Читать книгу Galileo’s Dream - Kim Stanley Robinson - Страница 10

These confused and intermittent mental struggles slip through one’s fingers and escape by their subtleties and slitherings, not hesitating to produce a thousand chimeras and fantastic caprices little understood by themselves and not at all by their listeners. By these fancies the bewildered mind is bandied about from one phantasm to another, just as in a dream one passes from a palace to a ship and then to a grotto or beach, and finally, when one awakes and the dream vanishes (and for the most part all memory of it also), one finds that one has been idly sleeping and has passed the hours without profit of any sort.

-GALILEO, letter to Cosimo, 1611

And indeed he came out of this syncope as one wakes from a dream, agitated, gasping, struggling to remember as it squirted away; you could see it in his face. ‘No,’ he moaned, ‘come back…don’t forget…’

This time it was his newly hired housekeeper who discovered him: La Piera had arrived at last. ‘Maestro!’ she cried, leaning over to peer into his staring eye. ‘Wake up!’

He groaned, looked at her without recognition. She gave him a hand, hauled him to his feet. Though a braccio shorter, she was about as heavy as he was.

‘They told me you suffer from syncopes.’

‘I was dreaming.’

‘You were paralysed. I shouted, I pinched you, nothing. You were gone.’

‘I was gone.’ He shuddered like a horse. ‘I had a dream, or something. A vision. But I can’t remember it!’

‘That’s all right. You’re better off without dreams.’

He regarded her curiously. ‘Why do you say that?’

She shrugged her broad shoulders as she tugged his clothes into position, holding up a little pellet she pulled from his jacket and then pocketing it. ‘My dreams are crazy, that’s all. Burning things in the oven while all the fish on the table come to life and start biting me, or sliding out the door like eels. They’re always the same. Rubbish I say! Life is crazy enough as it is.’

‘Maybe so.’

Then Cartophilus hustled onto the altana and came up short at the sight of them. Galileo shuddered again, pointed a finger at him: ‘You!’ he exclaimed.

‘Me,’ the ancient one admitted cautiously. ‘What is it, maestro? Why are you up?’

‘You know why!’ Galileo roared. Then, piteously: ‘Don’t you?’

‘Not I,’ Cartophilus said, shifty as always. ‘I heard voices and came out to see what was up.’

‘You let someone in. In the gate?’

‘Not I, maestro. Did you fall into one of your syncopes again?’

‘No.’

‘Yes,’ La Piera confirmed.

Galileo heaved a huge sigh. Clearly he could remember nothing, or next to nothing. He glanced up; Jupiter was nearly overhead. He was cold, he slapped his arms to warm himself. ‘Were the wolves in the hills howling earlier?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Not that I heard.’

‘I think they were.’ He sat there thinking about it. ‘To bed,’ he muttered, and stood. ‘I can’t do it tonight.’ He glanced up again, hesitated. ‘Ah, damn.’ He plopped down again on his stool. ‘I have to check them, at least. What time is it? Midnight? Bring me some mulled wine. And stay out here with me.’

Salviati was out of town, and Galileo was therefore stuck in his rented house in Florence. He found himself in a strange mood, distracted and pensive. He made it known to Vinta, in the most obsequious and flowery language he could manage, which was saying a lot, that he wanted to go to Rome to promote his new discoveries-or, as he admitted in a meeting with the Grand Duke’s secretary, to defend them. For there were a lot of serious people who simply didn’t have spyglasses good enough to see the moons of Jupiter, and even well-meaning parties like the Jesuits, the best astronomers in Europe aside from Kepler, were having trouble making the observations. And in Tuscany a new thing had happened: a philosopher named Ludovico delle Colombe was circulating a manuscript that not only ridiculed the notion that the Earth might move, but displayed a long list of quotes from the Bible to back his argument that Galileo’s idea was contrary to Scripture. These quotes included ‘You fixed the earth on its foundation’ (Psalm 104:5); ‘God made the orb immobile’ (1 Chronicles 16:30); ‘He suspended the earth above nothingness, that is, above the centre’ (Job 26:7); ‘The heaviness of stone, the weight of sand’ (Proverbs 27:3); ‘Heaven is up, the earth is down’ (Proverbs 30:3); ‘The sun rises, and sets, and returns to its place, from which, reborn, it revolves through the meridian, and is curved toward the North’ (Ecclesiastes 1:5); ‘God made two lights, i. e. , a greater light and a smaller light, and the stars, to shine above the earth’ (Genesis 1:17).

Galileo read a manuscript of this letter, given to him by Salviati to show him what was being circulated, and cursed at every sentence. ‘The heaviness of stone! This is stupid!’

Who wants the human mind put to death? he wrote angrily to Salviati. Who is going to claim that everything in the world which is observable and knowable has already been seen and discovered?

