hour, two at the most—either chuckling or swearing under his breath, or heaving great sighs; or reading sentences aloud, amending them, trying different versions, writing drafts on blank loose sheets or the backs of notebook pages that had not been filled. Later he would transcribe what he liked onto new blank pages, and when they were full, file them with the other finished pages in a particular pigeonhole of a cabinet set on the desk. Sometimes when finishing for the day he would shuffle the pages to make the stack of them appear higher. Some days he wrote a page or two, other days twenty or thirty.

Then with a final loud groan he would stand, stretching like a cat, and call for wine. He drank the cups off in a couple of swallows, then strapped on his truss and took another walk in his fields. If it was late enough for good shade, he would sit on a stool and move down the rows of vegetables, pulling out weeds with the stab of a little trowel. He took great satisfaction in killing weeds, filling bushels with them for the compost heap down by the jakes. Sometimes he would hurry back up to the villa to write down something good that had occurred to him in the garden, orating the idea so as not to forget it. “Oh, the inexpressible baseness of abject minds!” he would shout as he limped up the hill. “To make themselves slaves willingly! To call themselves convinced by arguments that are so powerful that they can’t even tell what they mean. What is this but to make an oracle out of a log of wood, and run to it for answers! To fear it! To fear a book! A hunk of wood!”

Another time, limping hastily uphill: “For every effect in nature, some idiot says he has a complete understanding! This vain presumption, of understanding everything, can have no other basis than never understanding anything. For anyone who had experienced just once the understanding of one single thing, thus truly tasting how knowledge is accomplished, would then recognize that of the infinity of other truths, he understands nothing.” Shouting this at the top of his lungs, down at Florence, out at the world. Writing it down as he pronounced it again. Back and forth, from desk to garden to desk.

In the late afternoon, if it was nice, he would usually stay in the arcade until sundown, writing faster than ever, or reading in his notebooks as he drank more wine. He would watch the sunset, for those few moments seeming at ease. He would sketch the clouds if there were any. The blue of the sky was something he never tired of. “It’s just as beautiful as the colors of a rainbow,” he would insist. “Indeed, I say the sky itself is the eighth color of the rainbow, spread over the whole sky for us, all the time.”

On many afternoons a letter would arrive from Maria Celeste. These he always opened and read immediately, frowning with worry as he began, but often enough then smiling, even bursting into laughter. He loved these letters and the candied fruit that often accompanied them, tucked in a basket that he would then send back to her filled with food. He often sat down and wrote his reply to her on the spot, eating candies as he wrote, then calling for La Piera to prepare the basket for return that same day.

He liked to write, it appeared; and when he was writing, life at Bel-losguardo was good. There were hours when he would just sit there contentedly, staring at nothing, grattare il corpo as the saying goes, scratching his belly in the sun: very rare for Galileo. He withdrew from the world at large, and ignored even matters he should have attended to. He neglected his court duties, and paid no attention to the larger European situation, or indeed anything outside the villa beyond his scientific correspondence, which was always voluminous. The household was happy.

But ignoring the European situation was a mistake. And he should have been paying more attention to what people were learning about Pope Urban VIII as the months and years passed. For people in Rome were telling stories. It was said, for instance, that Galileo had again been denounced to the Inquisition. The denunciation was anonymous, but was said to have been made by one of his enemies among the Jesuits, perhaps even Grassi, whom he had made such fun of in Il Saggiatore. Because Grassi had hidden behind a pseudonym, Galileo had been free to stick his supposedly unknown opponent mercilessly. Sarsi’s subsequent rebuttals had been just as sharp; he had referred to Il Saggiatore as L’Assaggiatore, The Wine-Taster, which everyone laughed at, except Galileo.

But that was just a joke. A denunciation to the Holy Office of the Congregation was a very different thing. One rumor said that the denunciation had nothing to do with the banned Copernican world system, but rather with something about the atomistic views of the Greeks. Bruno had spoken for atomism; the war with the Protestant countries in northern Europe was supposedly being fought over atomism, because of what it implied about transubstantiation. So it was potentially more dangerous even than discussing the two world systems, and yet Galileo was unaware that it even constituted a problem.

