Galileo's Dream

Chapter nineteen Eppur Si Muove

Confined again to the Villa Medici, Galileo spent his days smoldering with rage and despair. He did not seem to appreciate that he had escaped a dire fate. He was too bitterly angry for that to matter. He spoke only in low outbursts to himself: “Fake documents—broken promises—betrayal. Liar. Liar! Who could imagine a man breaking his word when he didn’t have to? But that’s just what he did.”

He spent his waking hours in the villa’s big kitchen, eating compulsively. His moaning by day came mostly from the jakes. While in the hands of the Inquisition he had been unable either to eat or shit. Now he made up for lost time at both ends. Occasionally he would afterward limp around the formal garden, looking at plants as if trying to remember what they were. Everyone who approached him heard the same thing. “That lying bastard has eaten my life. From now on when people think of me, they’ll think of his trial. It’s the ultimate power.”

“Ultimate,” Cartophilus would scoff under his breath.

“Shut up,” Galileo would growl, showing Cartophilus the back of his hand and stumping away.

This was all bad enough, although predictable. But at night it was much worse. In the late hours, on his bed half asleep and half awake, he would roll in agitation, groan, moan, even shout—even shriek in agony. No one in that wing of the villa could sleep well in those pathetic hours, and Niccolini and his wife Caterina were beside themselves. The ambassador ignored the usual niceties of protocol, and returned to the Vatican repeatedly to beg some relief for the astronomer. Caterina rallied the servants and the villa’s priest to hold midnight masses, with lots of chanting and singing, the music echoing down the dark halls from the chapel to the east wing. Sometimes it seemed to help him.

Word of Galileo’s nocturnal fits got around, of course, and a couple of weeks after the abjuration, Cardinal Francesco Barberini worked on his uncle in private. The Sanctissimus finally agreed to shift Galileo’s house arrest to the palazzo of Archbishop Ascanio Piccolomini, in Siena. Piccolomini, another ex-student of Galileo’s, had requested it, and Urban agreed to the plan, perhaps hoping to remove Galileo and his histrionics from the rumor mill of Rome, to get rid of him at last.

It was July 2, 1633 when Galileo left Rome for the last time, in a closed ecclesiastical carriage. In Viterbo, just outside the capital, he yelled for the carriage to stop, got out, gestured rudely back at the city, spat at it, and then walked for four or five miles down the road before he would agree to get back in.

In Siena, however, his night terrors only got worse. He seemed to have lost the ability to sleep, except in snatches near dawn. Red-eyed, he would stare up at his caretakers and rehearse all the crimes committed against him, and then rail against all his enemies, a list that now ran well into the scores, so that if he described them all individually and in order of their appearance, as he sometimes did, it could take him close to an hour to run through them. He used set phrases that he always repeated, like Homeric epithets. The lying horsefly. The blind astronomer. The back stabber. That fucking pigeon. Eventually his rants would exhaust him to incoherency, and these epithets would be the only words left that anyone could understand, after which he would fall into bouts of piteous moaning, interspersed with sharp thin cries, even short high screams, as if he were being murdered.

Everyone rushed to him at those times, and tried to comfort him and get him back to bed. Sometimes he didn’t even recognize us, but reacted as if we were jailers, beating at our arms and kicking our shins. There was something upsetting enough about these panics that for a while we would all fall headlong into his nightmare, whatever it was.

But Archbishop Ascanio Piccolomini was a persistent man. He was almost as short as Bellarmino had been, and indeed he resembled what Bellarmino must have looked like in his forties, with the same neat handsome triangular head, sharpened to a point by a trim goatee. This graceful intellectual had never forgotten his childhood lessons with the maestro, when he had been lucky enough to be designated one of young Cosimo’s friends. When teaching Cosimo, Galileo had tried to be as Aristotle to Alexander, authoritative yet charming, entertaining, instructive, transformational—the perfect pedagogue. Piccolomini had been immersed in the bath of that performance, and it was indeed a baptism to a different life, for from that time on, the young aristocrat had explored mathematics and engineering with a passion, and taken a lively interest in everything; in short he had been a better pupil than Cosimo, and become a true Galilean. And so now it was a real shock for him to witness the broken old man wandering like a lunatic through his palazzo. His hope had been to provide a sanctuary for the scientist, something very like the Lincean Academy, but with the added comfort of being located inside the Church, thus implying that Galileo’s sentence was not a unanimous judgment, and definitely not an excommunication, no matter what people said. Now that Piccolomini saw how distressed the old man was, he realized it was going to be a more complicated process of recovery than he had imagined. Every night the spell of insomniac horrors returned. At times Galileo seemed to have lost his wits entirely, even by day.

One morning, after a particularly grueling night, the archbishop drew Galileo’s old servant aside. “Good man, do you think we should restrain him? Should we tie him to his bed to keep him from doing himself a hurt? These fits that come on him are so violent, it seems they could lead to a fatal fall.”

Cartophilus bowed. “Oh, Your Eminence, thank you, of course you are right. Although, possibly, I wonder if he may now be past the, the …”

“Past the worst of it?”