People were afraid of change. They seized on Aristotle because he said that above the sky there was no change; thus, if you died and went there, you would not change either. He wrote to the astronomer Mark Welser, I suspect that our wanting to measure the universe by our own little yardstick makes us fall into strange fantasies, and that our particular hatred of death makes us hate fragility. If that which we call corruption were annihilation, the Peripatetics would have some reason for being such staunch enemies of it. But if it is nothing else than a mutation, it does not merit so much hatred. I don’t think anyone would complain about the corruption of the egg if what results from it is a chick.

Change could be growth, in other words. It was intrinsic to life. And so these religious objections to the changes he saw in the sky were stupid. But they were also dangerous.

So he wrote weekly to Vinta, asking him to ask the bighearted brilliant splendiferous grandissimo Grand Duke to send him to Rome, so he could explain his discoveries. Eventually Galileo convinced Vinta that a visit could do no harm, indeed could add to the lustre of his prince’s reputation. The trip was therefore approved; but then Galileo fell ill again. For two months he suffered such headaches and fevers that there was no question of travel.

He recuperated at Salviati’s villa. ‘I’m embroiled in something strange,’ he confided to his young friend from out of a fever. ‘Lady Fortuna has grabbed me by the arm, she has tossed me over her shoulder. God knows where I’m headed.’

Salviati did not know what to make of this, but he was a good friend to have in a crisis. He held your hand, he looked at you and understood what you said; his liquid eyes and quick smile were the very picture of intelligent goodness. He laughed a lot, and he made Galileo laugh, and there was no one quicker to point out a bird or a cloud, or to propose a conundrum about negative numbers or the like. A sweet soul, and smart. ‘Maybe it’s La Vicuna who has taken you by the hand, the muse of justice.’

‘I wish it, but no,’ Galileo said, looking inward. ‘Lady Fortuna is the one deciding my fate. The capricious one. A big woman.’

‘But you have always been avventurato.’

‘But with luck of all kinds,’ Galileo groused. ‘Good luck and bad.’

‘But the good has been so good, my friend. Think of your gifts, your genius. That too is Fortuna making her dispensations.’

‘Maybe so. May it continue that way, then.’

Finally, impatient at the delay forced on him by his body, he wrote to Vinta asking if a ducal litter could be provided for his travel. By this time it was becoming clear that the Sidereus Nuncius had made Galileo famous all over Europe. In the courts lucky enough to have been sent one of Galileo’s spyglasses, star parties were being held, from Bavaria and Bohemia to France and England. Vinta decided that Galileo’s presence in Rome could only bring honour and prestige to the Medici: the use of the ducal litter was approved.

On 23rd March, 1611, Galileo left with his servants Cartophilus and Giuseppe, and a little group of the Grand Duke’s horsemen. He carried with him a letter of introduction to Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, written by an old acquaintance of his, Michelangelo Buonarroti, nephew of Florence’s most famous artist, who had died the day before Galileo was born, causing talk (by Galileo’s father anyway) of a transmigration of souls.

The roads between Florence and Rome were as good as any in Italy, but they were still slow, even in the best stretches, which were much abbreviated by winter damage. In a litter the trip took six days. By day Galileo sat on pillows inside the carriage, enduring the jouncing of the iron-rimmed wooden wheels into potholes and over stones, also the steady grind over cobbles or beds of gravel. Sometimes he rode a horse to give his kidneys and back a rest, but this meant a different kind of hammering. He hated to travel. Rome was as far away from Florence as he had ever been, and his only previous trip had occurred twenty-four years earlier, before the terrible incident in the cellar at Costozza had wrecked his health.

The roadside inns they stopped in along the way-at San Casciano, Siena, San Quirico, Acquapendente, Viterbo, and Monterosi-offered beds that were battered and flea-ridden, in rooms crowded with other bodies all snoring and hacking at once. It was better to spend the night outside in his coat, under a cape and a blanket, watching the sky. Jupiter was high, and every night he could log the positions of the four Jovian moons early and late, looking for the moments when a moon slowed and reached the outer point of its orbit, or the moments when it touched the lambent side of Jupiter itself. He was intent on being the first to determine their exact orbital times, which Kepler had written would be hard to do. He felt a strong bond with the moons, as if being their discoverer he somehow possessed them. One night he heard wolves howling and the bond seemed stronger than ever, as if wolves came from Jupiter. The white disc in his glass seemed to quiver with life, and he felt full of a feeling he couldn’t name.

So the damp spring nights would pass, and he would collapse into the litter as the Grand Duke’s men prepared for departure, hoping for sleep through the jouncing day on the road. Many mornings he succeeded in this, and was insensible to some hours of travel. But both his night and day routines were hard on his back, and he arrived in Rome exhausted.

On Holy Tuesday the litter ground its way through the immense shabby outskirts of Rome. The broad road was flanked hard on each side by innumerable shacks made of sticks, as if built by magpies. Once inside the ancient wall, which was easy to miss, Galileo’s party clopped slowly through packed paved streets. Rome was as big as ten Florences, and the tightly packed buildings were often three and even four storeys tall, balconies overhanging the narrow streets. People lived their lives and dried their laundry on the balconies, commenting freely on the passersby below.