Then there were other, more public signs of trouble. Urban was beginning to flex his papal powers, taking on with gusto the traditional task of rebuilding Rome. He decided to build an arch over the altar in St. Peter’s, under which only he could conduct services. And since beams long enough to span the altar were no longer available on the deforested slopes of the Apennines, his builders raided the Pantheon and took most of its beams away, almost wrecking the ancient building. “What the barbarians failed to do, the Barberini finished off,” people said of this vandalism. Slogans like this were only the surface of a growing undercurrent of dislike for the new pope. “On ascension, the bees turned to horseflies,” people were saying. The Avvisi began to print rhymed attacks on the pope, and alarming horoscopes that predicted his imminent death. Urban had a now rather old-fashioned obsession with astrology, and these scurrilous dark horoscopes disturbed him so much that he made it a capital crime to predict a pope’s death. After that no more were published, but the word was out, the feeling was abroad. Popes were appointed in old age for a reason; good or bad, they did not last long, and the frequent succession of doddering elders kept churning the pots of patronage. But Urban was hale in his fifties, and full of nervous choleric energy.

His ambitions and problems of course ranged far beyond Rome. He continued to favor the French over the Spanish in their war, and so came to fear Spanish spies in the Vatican. And rightfully so, as there were many of them. He had not been pleased, people said, to learn of Galileo’s attempt to sell the celatone and jovilabe to the Spanish military. And when he was not pleased it could go very badly. Once someone sneezed during a service he was conducting in St. Peter’s, and afterward he decreed that anyone taking snuff in church would be excommunicated. Even more of an eye-opener was his decision to have Archbishop Mark Anthony de Dominis burned at the stake for heresy. De Dominis had already been dead for three months when this happened, having expired in the Castel Sant’Angelo after an interrogation by the Inquisition, but no matter; on the feast day of Doubting St. Thomas, the body was exhumed and taken to Campo dei Fiori and burned at the stake, its ashes then thrown into the Tiber. The offense that had outraged the pontiff to such a degree involved speaking about precisely this matter of atomism and transubstantiation for which Galileo had been secretly denounced.

But a heretic was a heretic, and anything could happen to them. Servants all across Italy were much more shocked by a new story that spread with the speed of amazement; Urban, oppressed by all his worries, had been having trouble sleeping at night, and it seemed to him that it was the chirping and singing of the birds in the Vatican gardens that was keeping him awake, and so he ordered them all killed. “He ordered his gardeners to kill every bird in the Vatican!” people said. “All the birds killed, so he can sleep better in the morning!” This was the man Galileo was trying to reason with.

Often as he wrote he sighed. So many had died. His parents and Marina, Sarpi and Sagredo and Salviati, Cesarini and Cosimo … The world of his youth, and of the years in Padua, seemed to have disappeared into the darkness of a previous epoch. He had lived on into a more troubled time. When he was sick it often seemed to the household that it was sorrow that kept him in bed more than any pains of the flesh.

To comfort himself for two of these losses, Galileo structured his new treatise as a series of dialogues between Filippo Salviati, Giovan-francesco Sagredo, and a third character named Simplicio. Salviati would express the views that Galileo himself was trying to teach, although Salviati also referred from time to time to an “Academician,” which the context made clear was Galileo himself. Sagredo, the man Galileo had eulogized as “my idol,” was then the voice of an intelligent courtier of the time, curious and open-minded, willing to be educated by Salviati’s explanations. This was so much the way they had been in real life—not just patrons to Galileo, but friends, teachers, brothers—like the elder brothers he had never had, and had so much enjoyed having. There had to be someone you could boast to who would enjoy hearing it, who would be proud to hear it of you; and wiser heads who would look after you too. He wrote with his heart full and his throat tight:

Now, since bitter death has deprived Venice and Florence of those two great luminaries in the noon of their years, I have resolved to make their fame live on in these pages, so far as my poor abilities will permit, by introducing them as interlocutors in the present argument. May it please those two great souls, forever cherished in my heart, to accept this public monument of my eternal love. And may the memory of their eloquence assist me in delivering to posterity the promised reflections.

