He was in that most irritable state when Archduke Leopold of the Tyrol came by the villa to talk to him. Galileo ordered a feast, and as it was a nice day, hosted the archduke out on the terrazzo next to the house. Galileo stood next to the archduke, leaning with both hands clasped on his staff. Leopold seemed more capable than the Spaniards of comprehending the jovilabe, but his dukedom was entirely landlocked, and there was no need for his military to be able to determine their longitude. The celatone he also found interesting—though really, as he said, for purposes of warfare, an ordinary spyglass would do the trick. Nevertheless he was engaged and engaging, the very model of what a modern prince could be, and Galileo was encouraged by his visit. “God bless Your Magnificence,” he said on the archduke’s departure. “I kiss your clothes with all due reverence, Your Comprehension.” He was encouraged again by a kind note Leopold sent later, thanking him for the meal and inquiring whether he would ever want to travel up the valley past Lake Como to the Tyrol.
Unfortunately, as Galileo and the rest of Tuscany learned only a month or two later, on the very day Leopold sent this inviting letter, some Protestant officers had thrown two Catholic officials out the window of a high tower in Prague. This defenestration was a sign; the war was intensifying all over the continent, Spain and the Hapsburgs in Germany fighting Catholic France and its Protestant allies to the north. Few knew how bloody it was going to get, but everyone saw immediately it was dangerous for all concerned. Leopold of Tyrolia, stuck in the middle of it, with allies on both sides of the conflict, had no more time for philosophers and their ideas.
In Bellosguardo, Galileo did not have to work as hard as he had in the city to avoid his unhappy mother. Giulia was living in the city in a little house he rented for her, just around the corner from where they had lived when he was a boy, and she was specifically not invited across the river and up to the new villa and its fine view. When Galileo saw her at all, she treated him the same as she always had, as if no time had passed. It like a nightmare in which her scorn for Vincenzio and her harsh treatment of her children had merely shifted down a generation without her noticing the people had changed, so that she spoke as if Galileo were her husband and his children hers, her every utterance still a hellish mélange of reproach and insult. She had a curious manner of inflicting her excoriations as if making ordinary conversation, as if they were really just neutral remarks. It started the moment he entered her presence:
“Oh, here you are. I’m surprised to see you in the middle of the day like this, but I suppose you don’t have anything better to do.”
“No.”
“But of course you always were a lazy boy, and clearly it’s just stayed that way all your life.”
“Sorry for being so lackadaisical as to come to visit you, Ma.”
“No you’re not. Listen, that door at the back is still missing its bottom hinge, I don’t know why you don’t just tell the landlord to fix it, although you’ve always been afraid of people, I don’t know why, really there’s no reason to be a kiss-ass like you’ve always been. Why don’t you just face up to him?”
Galileo had long since learned to ignore this kind of thing, but a man in front of his servants could only take so much, and sometimes he made ripostes to her attacks with all the pent-up resentment of his half century under her lash, and these led inevitably to fierce arguments, for she never backed down. These fights never gave him the least satisfaction, for though he could outshout her now, he could never come away feeling triumphant or virtuous. When all was said and done, the old gorgon was unbeatable.
These days her main reproach, or at least her newest one, concerned his treatment of his three children. Though Giulia had disapproved of the liaison with Marina, she had also disapproved of Galileo terminating it. “Now what will you do with those poor bastard girls?” she would demand, lancing him with her medusan eye. “No one will marry them, and you couldn’t afford the dowries even if they would.”
“So it’s all right then,” Galileo would mutter through his teeth. He had made strenuous efforts to get the girls into a convent, which would solve both their problems and his, and seemed the best solution all around. But entering a convent before the age of sixteen was against canonical law, and only at thirteen could one become even a novitiate. Early entries happened all the time anyway, but of course Galileo’s application for a special dispensation had been denied, no doubt because the clergy of Florence disliked his thrashing of Colombe.
Eventually, however, the day came when the girls were grown up enough to be entered as novitiates. By then he had found them spots in a Clarite convent where the abbess was the sister of Belisario Vinta. Galileo still had some unfortunate memories when it came to Vinta, but he had been the broker of Galileo’s move into the Tuscan court, and they had ended up on friendly terms. So it was a real advantage to have the man’s sister in charge of his girls, as she proved immediately by dispensing with the feast they were supposed to give and delegating that money instead to buying the habits the girls would need as nuns, thus saving Galileo a considerable sum.
So at first it looked like a wonderful thing, even if his mother lambasted him for it. “You’ve condemned those poor sweet things to a lifetime of drudgery and starvation,” she declared, curling her upper lip and slapping the air in his direction with the back of her hand. “You heartless pig. You’re just like your father. I don’t know why I should be surprised at that, but I am.”
Galileo turned his back on her and looked at the bright side. The girls would be respectable nuns and set for life. Their abbess was a friend and ally. It would take him about an hour to walk over the hills to the convent in Arcetri, and the same to ride a mule, as usually his hernia would force him to do; this he could manage at least once a week. It was good. They would be fine.
It was true that the Order of the Poor Clares was well named. Clare had been a student of Saint Francis of Assisi, and her declared intent had been to imitate Francis and own nothing on Earth. Fine for her, but when you had thirty women gathered in one house supposedly there to do the same thing, it was not practical. Many Clarite convents had been given some land by their nuns’ families, but not San Matteo. Giulia brandished at her son a letter one of the Clares had written to another local girl seeking entry, which somehow had gotten into her gnarled hands. She held it up before her and read loudly, “‘We dress in vile clothing, always go barefoot, get up in the middle of the night, sleep on hard boards, fast continually, and eat crass, poor, and Lenten food, and spend the major part of the day reciting the Divine Office and in long mental prayers. All of our recreation, pleasure, and happiness is to serve, love, and give pleasure to the beloved Lord, attempting to imitate his holy virtues, to mortify and vilify ourselves, to suffer contempt, hunger, thirst, heat, cold, and other inconveniences for His love.’ Sounds great, eh? What a life! Why don’t you just kill them and be done with it?”
“Why don’t you just steal the eyes out of my head?” Galileo replied, leaving her company without a good-bye.
Virginia understood her father’s motives. She was a good girl. She took as her nun’s name Maria Celeste, to honor her father’s astronomical accomplishments, and she entered the convent without complaint, and only a few hours of tears. Livia, on the other hand, was three years younger, and had always gone her own way; she had inherited Marina’s sharp tongue, and Giulia’s black outlook. When the time came for the move to San Matteo she had to be restrained by the servants, and was finally taken over to the convent in a sealed litter, trussed like a pig. Released into San Matteo, she composed herself into a white-faced ball in the corner of their public room, trembling like a trapped hedgehog. Looking at Galileo’s feet, she announced with dignity, “I will never speak to you again,” and then hid her face on her knees and went silent. To a much greater extent than Galileo would have believed possible, she kept her vow.