The tight streets opened up by the river, where there were flood fields and orchards. Further into the city they came to the Palazzo Firenze, which overlooked a small campo. This was where Galileo was to be hosted by Cosimo’s ambassador to Rome, one Giovanni Niccolini, a lifelong diplomat near the end of a long career in the Medici service. This worthy appeared in the entryway of the palazzo and greeted Galileo rather coolly. Vinta had written Niccolini to say that Galileo would be accompanied by a single servant, and here were two, Cartophilus having insinuated himself at the last minute. Financial arrangements between the Grand Duke and his ambassador were meticulously kept, so perhaps it was not clear to Niccolini that he would be reimbursed for the keep of this extra servant. In any case, he was distinctly reserved as he led Galileo and his little retinue into a big suite of rooms at the back of the ground floor, looking onto the formal garden. This elaborate green space was dotted with ancient Roman statues whose marble faces had melted away. Something about the look of them caught Galileo’s eye and disturbed him.

Once moved in, Galileo launched into a busy schedule of visits to dignitaries strategic to his purpose, one of the most important being the Jesuit Christopher Clavius at the College of Rome.

Clavius greeted him with the same words he had used twentyfour years before, when Galileo had been an unknown young mathematician and Clavius in his prime, known throughout Europe as ‘the Euclid of the sixteenth century’:

‘Welcome to Rome, young signor! All praise to God and Archimedes!’

He was not much changed in appearance, despite all the years: a slight man with a puckered mouth and a kindly eye. He led Galileo into the Jesuit college’s workshop, where together they inspected the spyglasses the monk mechanicals had constructed. The glasses looked like Galileo’s, and were equivalent in power, although more marred by irregularities, as Galileo told the monks freely.

Christopher Grienberger and Odo Maelcote then joined them, and Clavius introduced his younger colleagues as the ones who had made the bulk of the observations; Clavius lamented his aged eyesight. ‘But I have seen your so-called Medicean stars several times,’ he added, ‘and they are obviously orbiting Jupiter, just as you say.’

Galileo bowed deeply. There were people out there claiming the moons were just flaws in Galileo’s glass; he had angrily offered ten thousand crowns to anyone who could make a glass that would show flaws around Jupiter but not around the other planets, and of course there were no takers, but still-not everyone believed. So this mattered. Seeing was believing, and Clavius had seen. As Galileo straightened up he said, ‘God bless you, Father, I was quite sure that you would see them, they are so prominent, and you such an experienced astronomer. And I can tell you that on my journey to Rome I have made good progress in determining the period of orbit of all four of these new moons.’

Grienberger and Maelcote raised their eyebrows and exchanged glances. Clavius only smiled. ‘I think here we are in rare agreement with Johannes Kepler, that establishing their periods of rotation will be very difficult.’

‘But…’ Galileo hesitated, then realized he had made a mistake, and dropped the matter with a wave of the hand. There was no point in making announcements in advance of results; indeed, since he was intent on being the first to make every discovery having to do with the new stars, he should not be inciting competitors to further effort. It was already startling enough to see that they had managed to manufacture spyglasses almost as strong as his own.

So he let the talk turn to the phases of Venus. The Jesuits also had seen these, and while he did not press the point that this was strong evidence in support of the Copernican view, he could see in their faces that the implications were already clear to them. And they did not deny the appearances. They believed in the glass. This was a most excellent sign, and as he considered the happy implications of a public acknowledgment that their observations agreed with his, Galileo recovered from his uneasiness at the power of their devices. These were the Pope’s official astronomers, supporting his findings! So he spent the rest of the afternoon reminiscing with Clavius and laughing at his jokes.

Another important meeting for Galileo, though he did not know it, came on the Saturday before Easter, when he paid his respects to Cardinal Maffeo Barberini. They met in one of the outer offices of St Peter’s, near the Vatican’s river gate. Galileo examined the interior gardens of the place with a close eye; he had never been inside the sacred fortress before, and he was interested to observe the horticulture deployed inside. Purity had been emphasized over liveliness, he was not surprised to note: paths were gravelled, borders were lines of clean cobbles, long narrow lawns were trimmed as if by barbers. Massed roses and camellias were all either white or red. It was a little too much.

Barberini proved to be a man of the world, affable, quick, well-dressed in a cardinal’s everyday finery; lithe and handsome, goateed, smooth-skinned, fulsome. His power made him as graceful as a dancer, as confident in his body as a minx or an otter. Galileo handed him the introductory letters from Michaelangelo’s nephew and from Antonio de Medici, and Barberini put them aside after a glance and took Galileo by the hand and led him out into the courtyard, dispensing with all ceremony. ‘Let’s take our ease and talk.’

Galileo was his usual lively self, a happy Pulcinella with a genius for mathematics. In his interviews with nobles he was quick and funny, always chuckling in his baritone rumble, out to please. The Barberini were a powerful family, and he had heard that Maffeo was a virtuoso, with a great interest in intellectual and artistic matters. He hosted many evenings in which poetry and song and philosophical debates were featured entertainments, and he wrote poetry himself that he was said to be vain about. Galileo seemed to be assuming that this was therefore a prelate in the style of Sarpi, broad-minded and liberal. In any case he was perfectly at ease, and showed Barberini his occhialino inside and out.