The character Simplicio, on the other hand, was indeed a simpleton, as the name suggested—although there had been a Roman philosopher with such a name centuries before. But his meaning was obvious. He stood for all the enemies Galileo had ever sparred with, the whole crowd mashed together, not only the many who had denounced him openly but also the many more who had spoken in private, or in lectures or sermons all over Italy. Simplicio’s lame arguments would illustrate every one of the logical errors and deliberate misunderstandings, the exaggerations and false syllogisms and irrelevancies, the sheer stubborn stupidity, which Galileo had faced over the years. Often he laughed aloud as he wrote—not his low “huh huh huh huh” of true amusement, but the single bark of his sarcastic laugh.

The book was structured as four days of dialogue between the three men, gathered to talk at Sagredo’s palazzo in Venice, that pink ark where Galileo had spent so many magnificent hilarious nights. The first day’s discussion concerned his astronomical discoveries, including many new observations about the moon that he had made since publishing the Sidereus Nuncius. Along the way he interspersed jokes, wordplay, odd little observations that were mysterious even to him:

From the oldest records we have it that formerly, at the Straits of Gibraltar, Abila and Calpe were joined together with some lesser mountains which held the ocean in check; but these mountains being separated by some cause, the opening admitted the sea, which flooded in so as to form the Mediterranean. Consider the immensity of this….

Well, yes; but this event had happened a million years before, and the “oldest records” he spoke of did not exist. How did Galileo know about it? He himself was not completely sure. His old dreams haunted him; he remembered them in fluctuating detail, sometimes even dreaming he was out in space again. He knew for sure he had unfinished business there, but he was less and less sure what it was. He knew that his mind had been tampered with, and more than once overwhelmed.

Thus he had his Sagredo ask, when they were discussing the telescope,

Will the new observations and discoveries made with this admirable instrument never cease?

And his Salviati answered, If its progress follows the course of other great inventions, one may hope that in time things will be seen which we cannot even imagine at present.

Indeed.

Later in that First Day, he wrote, But we are not keeping track of the flight of time…. a person’s memory becomes so confused with such a multitude of things.

So true.

Later still he wrote, But surpassing all stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind was his who dreamed of finding means to communicate his deepest thoughts to any other person, though distant by mighty intervals of place and time! Of talking with those who are in India; of speaking to those who are not yet born, and will not be born for a thousand or even ten thousand years …

What sublimity of mind, indeed! People really had no idea. He revised the passage so that it seemed to refer to language and to writing, but for him it also referred to something both more immediate and more mysterious. To speak with people who would not be born for a thousand years….

The Second Day of his dialogues concerned the movement of the Earth—the evidence for it, and the explanations for why it was not immediately evident to those standing on the Earth’s moving surface. This required a detailed description of some parts of his motion studies, and Galileo could not help having Salviati say about this: How many propositions I have noted in Aristotle (meaning always his science) that are not only wrong, but wrong in such a way that their diametrical opposites are true.

Ha! But Simplicio was a stubborn character, in the book as in the world. Sagredo tried to explain to him the concepts of relative motion. He tried everything. He used for an example the effect of backspin on tennis balls; he even proposed a clever thought experiment concerning shooting crossbow bolts from a moving carriage, forward and back, to see if the bolts flew longer or shorter distances if shot in the direction of the carriage’s movement or against it. He pointed out, almost kindly, after the failure of one such Socratic lesson, that Simplicio could not seem to free his mind from his preconceptions enough to perform a thought experiment. None of this made any difference to Simplicio, and the Second Day came to an end without him being illuminated by any new understanding.