“I don’t know. But it’s always one thing at a time with him, Your Serenity.”

“Yes? Oh, yes. Well, I have been trying to give him something else to think about. But maybe it should be more direct.”

“A fine idea, Your Grace.”

The archbishop’s grin was like a schoolboy’s. “I’ve got just the man in mind.”

“Not an astronomer, I trust.”

Piccolomini laughed and gave the old servant a touch to the head that was half blessing, half schoolboy tap. And in the days following he invited several of the local natural philosophers of Siena to come to the palazzo and speak with Galileo. He asked them to initiate discussions about the strength of materials, magnetism, and similarly earth-bound topics. They did that, keeping resolutely away from the old man’s sore point, even to the point of spending much time looking through a microscope at the spectacular articulations of moths and fleas.

And while in these men’s company, it was true that Galileo seemed calmer. He attended to whatever they brought up, clearly relieved at the distraction. And the men were happy to be in his presence. They saw that the moment had finally arrived when one could safely condescend to Galileo. There was a real benevolence in the air as they enjoyed this new pleasure—something like sharing the room with a caged tiger.

But then the nights would come, and sleep would not. Wine did nothing to put him out, nor warm milk neither. Half-crazed he would prowl and howl down the cold moonlit galleries, staring out windows, seemingly confused by the striped duomo of Siena’s cathedral, looming over all the tilted planes of tile. By morning time he would be collapsed somewhere, staring red-eyed at nothing, his voice and mind shattered. It seemed incredible that he could face the day to follow in anything like a coherent form, the night having exhausted rather than refreshed him. And indeed by day there were dark hollows in his face, and his politeness to guests was a brittle thing. One afternoon a Father Pelagi joined the group to give a presentation on whether whirlpools created vortices of attraction or repulsion, and Galileo sat by the window with his arms crossed over his barrel chest, glowering as he listened to this priest’s unexpected mishmash of Aristotle and Scripture. At the assertion that a floating body would sink if the material’s buoyancy was not enough to keep it on the surface, he snorted and said, “I see your whirlpool has pulled in even your argument, it runs in such circles!”

“What do you mean?” Pelagi snapped.

“I mean,” Galileo said, “you make a circular argument. You are saying things float because they want to float. These are not whirlpools, but tautologies.”

“How dare you,” the priest retorted. “You who have been reproved by the Holy Office!”

“So?” Galileo said. “The Earth still moves, and you’re still a fool!” And he leaped to his feet and jumped on the man and started beating him. The others had to haul him off and then get between them. After some shouting and scuffling Pelagi was ejected—indeed, nearly defenestrated. Piccolomini announced that he was banished from the palazzo for the rest of Galileo’s stay. On the other hand it had been good to see the old warrior so feisty again, and everyone hoped it might refresh and reinvigorate him.

But that night the howls from Galileo’s room were more anguished than ever. The moon happened to be full, giving his performance the true lunatic brio. For those who had to endure it, it was like when a baby is crying; an hour seems a year, a night all eternity.

Then the next day some real problems also arrived to disturb him, in news conveyed by one of Maria Celeste’s letters. Galileo’s friends Gino Boccherini and Niccolo Aggiunti had come to San Matteo to ask her for the keys to his house and desk, so that they could enter and remove certain papers. It was during the time we suspected you to be in the greatest danger; they went to your house and did what had to be done, seeming to me at the time well conceived and essential, to avoid some worse disaster that might yet befall you, wherefore I knew not how to refuse them the keys and the freedom to do what they intended, seeing their tremendous zeal in serving your interests.

This action had come on Galileo’s instruction, as he informed Maria Celeste later; he had sent a letter to his friends (ex-students again) requesting their help. So he must have been afraid that the case against him was not yet over. And he was probably right to think that some of the things he had written down through the years might prove dangerous. Copernicanism, atomism, the sun a live creature, something like a god—he had written a lot of things that could worry him now.

Even with those papers in the house spirited away, there were still reasons to fear. It was becoming obvious to us that Urban was still very angry at Galileo. It was possible Urban felt now that Galileo had been let off too lightly—that in order to show resistance to the Borgia, he had not inflicted as much pain on Galileo as he really wanted to. Luxurious house arrest in an admiring archbishop’s palazzo was not much of a punishment for vehement suspicion of heresy. For now, Urban was taking out his anger elsewhere; the news coming to Siena made it clear that all those who had helped Galileo were being punished for it. Riccardi’s prevaricating did not save him; he was dismissed as Master of the Sacred Palace. The inquisitor in Florence who had approved the publication was reprimanded. Castelli had fled from Rome to avoid notice. Ciampoli was ordered to leave Rome, and for life, Urban told everyone. He was going to be a parish priest in one of the miserable villages of Umbria for the rest of his days.

And these were by no means the strictest punishments Urban was ordering, for he was in a truly foul mood. A bishop and two priests accused of conducting black masses to call down his death were tied together to the stake and burned in the Campo di Fiore. People said these unknown miscreants had served Urban as replacements for Galileo, who had somehow slipped away—at least so far. The story was not necessarily over. For the pope was clearly no longer quite sane. So there were real reasons for fear; and sometimes fear took Galileo over. By day he smoldered, he fulminated, he moaned, he roared and shrieked. He stumbled to his bed and failed to sleep. And then at night the fears took over, each one a blacker dark night of the soul.