‘I wish I had been able to bring enough of them with me to leave one with you as a gift, Your Eminence, but I was only allowed a small trunk for baggage.’

Barberini nodded at this awkwardness. ‘I understand,’ he murmured as he looked through the glass. ‘Seeing through yours is enough, for now, and more than enough. Although I do want one, it is true. It’s simply amazing how much you can see.’ He pulled back to look at Galileo. ‘It’s odd-you wouldn’t think that more could be held there for the eye, in distant things, than we already see.’

‘No, it’s true. We must admit that our senses don’t convey everything to us, not even in the sensible world.’

‘Certainly not.’

They looked through it at the distant hills east of Rome, and the cardinal marveled and clapped him on the shoulder in the manner of any other man.

‘You have given us new worlds,’ he said.

‘The seeing of them, anyway,’ Galileo corrected him, to seem properly humble.

‘And how do the Peripatetics take it? And the Jesuits?’

Galileo tipped his head side to side. ‘They are none too pleased, Your Grace.’

Barberini laughed. He had been trained by the Jesuits, but he did not like them, Galileo saw; and so Galileo continued, ‘There are some of them who refuse to look through the glass at all. One of them recently died, and as I said at the time, since he would not look at the stars through my glass, he could now inspect them from up close, on his way past them to Heaven!’

Barberini laughed uproariously. ‘And Clavius, what does he say?’

‘He admits the moons orbiting Jupiter are really there.’

‘The Medici moons, you have called them?’

‘Yes,’ Galileo admitted, realizing for the first time how this could be another awkwardness. ‘I expect to make many more discoveries in the heavens, and hope to honour those who have helped me accordingly.’

The little smile that twitched over the cardinal’s face was not entirely friendly. ‘And you think these Jovian moons show that the Earth goes around the sun in an analogous manner, as Copernicus claimed?’

‘Well, it shows at least that moons go around planets, as our moon goes around the Earth. Better proof of the Copernican view, Your Grace, is how you can see the phases of Venus through the glass.’ Galileo explained how in the Copernican understanding the phases of Venus had combined with its varying distance from Earth to make it give to the naked eye always the same brightness, which had argued against the idea it had phases, when one had no glass to see them; and how its position, always low in the sky in the mornings and evenings, combined with actual sighting of the phases through the glass confirmed the idea that Venus was orbiting the sun inside the Earth’s own orbiting of it. The ideas were complicated to describe in words, and Galileo felt at ease enough to stand and take three citrons from a bowl, then place them and move them about on the table to illustrate the concepts, to Barberini’s evident delight.

‘And the Jesuits deny this!’ the cardinal repeated when Galileo had completed a very convincing demonstration of the system.

‘Well, no. They agree now that the phenomena at least are real.’

‘But then saying that the explanation is not yet so clear. Yes, that makes sense. That sounds like them. And after all, I suppose God could have arranged it any way He wanted.’

‘Of course, Your Grace.’

‘And what does Bellarmino say?’

‘I don’t know, Your Grace.’

The cardinal’s smile was even a little wicked in its foxiness. ‘Perhaps we will find out.’

Then he spoke of Florence, of his love for the city and its nobility, which Galileo happily echoed. And when Barberini asked the usual question about favourite poets, Galileo declared, ‘Oh, I prefer Ariosto to Tasso, as meat over candied fruit,’ which made the cardinal laugh, as being the reverse of the usual characterization of the two; and thus the interview continued well to its conclusion and Galileo’s obsequious withdrawal. And Cardinal Barberini must have enjoyed it, for that very afternoon he wrote to Buonarotti, Michelangelo’s nephew, and to Antonio de Medici, to say he appreciated their recommendations of Florence’s new court philosopher, and would be delighted to help him in any way he could.

A few days later Galileo was invited to a party organized by Giovanni Battista Deti, nephew of the late Pope Clement III, where he met four more cardinals, and listened to a talk given to the group by Giovanni Battista Strozzi. In the discussion afterward Galileo held his tongue, as he told all his correspondents later, feeling that as a newcomer this was the courteous thing to do. Staying silent was no doubt difficult for him, given his natural tendency towards continuous speech, and also given what could only be called his growing intimacy with the topic of Strozzi’s talk, which was Pride. For the success of all these visits was clearly going to his head. Night after night he was joining evening meals, often at Cardinal Ottavio Bandini’s residence on the Quirinal, right next to the Pope’s palace, and after the food and the musical entertainment standing up to become himself the featured entertainment, speaking and then showing the guests what could be seen of nearby landmarks through his glass. People never ceased to be amazed, and Galileo puffed up accordingly; back at the Palazzo Firenze after these events we could barely get him out of his jacket and boots.