The Third Day was then a technical discussion of the astronomical issues, which Galileo augmented with many small geometrical line drawings, to make clearer his meaning concerning the Earth’s movement. Some of Tycho’s data were included, and a dense discussion of all Galileo’s telescopic work: the attempt to find parallax, the phases of Venus, the odd motions of Mars, the difficulty of seeing Mercury. It turned out to be the longest dialogue of the four, and inevitably, it seemed, the least entertaining.

The Fourth Day was a revision of Galileo’s earlier treatise on tides and how they provided clear evidence of the Earth’s rotation. This meant that the final fifty pages of his masterpiece were devoted to a false argument. Galileo was obscurely aware of this, but he wrote the chapter out anyway, following the plan he had set down years before—because, among other reasons, it seemed to him that his Jovian understanding of the cause of tides was too weird to be true, as well as impossible to describe. “I don’t like this,” he grumbled to Cartophilus one night. “It’s giving me that feeling again. I’m just doing what I always have done.”

“So change it then, maestro.”

“The changes too have already happened,” Galileo growled. “Fate changes, not us.” And dipped his pen and forged on. It was the book of his life; he had to finish it in style. But would it be enough to convince Urban VIII of its views?

By now Galileo over the course of his life had accrued three kinds of enemies. First came the Dominicans, the Dogs of God (cani Domini), who since Trent had been using the Inquisition to smash all challenges to orthodoxy. Then there were the secular Aristotelians, all the professors and philosophers and laymen who stood by the Peripatetic philosophy. Lastly and most recently, for they had supported Galileo during his first trips to Rome, the Jesuits too had turned on him, perhaps because of his attack on Sarsi; no one was quite sure about that, but enemies they now were. It was getting to be quite a crowd. His character Simplicio would be certain to offend scores, even hundreds of men. Galileo was perhaps being ironical when he had Simplicio say, late in the Second Day, The further this goes on, the more confused I become, and Sagredo then replies, This is a sign that the arguments are beginning to change your mind.

Or perhaps it was a sign that Galileo still had not learned that arguments never change anyone’s mind.

One day, returning from the convent of San Matteo alone, his mule Cremonini shied away from a startled rabbit and threw the inattentive Galileo to the ground. Galileo was too sore to remount, and had to limp all the way home.

“We’re too far away,” he declared when he got there. “We need to move closer to San Matteo.” He had said this often before, but now he meant it.

No one at Bellosguardo was pleased. Arcetri, where San Matteo was located, was a village in the hills west of the city. It was not as easy to get to Florence from there as it was from Bellosguardo. And Bellosguardo was such a big place that any villa in Arcetri would be smaller, and so would not require as large a staff.

Still, this became a new project for Galileo. The Dialogo was nearing completion, so he could give the matter some attention, when he was not working on the problem of publication. Then also Maria Celeste was happy to help organize a house hunt in Arcetri. Indeed she was so good at it, so industrious and resourceful, that Galileo began to wish aloud that she could arrange for his book’s publication as well. And then Vincenzio and his sweet wife Sestilia returned to Bellos-guardo, and the hunt for a new house became something they all did together, a kind of family outing, a pleasure for all.

Things might have gone equally well in regard to publishing the Dialogo, except Federico Cesi died. Another great young Roman Galilean dead in his meridian, long before his time; it was a pattern of bad luck that almost looked providential, or diabolical, and some of us worried about that.

This time it was a disaster for Galileo beyond what he realized. Cesi was the only patron who might have been powerful enough to publish the Dialogo without trouble. And with him gone, his Lyncean Academy immediately collapsed too. Only now did it become obvious that it had been his private club all along.

His loss meant Galileo had to seek a publisher in Florence, which meant obtaining formal approval from the censor there as well as from Father Monster in Rome. And in Florence, the likely prospect that publication would cause political trouble was upsetting the Medicis. Young Ferdinando had by now come into full possession of his crown, and he was concerned to consolidate his power. The last thing he wanted was for his father’s old court astronomer to be causing trouble with the Inquisition. So there were Florentine factions to add to the Roman ones opposed to publication. Indeed, with the single faction that had been in favor of it now defunct, only an irregular band of Galileans scattered all over Italy were left to hope for its success.