In this sad disarray the days stumbled along. Piccolomini, at a loss, consulted Cartophilus again. After that he went out to the cathedral’s workshop and asked the artisans what they were working on. From them he learned of a problem they were having in the city foundry, where they were trying to cast a replacement for the cathedral’s largest bell. The casting mold for the new bell was made of two immense blocks of clay, with the outer mold turned upside down and held in position by a framework of heavy beams, and the inner mold, a massive solid plug with its outside carved to the shape of the inside of the bell, suspended from a lattice of cross beams in a position very close to the curved clay of the outer shell. The empty space between the two molds was the shape of the bell. This was the usual method, and all seemed well with it, but when they poured in the molten metal, it ran to the bottom of the open space and pooled there, shoving up the inner mold even though the massive block of clay weighed much more than the poured metal did. No one could understand it.

Piccolomini, walking around the great wooden armature holding the cast, smiled. “This is good,” he said. “This is just what we need.”

He went to Galileo and described what had happened, and Galileo sat and thought about it for a while. For a time it looked as though he had forgotten the matter and slipped into sleep, which even by itself would have been a benefit. Then he stirred. He took up a big sheet of paper and his quill and inkpot, and drew a side elevation of the problem to illustrate his points to the archbishop. “I discovered this when I was working on the floating bodies problem. What I found was that a very small weight of liquid can lift a much greater solid weight, if the liquid is trapped in a curve below the weight, as here.”

“But why?”

“Let’s not ask why,” Galileo requested.

For Piccolomini this brought back memories of his boyhood lessons, and of poor Cosimo, long since dead. “And how then did you deal with it, maestro?”

Galileo insisted on demonstrating the truth of his old finding with a model before proceeding any further. He made use of the glass urinal in his room for the model’s bottom mold, and the cathedral artisans made a wooden inner mold to fit it, filling the wood with shot to make it heavy. Then it was placed in the urinal such that, as Piccolomini said, “you couldn’t fit a piaster between them.” After that Galileo had a flask of quicksilver brought in, and he poured it into the gap between the glass and wood; and though the weight of the quicksilver was less than a twentieth that of the shot-filled wooden form, the form rose up a finger or two higher than it had been. Almost all the quicksilver pooled at the bottom of the urinal.

“Even Mercury’s silver urine gives wings to things,” Galileo joked, head cocked to the side.

Piccolomini laughed obligingly. “A very clear demonstration,” he said happily. “But then, this being the case, strange though it seems, what should we do about casting our bell?”

Galileo shoved down on the wooden mold with his hand. “The inner mold, heavy or not, has to be fixed in place like the outer one. To prevent it rising, you will need to bolt it to a pavement below. Use the heaviest beams and bolts, and all should be well.”

So they did as he had recommended, and the bell was cast successfully. Regarding the bright new thing when it emerged from its massive mold, for a moment Galileo appeared content.

But that night he howled more painfully than ever.

Cartophilus got up and found him collapsed over a railing, in the stairwell of the bell tower overlooking the piazza where the famous horse race was soon to be run. He was barking into the dark space of the stairwell, then groaning in a kind of harmony as the echoes bounced up and down it. He had been weeping so hard he could barely see; the light of the ancient servant’s candle lantern seemed to hurt his eyes.

“You must not have had your glass of milk before bed,” Cartophilus said, sitting down heavily beside him. “I told you never to neglect that.”

“Shut up,” Galileo moaned piteously. “Talking of milk when they’ve thrown me in hell.”

“It could be worse,” Cartophilus pointed out.

Silence.

Then Galileo growled. It was his wounded bear growl, and the old servant, surprised to hear it, could not help but smile. Once in the Bel-losguardo years the two of them had witnessed a bearbaiting in Florence, and late in the fight the baiters had poked the bloodied bear in the back, to get it to come out of its corner and fight the dogs, and it had briefly glanced up over its shoulder at its tormentors and growled—a low sound, bitter and resigned, that stood the hair upright on the necks of everyone who heard it. On the way home Galileo had imitated the sound over and over. “That’s me,” he told Cartophilus when he got it to his satisfaction. “That’s my growl. Because they’ve got me cornered, and they’ll make me fight.”

Now, these many years later, the same sound vibrated out of his hulk and filled the stairwell. “Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrr …” By his glance at Cartophilus, the old servant knew Galileo was reminding him of that moment in Florence, his recognition of the ursine fate awaiting him.

“Yes yes,” Cartophilus murmured, as he tugged the old man back toward his room. “But it could be worse, that’s all I’m saying. You need to remember that. You need to pick yourself up somehow and carry on.”

Galileo clutched him by the arm. “Send me back,” he demanded hoarsely. “One more time. Send me to Hera.”

“All right,” Cartophilus said after a pause. “If you want. Let’s go.” And later that night the old man fell into one of his syncopes.