One meeting had lasting consequences. It took place at the palazzo of Federico Cesi, the Marquis of Monticelli, the young man who had founded the Accademia dei Lincei, the Academy of the Lynxes, in which matters of mathematics and natural philosophy were regularly discussed. Cesi also used his fortune to gather in his palazzo an ever-growing collection of natural wonders. When Galileo arrived at his palazzo, Cesi took him on a tour of two rooms that were filled to overflowing with lodestones, chunks of coral, fossils, unicorn horns, griffins’ eggs, coconuts, nautilus shells, sharks’ teeth, jars containing monstrous births, carbuncles that glowed in the dark, turtle shells, a rhinoceros horn worked in gold, a bowl of lapis lazuli, dried crocodiles, model cannons, a collection of Roman coins, and a box of truly exquisite lapidary specimens.

Galileo inspected each of these objects with genuine curiosity. ‘Marvellous,’ he said as he looked in the hollow end of a unicorn’s horn chased with gold. ‘It must be as big as a horse.’

‘It does seem so, doesn’t it,’ Cesi replied happily. ‘But come look at my herbarium.’

Most of all, it turned out, Cesi was a botanist; he had hundreds of leaves and flowers arranged in big thick books, all dried and displayed with descriptions. He pointed out his favourites enthusiastically. Galileo watched him closely: he was young and handsome, very wealthy, fond of the company of men. And his admiration for Galileo was boundless. ‘You are the one we’ve waited for,’ he said as they closed the plant books. ‘We’ve needed an intellectual leader to blaze the path to the higher levels, and now that you’re here, I’m sure it will happen.’

‘Maybe so,’ Galileo allowed. He liked the idea of the Lincean Academy very much. To get out from under the thumb of the universities and all their Peripatetics, to elevate mathematics and natural philosophy to the highest level of thought and inquiry; it was a great new thing, a way forward. A new kind of institution, and a potential ally too.

Later that day Cesi hosted a dinner to introduce Galileo to the rest of the Lynxes. The party took place on top of the Janiculum, the highest of the Roman hills, in the vineyard of Monsignor Malvasia. The Lincean membership and a dozen other likeminded gentlemen assembled while it was still day, for the views from the Janiculum over the city were unobstructed in all directions. Among the guests were the foreign Linceans Johann Faber and Johann Schreck from Germany, Jan Eck from Holland, and Giovanni Demisiani from Greece.

Galileo trained his glass first on the basilica of St John Lateran, across the Tiber at a distance of about three miles, adjusting it until the chiselled inscription was legible on the loggia over the side entrance. It had been placed there by Sixtus V in the first year of his pontificate:

Sixtus

Pontifex Maximus

anno primo

Everyone was startled, as usual. When they had all looked through the occhialino more than once, and read and re-read the distant inscription, several toasts were proposed and drunk down. The group grew raucous, even a little giddy; Cesi’s musicians, sensing the spirit of the moment, played a fanfare on horns they pulled out from beneath their chairs. Galileo bowed, and while the brassy music played on, turned his glass on the residence of the Duke of Altemps, on a hill in the first rise of the Appenines, far to the east of them. When he had it fixed the Linceans again crowded round, taking turns counting the windows on the façade of the great villa, some fifteen miles away. This made people stark amazed, and the Janiculum rang with cheers.

Later that night, after a great deal of eating and drinking and talk, and a brief look at the moon, which was too full to see through the glass as other than a white blaze, Demisiani the Greek sat down by Galileo and leaned into him.

‘You should name your device with a new Greek word,’ he said, his saturnine face alive with the humour of his suggestion, or the fact that he was the one making it. ‘You should call it a telescope.’

‘Telescopio?’ Galileo repeated.

‘To see at a distance. Tele scopio, distance seeing. It’s better than perspicillum, which means merely a lens after all, or visorio, which is only to say visual or optical. And occhialino is petty somehow, as if you wanted only to spy on someone, it’s too small, too provincial, too Tuscan. The other languages will never use it, and will have to make up words of their own. But telescope all will understand and use together. As always with Greek!’

Galileo nodded. Certainly the best scientific names were always either Latin or Greek. Kepler had been calling it a perspicillum.

‘The root words are very old and basic,’ Demisiani said, ‘and the compounding method as well.’

Galileo surged to his feet and raised his glass, waited for the group to notice and go quiet. ‘Telescopio!’ he bellowed, dragging out the syllables as if calling for Mazzoleni, as if announcing the name of a champion: the group cheered, and Galileo leaned over to give the grinning Greek a hug, filled with sudden glee: of course his invention was such a new thing in the world that it needed a new name! No mere occhialino this!

‘TEL ESCOPIO!’ Who knows how many of the surrounding hills of Rome heard the party shouting out the new word. Galileo alone could have been heard halfway to Salerno.

The very next day, word came: the Pope wanted to see him.