By 1629, the book’s situation had become so complicated that Galileo decided another trip to Rome was in order, to make sure his permission to publish was secure. He went in 1630, at great trouble and expense, and against the will of the Medicis.

As with all his previous trips to Rome, everything there seemed to have changed. It was as if each time he visited it was the Rome of a slightly different universe.

This time Urban agreed to meet with him only once, and that only after a great diplomatic effort by Ambassador Niccolini, who made this effort on his own, apparently because of his liking for Galileo.

And so once again Galileo woke in the Medici’s Roman embassy, and carefully dressed in his threadbare finest, remembering all the times this had happened before. He was conveyed down to the Vatican in an embassy litter, mentally rehearsing his points, and so intensely curious as to what he would find that he saw nothing of the narrow alleys and broad strada of the endless hilly city.

This time Urban was calmly formal. Lacking an invitation to rise, Galileo remained on his knees and spoke from there.

Urban’s carapace of power was now reinforced by a solid layer of flesh. He was more voluble than before. He spoke of his garden, his Florentine relatives, the poor state of the roads. He made it clear that he did not want the subject of astronomy to arise—not yet, anyway. He left it unclear if he were ever going to want it to arise. Galileo felt his knees begin to splinter under him as he made his part of the conversation; from this perspective he saw a different man. It was not just that Barberini’s face had thickened, his jaw gone more massive, his small eyes smaller, his skin more coarse and pale; it was not even that his goatee had been colored a brown that did not quite match the hair on his head. He looked down at Galileo as if from an enormous distance, of course, but also as if he knew things about Galileo that he thought Galileo should know but didn’t. As was indeed the case, because of the secret denunciation of Il Saggiatore. Spies had recently passed along word that Urban had had the charge investigated, but no one had heard the result. Occasionally there were times when the Vatican was like a black box with no lid, and this was one of them.

The silence on that topic made it seem possible that Urban had set the matter aside, at least for now. And there were developing aspects of the larger situation in Europe that oddly protected Galileo from Urban. Prosecuting his previously favored scientist for heresy would not help Urban in his struggles with the Spanish, but merely be taken by them as a sign of weakness, a baring of the throat. Urban did not want that at all.

His look now suggested that he had not forgotten the denunciation, that he knew he could use it if he wanted to. But Galileo did not know enough to read the look. He had his eye on one thing only, and seizing the thorny opportunity, he felt a quiet moment come on them and asked, “Your Holiness, I wonder if you will bless me with your opinion of my book on the world systems, which I have continued to write, and am ready to submit to Fra Riccardi for approval?”

Urban’s brow furrowed and his look darkened. “If our commissioner is to approve it, why do you ask us? Do you think we would countermand our own appointment to the Holy Office of the Congregation?”

“Not at all, Your Holiness. It’s just that your word is all in all to me.”

“You have made it clear in your book that God can do anything He pleases, correct?”

“Very much so, Holiness. That is the book’s point.”

At the back of the Vatican garden, Cartophilus trembled to hear this. It was impossible to tell from the look on Galileo’s face whether he knew he was lying or not.

For a long time Urban too regarded him closely. The kneeling old astronomer looked like a dressed barrel topped by an upraised head, his bearded red face open and sincere. Finally the pope nodded, a single slow, deep nod—a blessing in itself. “You may proceed with our blessing, Signor Galileo Galilei.”

These words surprised several of the people who heard it. The sound of the sentence hung in the air. Hope itself seemed to hoist Galileo back to his feet, as if he were a much younger man than the one who had knelt.

