More days passed. It resembled an impasse. By ordering Galileo to come to Rome and face trial, Urban had already committed the Church to rendering a judgment against him; this was understood by all, including Galileo. That was why he had tried so hard to dodge the summons. Now that he was here, some kind of judgment was going to be rendered. It was not possible to find that the Church had made a mistake and Galileo therefore innocent of all wrongdoing. Yet that was what he was claiming had happened.

Did he not realize he could make things tremendously worse?

More days passed. The Church had all the time in the world. Archbishop de Dominis had been held for three years, before dying after an interrogation. Giordano Bruno had been held for eight years.

Galileo’s room was in one of the little Vatican dormitories used by priests working in the Holy Office. The dormitory had been evacuated for the period of his confinement, so Galileo had the entire drafty hall to himself. His servant Cartophilus was on hand, but none of his Roman friends and acquaintances were allowed to call, and none of the Vatican’s clerics visited him either. It was very close to solitary confinement.

The quarters themselves were adequate, but the hours stretched out and grew long. Again Galileo had time to think—too much time, which of course was the point. He began to lose his appetite, and as a result his digestion and excretion. His sleep was disrupted. He was always prone to insomnia, and it often hit him in times of crisis. Now, in the depths of the chill spring nights, Cartophilus would be called in to him, asked to bring a basin of warm water, or a loaf of bread. In the candlelight Galileo’s bloodshot eyes stared as from out of a deep cave. Once Cartophilus came back from the little brazier he kept outside the entryway, balancing a basin of steaming water, only to find the old astronomer frozen in something like one of his syncopes. “What’s this?” the servant said wearily.

But it was only an ordinary trance or dream, the old man asleep on his feet. He whimpered once or twice as Cartophilus helped him out of his paralysis and put his hands in the warm water.

In this suspended manner sixteen long days passed, during which nothing whatsoever happened, as far as anyone outside Maculano’s office could tell. Of course the spies were everywhere, but they were now hearing almost nothing, and what they heard was contradictory. Galileo frequently urged Cartophilus to find out more, and the ancient one had been trying, but his opportunities from inside the Vatican were limited. Galileo’s nerves had begun to fray by the third or fourth day of his confinement. By the end of the second week, he was a wreck.

“You have to sleep, maestro,” Cartophilus suggested for the thousandth time.

“I have the certificate from Bellarmino himself, signed by him, forbidding me from holding the belief but not from discussing it ex sup-positione.”

“Yes you do.” This had been said at least a thousand times.

“Their own supposed injunction wasn’t signed by anyone. It was written on the back of some other document, a letter with a 1616 date on it. I’m sure it’s a forgery. They pulled out something from the files from that year and wrote it up, probably this winter, to frame me, because they have nothing.”

Cartophilus said, “It must have been a shock when you saw it.”

“It was! I couldn’t believe my eyes. Everything became obvious the moment I saw it. Their plan, I mean.”

“And so you decided to deny everything. You claimed that your book refutes Copernicus.”

Galileo frowned. He knew perfectly well that the claim was absurd and unsupportable. Possibly it had been a panic response to Maculano’s sudden deployment of the forged injunction. Possibly it was a move that he now regretted. Sixteen days was a long time.

Cartophilus persisted. “Didn’t Ambassador Niccolini advise you to go along with them, to say whatever they wanted? To allow them to slap you on the ear and let you go?”

Galileo growled.

Cartophilus observed him wrestling with all this. “You know they cannot admit the accusation was wrong.”

Another growl, his bear’s growl.

“Perhaps you could write to the pope’s nephew,” the old one suggested. “Didn’t you help him to get his doctorate, and his position in Padua?”

“I did,” Galileo said grimly. After a time he said, “Bring me paper and ink. Lots of paper.” Even at the best of times, Galileo’s letters could be very long. This one would be thick, but not as thick as some; Cardinal Francesco Barberini was already familiar with the situation.

As Niccolini had reported to Florence, servants from the Villa Medici were allowed to cross town and bring Galileo his meals every day, and so it was no great difficulty to get messages back and forth. Word finally came by way of this conduit, conveying Cardinal Francesco Barberini’s reply to Galileo’s appeal for help. His Holiness was still too angry about the matter to be approached. A way would have to be found within the normal procedures of the Holy Office. Given Galileo’s stated position, impossible to believe—and an affront to the process—it would be difficult. Happily, given all this, a letter from Maculano to Francesco had recently arrived, which made it clear that Maculano too was trying to broker a solution. A manuscript copy of this letter was enclosed, under the cloth holding a loaf of bread in a basket:

I reported to the Most Eminent Lords of the Holy Congregation, and then they considered various difficulties in regard to the manner of continuing the case and leading it to a conclusion, for in his deposition Galileo denied what can be clearly seen in the book he wrote, so that if he were to continue in his negative stance it would become necessary to use greater rigor in the administration of justice, and less regard for all the ramifications of this business.

Meaning if they had to torture him to obtain a confession, not only would it be bad for him, but as he was one of the most famous people in Europe, and had been so for twenty years, it would be bad for the Church. More important still, it would be bad for Urban. Urban had favored Galileo as something like his personal scientist for many years. If Galileo’s punishment was harsh, it would be obvious to all that Urban had been made to sacrifice one of his people to satisfy the Borgia, and this would weaken him further in his struggle against the Spanish. So in his own interest, Urban could not be forced into harming Galileo too much—not even by Galileo himself, in the form of his most egregious lie under oath before the Holy Office.

Was this Galileo’s point? Could he have risked so much to force the realization of this truth on Urban? Was this what he had been hoping for? If so, it was one hell of a gambit.

Finally I proposed a plan, Maculano continued, namely that the Holy Congregation grant me the authority to deal extrajudicially with Galileo, in order to make him understand his error and, once having recognized it, to bring him to confess it. The proposal seemed at first too bold, and there did not seem to be much hope of accomplishing this goal as long as one followed the road of trying to convince him with reasons; however, after I mentioned the basis on which I proposed this,

—a basis which Maculano did not identify in the letter, although it was easy to assume that he meant the threat of torture; but he might have had something else in mind. In any case, as he wrote to conclude his letter to Cardinal Barberini—they gave me the authority.

THIS TIME IT WAS TRULY A PRIVATE INTERVIEW. No scribe was on hand, no transcript recorded, no witnesses of any kind. Only Maculano and Galileo, in a small office of the dormitory next to the Holy Office; though if one were at hand in the servant’s closet, waiting for Galileo if he called, the ability to hear what was going on in the little inner room had long since been established.