An audience with Pope Paul V. The routine at the Palazzo Firenze took on a slightly frenzied air. Sleep was difficult. Galileo didn’t even try, but watched Jupiter and considered what was to come, and so slept eventually. He woke early, before sunrise, and took a slow dawn walk in the formal garden among the statues. He performed his ablutions, ate a small meal. Perhaps on this day it was even smaller than usual. Then Cartophilus and Giuseppe helped him dress in his best clothes, choosing the darker and more formal of his two dress jackets, which were getting a lot of wear on this visit.

Niccolini came by while he was completing his toilet, to discuss the audience, and to tell him all the latest from the Avvisi, Rome’s broadsheet of rumour and gossip, concerning His Holiness’s activities the previous week and what seemed to be on his mind. Like everyone else, Galileo already knew the Pope’s background: he had been Cardinal Camillo Borghese, a heretofore obscure member of that most powerful and dangerous of families, a canon lawyer whose election as Pope was so unlooked-for that he himself considered it an intercession of the Holy Ghost, and all his subsequent pontifical actions therefore divinely intended. This included the hanging of one Piccinardi, who had been so remiss as to write (though not to have published) an unauthorized biography of Paul’s predecessor, Clement VIII. That had set a tone that no one forgot.

Niccolini did not remind Galileo of that particular example of Paul’s severity, but made the point in more roundabout ways. The pontiff, he warned, was rigid, headstrong, peremptory; in these difficult years of the Counter-Reformation, he brooked no deviation from the rules and tactics laid out by the Council of Trent half a century before. In short, a pope. ‘He has grown a bit fat with papal power, in the usual way,’ Niccolini concluded.

The audience was held at the Villa Malvasia, where Galileo had been only the night before. This was the Pope’s idea; he wanted to get away from the Vatican. Niccolini led Galileo into the villa’s giant antechamber, and there introduced him to Paul V, using rather stiff and nervous phrases.

The Pope was indeed fat, an immense man, nearly spherical under his red robes, his neck fleshy and as thick as his head, his piggish eyes deep in thick folds of skin. He had a triangular goatee. Galileo knelt before him and kissed the offered ring, murmuring the prayer of obeisance Niccolini had taught him to use.

‘Rise,’ Paul said gruffly, interrupting him. ‘Speak to us standing.’

This was a great honour. Holding his features steady, Galileo got to his feet with the least clumsiness he could manage, then bowed his head.

‘Walk with us,’ Paul said. ‘We wish to take a turn in the garden.’

Galileo followed the Pope and walked with him, Niccolini and a clutch of papal assistants and servants trailing behind. They wandered through the hilltop’s vineyard, already well known to Galileo, and as he grew used to the big man’s blunt manner, and his slow gait, he grew more comfortable. He seemed to forget the stiletto sticking in and out of Paolo Sarpi’s head, and spoke as if to God Himself. Mostly he talked about the joy of seeing new stars in the sky, and of the blessing it was to witness the new powers now given to man by God.

‘Some speak of theological problems arising from the new discoveries,’ Galileo said calmly, ‘but really these problems are not possible, as creation is all one. God’s world and God’s word are necessarily the same, both being God’s. Any apparent discrepancies are only a matter of human misunderstanding.’

‘Of course,’ Paul said shortly. He did not like theology. He waved these problems aside as if they were the bees humming in the vineyard. ‘You have our support in this.’

After that Galileo spoke of other things, billowing on this pronouncement like a sail filled with the wind. He became less serious, more his usual courtier self. Then, after three quarters of an hour of this slow stroll through the vines, Paul glanced back at his secretaries and simply walked away, down to his litter at the front of the villa.

Startled by this abrupt departure, Galileo stood with his mouth hanging open, wondering if he had said something to offend. But Niccolini assured him that this was Paul’s way, that given the frequency of his audiences, the time he saved by dispensing with the always-lengthy farewells added up to an hour or more a day. ‘The amazing thing is that he stayed as long as he did. If he had not been truly interested he would have left much earlier.’ In truth the audience had gone wonderfully well, and Galileo had been shown great favour by being commanded to walk with the Pope. It had been one of the friendliest audiences the ambassador had ever witnessed. A triumph for both Galileo and for Florence. Coming from Niccolini, who was suddenly enthusiastic, Galileo knew it must be so.

After that Galileo lost his head, everyone around him saw it. The endless parade of banquets at which he was the centre of all attention and praise; the rich food; the balthazars and fiascos of wine; the long nights, when despite all the revelry he would stay up afterward to get some more sightings of Jupiter and its moons, so that even in the midst of everything else he was homing in on good orbital times for I, II, III, and IV-and yet he still had to rise early on the mornings after to prepare for yet another feast: all these began to take their toll on him. The idea that he would keep his mouth shut during a banquet discussion, be it on pride or anything else, became laughable. He talked lots: he discoursed, he lectured, he conversed, he boasted. He had always known that he was smarter than other people, but in the years when that had not actually seemed to benefit him, he had not been so impressed by it. Now, as he became ever more full of himself, he began to use his wit like a sword, or to be more accurate, given the rough buffo tenor of his humor, like a club. Buffo became buffare as he swelled up.