Francesco Niccolini provided him a room in Ferdinando’s Roman embassy, so that for the next two months Galileo could be comfortable as he went out every day to do his best to align the rest of the forces in Rome in the way Cesi would have. Urban’s private approval had been given, but clearly there was more diplomatic work to be done to secure the project. And yet Galileo had never been a great diplomat. All his life he had flattered his superiors excessively while also presuming to know much more than they did. This was not a good combination, and worse yet, he was still quick with the cutting sarcastic rejoinder if anyone disagreed with him. Thus it was no coincidence that after five visits he had more enemies in Rome than friends. And with rumors of his purpose in the capital widespread, there were many now out to subvert him if they could.

They were effective. At the end of the two months he had managed only to secure a partial permission to publish from Riccardi, conditional on Riccardi’s approval of the full text, which would come only after revision of any areas deemed problematic.

In truth, given the overall situation, he could have expected little more. The words of Urban were the ones he had wanted to hear most, anyway.

So he returned to Florence. He was beginning to hate these trips to Rome, and yet of course they had all been spring picnics compared to the one left to come.

While he was gone, Maria Celeste had found a suitable villa for rent in Arcetri, called Il Gioièllo, the Jewel. The rent was only thirty-five scudi a year—much less than Bellosguardo’s hundred, because it was so much smaller, and in a less convenient location. But Galileo declared that despite the diminution in size he would keep the entire staff, so everyone was happy. They left Bellosguardo, where they had lived together for fourteen years, without a backward glance.

Galileo was particularly happy with the new house. From his bedroom window on the second floor he could look down the lane and see the corner of the convent of San Matteo. He could visit every day, and he did. The house rules there had relaxed to the point where he was free to enter the central hall, and to help the women with their domestic repairs. He did carpentry, he fixed their clock. He wrote them little plays to perform, and even music to sing. Once he intertwined all his favorites of his father’s melodies into one polyphonic chorus, which brought tears to his eyes to hear. He played the lute for them.

Maria Celeste was in her own personal paradise. Arcangela, on the other hand, still would not speak to him. In fact she had stopped speaking entirely; also bathing and combing her hair. She had the look of a madwoman, which was only appropriate; she was a madwoman. They had to keep her away from the wine cellar, even the kitchen. Maria Celeste fed her by hand. If she hadn’t, her sister would have starved. But on they went.

His household still included his sister’s family, his brother’s family, Vincenzio and Sestilia and child, the servants, and a number of artisans, including Mazzoleni and his family, now jammed into a shed off the larger shed they had converted into the new workshop. Despite La Piera’s best efforts in the kitchen, it was chaos every day. Galileo ignored all that and persisted in getting the Dialogo published, now by a new publisher in Florence, which meant he could work directly with the printers in their shop. It proceeded very slowly, but eventually it was time to submit it to Riccardi and get his approval, if he could.

At this point Galileo had obtained permission to publish from the Medicis’ bishop’s vicar, from the Florentine Inquisitor, and from the grand duke’s censor. Riccardi had read some chapters and discussed their contents with Urban, he said, but now he told Galileo that he would need to read the whole manuscript in its final form. That was bad enough, but also the plague had again forced a quarantine on everything moving up and down the peninsula, and a bulky manuscript was unlikely to make it through the whole way. Galileo offered to send the preface and conclusion, which was where the potential problems were dealt with, he said, while the main text of the book could be reviewed and reported on by someone in Florence chosen by Riccardi. Riccardi agreed to this, and his designated reviewer, Fra Giacinto Stefani, read the main text with minute attention to detail, and was won over to the book’s views in the process.

Meanwhile, Riccardi was slow at getting to the preface and conclusion. When he finally did, he changed nothing to speak of, but merely ordered that Galileo add a last paragraph, like a chord at the end of a coda, or an amen, which would make it clear that the book’s speculations were not physical arguments about the real world but mathematical concepts used to help predictions and the like. The angelica dottrina would be thereby affirmed.

Galileo wrote it out thusly, as the final argument of the book, which he put into the mouth of Simplicio:

To which Galileo had Salviati reply:

Which was very nicely expressed, Galileo thought—both to affirm Urban’s angelica dottrina and at the same time assert the freedom Galileo had been given to discuss things ex suppositione.

