“I had a dream,” he gasped, confused. Trying to hold on to it. “I was stuck!” He stared up at Cartophilus as if from out of a deep well. From the bottom of that depth he said, “I am the sum of all possible Galileos.”
“No doubt of that,” the old servant said. “Here, maestro, drink a bit of this mulled wine. That was a hard one, I could tell.”
Galileo gulped down the wine. Then he fell asleep, and when he came to, he had forgotten that he had even experienced a syncope that night.
He was left with a very strange feeling, however. In his weekly letter to Maria Celeste he tried to describe it: I am caught in the loops of these events, and thus crossed out of the book of the living.
She replied in her usual encouraging way: I take endless pleasure in hearing how ardently the Monsignor Archbishop perseveres in loving you and favoring you. Nor do I suspect in the slightest that you are crossed out, as you say, de libro vivendum. No one is a prophet in his own country.
Galileo shook his head as he read this. “No one is a prophet anywhere,” he said, looking out his window to the north, toward San Matteo. “And thank God for that. To see the future would be a most horrible curse, I am quite sure. Let me be not a prophet in my own country, but a scientist. I only want to be a scientist.”
But that was no longer possible. All that life was gone. He sat in the gardens in Siena now, but did not see anything. Piccolomini tried to interest him in more problems of motion and strength, but even those old friends did little to rouse him. He sat waiting for his mail. If Maria Celeste’s letters didn’t arrive when he expected them, he would cry. Some days he could barely be persuaded out of bed.
Around that same time, some of the Venetian spies reported that Piccolomini had been anonymously denounced to the pope. It was all still happening. The letter received at the Vatican said: The Archbishop has been telling many people that Galileo was unjustly sentenced by this Holy Congregation, that he is the first man in the world, that he will live forever in his writings, even if they are prohibited, and that he is followed by all the best modern minds. And since such seeds sown by a prelate might bear pernicious fruit, I hereby report them.
The identity of this Siena informer was never found out, although the priest Pelagi would have been a good guess. In any case, the campaign against Galileo clearly had not ended. Cartophilus, hearing of this secret denunciation when Buonamici came up from Rome to tell him about it, went that evening to Archbishop Piccolomini, and asked him in a shy way if the time might have come when Galileo could hope to be remanded to Arcetri. Piccolomini thought it might indeed be possible, and he took the old servant’s hint that it could be a case of getting the old man home before he died. And Buonamici made sure that same night to convey his news of the secret denunciation to the archbishop’s confessor, so that soon afterward Piccolomini would know of that danger too.
So he began to campaign for Galileo’s return to Arcetri. This was the start of October 1633. He pretended not to know he himself had been denounced, of course, and intimated, in letters to people outside the Vatican who would take the idea into the fortress, that confining Galileo to house arrest in Arcetri would be a more severe punishment than his relatively lavish and public situation in the archbishop’s palazzo in Siena.
When Urban heard it put this way, people said, he agreed to the plan. In early December a papal order came to Siena: Galileo was to be removed to Arcetri, there to be confined to house arrest.
Piccolomini himself took this news to Galileo, beaming with pleasure for his old teacher, whom he feared had gone a long way toward permanently losing his mind. A reunion with his girls would surely help. “Teacher, the news has come from Rome, the Sanctissimus has blessed you with permission to return to your home and family, God be praised.”
Galileo was truly startled. He sat down on his bed and wept, then stood and embraced Piccolomini. “You saved me,” he said. “Now you are one of my angels. I have so many of them.”
He did indeed. So many, stepping onto the stage from nowhere: the people who helped him, the crowd who tried to do him harm. Any event in history that gets more crowded the longer you look at it—that’s the sign of a contested moment, a crux that will never stop changing under your gaze. The gaze itself entangles you, and you too are one of the changes in that moment.
On the day of his departure from Siena, a strong wind poured over them from the hills to the west, tossing the last leaves on the trees in a wild flight. Galileo was hugged by several well-wishers, and when he finally embraced the little archbishop, he lifted him up. When he set him down and stepped back, wiping his eyes and shaking his head, Piccolomini held him by the arm to help him up into the carriage. Galileo’s gray hair and beard streamed in the wind, as did the banners over the palace, and the clouds. Birds wheeled overhead. Galileo stopped to look around, gestured at the spectacle, stomped on the ground. “It still moves!” he said. “Eppur si muove!”
Later Piccolomini told the story of Galileo’s parting remark to his brother, Ottavio Piccolomini; who, later still, when living in Spain, commissioned the painter Murillo to paint a painting to commemorate his brother’s tale. Murillo depicted the scene as taking place before the Inquisition itself, Galileo pointing at the wall over the congregation, where fiery letters spelled out Eppur si muove. In this way, and by word of mouth, the story was passed on. At some point the painting’s story became the one people told, and later still it must have been regarded as too blasphemous to show, and its canvas was folded and reframed so that the inscribed wall was hidden from view. It only came back to light when the painting was cleaned, many years later. But all the while people kept telling the tale, of Galileo’s sidelong defiance of his persecutors, his muttered riposte to the ages. It was true even though it wasn’t.
The carriage took only two days to bring Galileo to Arcetri and the gates of Il Gioièllo. All the household was standing there to greet him, with Geppo jumping in front and La Piera standing impassively at the rear. He had been gone eleven months.
He levered himself out of the carriage, stood with the help of a hand on Geppo’s shoulder, groaned as he straightened up. “Take me to San Matteo,” he said.
If anyone is to be loved, he must love and be lovable.
—BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE, The Book of the Courtier
IT WAS A SHOCK TO SEE how much thinner Maria Celeste had become in his absence. She had driven herself hard those eleven months, running the convent and also helping to take care of Il Gioièllo. Geppo had fallen ill, and afterward suffered a truly noxious skin rash; Maria Celeste had cured it with a salve of her own devise. She had authorized for La Piera the extra spending needed to get through a three-month flour shortage, and late in that bad time had instructed the housekeeper to shut down the house’s oven and get their bread from the convent, setting the price at eight quattrini a loaf. She never ate unless everyone else had.
As a result of all this she was skinnier than ever. No doubt her incessant worry about Galileo had also had its effect. She had tried to help him with his trial, which from her position was a little futile, but she had written repeatedly to Caterina Niccolini, asking her to petition a particular sister-in-law of the pope to intercede. Pursuing these chains of female influence, which were everywhere even though invisible to the men and to the history books, may or may not have helped his cause; it was even possible this had been the crucial intervention, and Caterina the architect of the strategy that got Galileo out of Rome alive. But there was no way to tell from outside that network. In one of her last letters to him before his return, Maria Celeste had mentioned her efforts, saying of them, I know, as I freely admit to you, that these are poorly drawn plans, yet still I would not rule out the possibility that the prayers of a pious daughter could outweigh even the protection of great personages.