Speaking one night of the uneven surface of the moon, for instance, revealed so clearly by his telescope, he reminded everyone that this was a big problem for the poor Peripatetics, as the Aristotelian orthodoxy was that everything in the heavens was perfectly geometrical, and the moon therefore a perfect sphere. Even Father Clavius, he said, had ventured, and in print, that although the visible surface of the moon was uneven, this could be illusory, and all its mountains and plains could be encased in a clear crystal shell that constituted its perfect sphericality. Galileo’s tone of voice expressed his incredulity at this opinion, and as the audience chuckled they also grew more attentive; this was treading a little close to the edge.

Cartophilus had joined some of the other servants in borrowing a pillow and a bottle of wine and lying out in the vineyard, outside the cast of the torchlight bathing the long banqueting table, there to watch and listen. The guests in their bejewelled finery were like a painting come to life and performing for them alone; but Cartophilus sat up and put the bottle down as Galileo began to poke fun at the famous old Jesuit:

‘If everyone is allowed to imagine whatever they please, then of course someone can say that the moon is surrounded by a crystalline substance that is transparent and invisible! Who can deny it? I will grant it without objection, provided that with equal courtesy I be allowed to say that the crystal has on its outer surface a large number of huge mountains, thirty times as high as terrestrial ones, but invisible because they are diaphanous. Thus I can picture to myself another moon ten times as mountainous as I said in the first place!’ The guests at the table laughed. ‘The hypothesis is pretty,’ Galileo went on, goaded by their amusement, ‘but its only fault is that it is neither demonstrated nor demonstrable! Who does not see that this is a purely arbitrary fiction? Why, if you counted the Earth’s atmosphere as a similar kind of clear shell, then the Earth too would be perfectly spherical!’

And of course they all laughed. Ha ha! Very funny! And it was. Galileo’s signature mix of wit and sarcasm had been making people laugh for years. But Christopher Clavius had always been friendly to him; and more generally, it was never good to make fun of the Jesuits. Especially publicly, in Rome, and right before the Jesuits were to host a lavish feast at the College of Rome to celebrate your accomplishments. Yet here he was. Cartophilus could only groan and take another swig from his bottle: from the darkness of the vineyard, the sight of Galileo standing in the torchlight over the long table of seated revellers was the very image of Pride before its Fall.

But Galileo did not notice any danger. He ate, he talked, he boasted. He trained his telescope on the sun, using a method suggested by Castelli: the sun’s light was directed through the tube onto a sheet of paper, where one could look at the big lit circle with no danger to the eyes. And immediately it became apparent to any viewer that the lit image of the sun was dotted by small indistinct dark patches. Over the course of days, these dark spots moved across the sun’s face in a manner that suggested to Galileo that the sun too was rotating, at a speed that he calculated made its day about a month long. Rotating at about the same speed as the moon in its course around the Earth, therefore; and they were the same size in the sky. It was odd. He made sketches each day of the sun spots’ patterns, and placed the sketches side by side to show the sequence of movement.

Galileo claimed this discovery of the sun’s rotation for himself, though there were astronomers-Jesuits again-who had been tracking the sun spots for some time. He proclaimed his discovery far and wide, ignoring the fact that it was another inconvenient finding for the Peripatetics, also that it contradicted certain astronomical statements in the Bible. He didn’t care; if he noticed such problems for his opponents, he would only make another sharp heavy joke about them.

For now, none of these indiscretions seemed to be having any bad effect. At the Jesuit banquet in his honour no one spoke of his jape at Clavius’s expense, and Clavius’s colleague, the Dutch astronomer Odo Maelcote, read a learned commentary on Sidereus Nuncius which confirmed every discovery Galileo had reported. It appeared he did not have to care.

Then the newly enthusiastic Niccolini was replaced as Cosimo’s ambassador to Rome by Piero Guicciardini, who, finding Galileo at the height of his magniloquence, did not like him. And back home, Belisario Vinta was replaced as secretary to Cosimo by Curzio Picchena, who shared with Guicciardini a more jaundiced view of Galileo’s loud advocacy of the Copernican position. They saw no reason the Medici should be drawn into such a potentially awkward controversy. But if Galileo noticed these new men and their attitude toward him, again he did not seem to care.

Meanwhile, Cardinal Bellarmino, Pope Paul’s closest advisor, also a Jesuit, and the inquisitor who had handled the case of Giordano Bruno, initiated an investigation into Galileo’s theories. This was probably on Paul’s instruction, but the spies within the Vatican who had found out about it could not be sure of that. Bellarmino, they said, had looked through a Jesuit telescope himself; he had asked his Jesuit colleagues for an opinion; he had attended a meeting of the Holy Office of the Congregation, which subsequently began to look into the case. Bellarmino seemed to have been the one to order the investigation.