Riccardi approved the book without having read the whole of the finished version. With an endless number of small problems and delays, the publisher in Florence began the work of printing a thousand copies.

With the Dialogo finished and in publication, Galileo was happy to see an invitation to a banquet come from the Grand Duchess Christina. She had not been sending these to him as often as before, and when they had come Galileo had been too harried to be pleased. Now he was happy to accept and attend.

In the antechamber to the great dining salon of the Medici palazzo, Galileo made his way through the crowd of courtiers to the drinks table and was given a tall gold goblet filled with new wine. He greeted Picchena and all the rest of his acquaintances at the court, and was circulating and talking with them when the Grand Duchess Christina, as distinguished and regal as ever, called him over to the open French doors leading out to the terrace and formal garden. “Signor Galileo, please come here. I want you to meet a new friend of mine.”

The friend was Hera of Io, from Jupiter.

Galileo clapped both hands to his chest; hopefully this resembled his usual flamboyant court mannerisms enough that it did not look too bizarre, because he was helpless to stop himself—he simply had to press down on his pounding heart, to keep it from breaking his ribs and flying free. It was definitely her, right out of his dreams: a woman quite tall but otherwise ordinary enough, fair-haired, fine featured, well dressed in the style of the court, a bit stout in such raiment. She had the same intelligent look in her eye as always, now curious to see his reaction to her presence, both concerned and amused—a very familiar look.

“Well met, my lady,” he managed to croak as he took up and kissed her offered hand. It felt chill.

“It’s my honor,” she said. “I read your Sidereus Nuncius when I was young, and thought it very interesting.”

Here in Italy she called herself Countess Alessandra Bocchineri Buonamici. She was Sestilia Galilei’s long-lost older sister, she said, and the diplomat Giovanfrancesco Buonamici’s wife. Here she spoke Tuscan with all the fluency of a Florentine, her voice richer and more vibrant than the internal translator’s had been. Galileo mouthed some typical phrases of courtly small talk, feeling Christina’s eye on them. Knowing his confusion, Alessandra did most of the talking. He learned that she spoke French and Latin, and played the spinet, and wrote poems, and corresponded with her friends in Paris and London. Count Buonamici was her third husband, she informed him; the first two had died when she was quite a bit younger. He could only nod. It was a common story; the plague in the last decade had killed half the people of Milan, and almost as many everywhere else. People died here. But not on Jupiter—

“I will seat you two next to each other at the banquet,” Christina declared, happy to see them hitting it off.

“Many thanks, Your Beautiful Highness,” Galileo said, and bowed.

When Christina had left them alone in the doorway, Galileo swallowed hard and said, “You remind me of someone?”

Her oak-colored eyes crinkled at the corners. “I should think so,” she said. “Perhaps you can escort me out to the terrace. I would like to take the air before we eat.”

“Of course.” Galileo felt a strange kind of pleasure growing in him, fearful but romantic, uncanny but familiar. To know she was real—it made him shudder.

Out on the terrace there were some other couples, and the two of them talked in distracted semicoherence about Florence and Venice, Tasso and Ariosto. He spoke for Ariosto’s warmth while she defended Tasso’s depth, and neither were surprised to find they came down on opposite sides of the question. Her husband had just been assigned to a posting in Germany, she said; she would have to leave quite soon.

“I understand,” he said uncertainly.

She asked about his work, and Galileo described the problems he was having with the publication of his book.

“Perhaps you could delay publication?” she asked. “Just by a year or two, until things calm down?”

“No,” Galileo said. “The printing has already begun. And I have to publish. The sooner the better, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve already waited fourteen years, or even forty.”

“Yes,” she said. “And yet.”

A crease appeared between her eyebrows as she considered him. She took his hand and led him around a corner of the palazzo, to a long bench against the wall in the dark. She asked him to sit down, and then reached out and touched him.