But no one told Galileo about this troubling development, being not quite sure what it meant. And because of his meeting with the Pope, and everything else that had happened, he was still full of himself, bumptious and grand. The visit to Rome was a triumph in every way, even if Guicciardini was now hinting that it might be best to leave while he was still being lionized. The ambassador stayed just on the right side of politeness about this, but if Galileo had sneaked into his office and looked at the letters on his desk, as proved fairly easy to do, he would have gained a truer sense of the ambassador’s mind:

Galileo has little strength of judgement wherewith to control himself, so that he makes the climate of Rome extremely dangerous to himself, particularly in these times, when we have a Pope who hates geniuses.

Eventually Galileo took the ambassador’s hint, or decided on his own, and announced he was returning to Florence. Cardinal Farnese hosted the farewell banquet in his honour, and accompanied him in his trip north as far as Caprarola, the country villa of the Farnese, where Galileo was invited to rest a night in luxury. Galileo carried with him a written report he had requested and received from Cardinal del Monte, addressed to Cosimo and Picchena. The Cardinal had finished his tribute with the words, Were we still living under the ancient republic of Rome, I am certain that a statue would have been erected in his honour on the Capitol- perhaps next to the statue of Marcus Aurelius-not a bad companion in fame. No wonder Galileo’s head had been turned. The visit to Rome was a complete success, as far as he knew.

Things continued that way after he got back to Florence. He was feted in fine style by Cosimo and his court, and it was clear that Cosimo was extremely pleased with him; his Roman performance had made Cosimo’s patronage look very discriminating indeed.

The Medici youth was no longer so young; he sat at the head of his table like a man used to command, and the boy Galileo remembered so well was no longer evident. He looked quite a bit the same, physically: slight, a bit pale, very like his father in his features, which was to say long-nosed and narrow headed, with a noble forehead. Not a robust youth, but now much more sure of himself, as only made sense: he was a prince. And he like everyone else had read his Machiavelli. He had given hard commands, and the whole duchy had obeyed them.

‘Maestro, you have set the Romans on their heels,’ he said complacently, offering a toast to the room. ‘To my old teacher, the wonder of the age!’

And the Florentines cheered even louder than the Romans had.

Soon after his return, Galileo got involved in a debate concerning hydrostatics: why did ice float? His opponent was his old foe Colombe, the malevolent shit who had tried to hang scriptural objections around his neck and thus cast him into hell. Galileo was anxious to stick the knives in this man while his Roman victories were fresh in everyone’s mind, and went at the contest like a bull seeing red, yes. But then he was frustrated by Cosimo, who ordered him to debate with such insignificant enemies in writing only, speaking over such a gadfly’s head to the world at large. Galileo did that, writing as usual at great length, but then Cosimo ordered him to debate the issue orally with a Bolognan professor named Pappazoni, whom Galileo had just helped to get his teaching position at Il Bo. This was like staking down a lamb to be killed and eaten by a lion, but Galileo and Pappazoni could only play their parts, and Galileo could not help enjoying it, as it was only a verbal killing after all.

Then Cardinal Maffeo Barberini came through Florence on his way to Bologna. Cardinal Gonzaga also happened to be in the city, and so Cosimo invited both of them to attend a repeat performance of Galileo’s debate on floating bodies, to be held at a court dinner on 2nd October. Papazzoni again made a reluctant appearance, and after a feast and a concert, and much drinking, Galileo again slaughtered him to the roaring laughter of the audience. Then Cardinal Gonzaga stood and surprised everyone by supporting Papazzoni; but Barberini, smiling appreciatively, perhaps remembering their warm meeting back in the spring in Rome, took Galileo’s side.

It was therefore another triumphant evening for Galileo. As he left the banquet, well after midnight, and long after the sacrifice of Pappazoni, Cardinal Barberini took him by the hand, hugged him, bade him farewell, and promised they would meet again.

The next morning, when Barberini was to leave for Bologna, Galileo did not show up to see him off, having been unexpectedly detained by an illness he had suffered in the night. From the road Barberini wrote a note to him:

I am very sorry that you were unable to see me before I left the city. It is not that I consider a sign of your friendship as necessary, for it is well known to me, but because you were ill. May God keep you not only because outstanding persons such as yourself deserve a long life of public service, but because of the particular affection that I have and always will have for you. I am happy to be able to say this, and to thank you for the time that you spent with me.

Your affectionate brother,

Cardinal Barberini

Your affectionate brother! Talk about friends in high places! To a certain extent it seemed he had a Roman patron now to add to his Florentine one.

All was triumph. Indeed it would be hard to imagine how things could have gone better in the previous two years for Galileo and his telescope: scientific standing, social standing, patronage in both Florence and Rome-all were at their peak, and Galileo stood slightly stunned on top of what had proved a double anno mirabilis.

But there were undercurrents and counterforces at work, even on that very morning when Galileo did not show up to see off Cardinal Barberini. Galileo had been ill, yes: because a syncope had struck him when he got home from the banquet the night before. Cartophilus had hopped down from the trap in front of their house in Florence, had stilled the horse, and opened the gate; and there in the little yard stood the stranger, his massive telescope already placed on its thick tripod.

In his crow’s Latin the stranger said to Galileo, ‘Are you ready?’