This morning was one he had very definitely lived before: the mule, the hills, the boys ahead, Cartophilus behind, all under whatever sky the day might bring. Today it would be high clouds like carded wool. The previous fall he and Maria Celeste had begun collaborating on jellies and candied fruits, so that both establishments might have some variety and pleasure in their diet; so hanging from the mule also was a bag of citrons, lemons, and oranges. They still looked like little Ios to him.

On the way Cartophilus would keep well behind, and it was too nice a morning for Galileo to want to talk to him anyway. May hills were green under a silver sky. They would be arriving at San Matteo just after midday. Convent rules forbade outsiders to go into most of the buildings, and the nuns were forbidden from going outside; supposedly they were required to have a screen to be set between them and any visitors. But over the years the screen had slowly shrunk to a waist-high barrier, and finally been dispensed with altogether, so that Galileo and his daughter could embrace, and then sit side by side in the doorway looking out at the lane, Maria Celeste holding him by the hand.

These days she was even thinner than she had been as a girl, but she was still bright and outgoing, and obviously attached to her father, who served as a kind of patron saint for her. Livia, now Suor Arcangela, on the other hand, was more withdrawn and sullen than ever, and never came out of the dormitory to see Galileo. From reports it appeared she was uninterested in anything but food, which was a bad sole interest for a Clare to have.

Maria Celeste, whom he persisted in thinking of as Virginia, today would be overjoyed to see him again. She would inquire repeatedly about his health, and seem surprised when he did not want to discuss it. He would see that this was one of the only subjects of conversation in the convent, perhaps the principal one. How they felt. How they were too hot or too cold, and always, how they were hungry. He would have to bring bigger baskets of food. He had given up trying to slip his daughters gifts he could not give to the other nuns; Maria Celeste felt it was wrong. So if he wanted to help her and Arcangela, he would have to help all of them. But that he couldn’t afford.

They had talked as they ate a dinner together with the abbess, then it was time to go, if they were to get back to Bellosguardo in the light.

On the mule on the way back he would be silent, as usual. He had the grim look he always had when thinking about family or money; perhaps the two simply went together. His annual retainer from the Medicis was a thousand crowns, more than the grand duke paid anyone except his secretary and his generals, and yet still it wasn’t enough. His expenses continued to mount. And much of it had to do with family. He supported the old gargoyle, of course. His sister Livia, who had left the convent she had entered in order to get married, had been unable to keep her odious husband Landucci from abandoning her. And this was after he had sued Galileo for nonpayment of what was really Galileo’s brother’s part of her dowry. Livia had come to Galileo for shelter, then died while he was in Rome; died of a broken heart, the servants said. Now Galileo had the care of her children. And Landucci was suing yet again for nonpayment of Michelangelo’s portion of the dowry—talk about déjà vu—even though he had left the marriage and the abandoned wife was dead, and Cosimo had given Galileo a dispensation. Meanwhile Galileo’s invertebrate brother had sent his own wife and seven kids to Galileo while he stayed in Munich and continued trying to make a living as a musician. That was family.

So even though Galileo was no longer teaching, and took in no student boarders, the household in Bellosguardo consisted of about the same number of people it had had in Padua, where people had often called the big house on Via Vignali the Hostel Galileo. Roughly forty people, he didn’t even bother to keep count anymore. La Piera kept the house accounts, and very capably. She always gave him the bad news with a straight face. They were running at a loss. Galileo had definitely lived these things before. And no one had ever bought a celatone, or ever would. And the ones he had given away, in hope of creating orders, had been expensive to manufacture.

A bad time came to Tuscany—years of plague, years of death. Sagredo asked him to think about a telescope for looking at things close up, to see more clearly objects like paintings and Cellini’s medallions, and Galileo and Mazzoleni worked up a thick rectangular lens, convex on both sides, which worked admirably, and which gave Galileo ideas for a compound lens system that might work even better. But then word came that Sagredo had died, with no warning and very little illness. The shock of it was like a sword thrust to Galileo’s heart; his knees buckled when he heard it. Giovanfrancesco, his big brother, gone.

Then his mother Giulia died, in September of 1620, after eighty-two years of making everyone in her life miserable. Galileo made all the arrangements for the funeral, he emptied and sold her house, he dispersed the money to his sisters and his hapless brother, all without a word or a sign, staring grimly at the walls as the furniture and goods left the place, revealing it to be pitifully small. For a long time it had been a comfort to him to realize that his mother was insane, and had been for the entirety of his life. But not now. She was angry. She was a person just like you, just as smart as you. She wanted what anyone would want. Everyone is equally proud. In one of her cabinets at the bottom of a mass of papers, he found two glass lenses, one concave and one convex.

Then Cardinal Bellarmino died, leaving no one alive who knew exactly what had passed between him and Galileo in the crucial meetings of 1616.

Then Grand Duke Cosimo died, after many years of illness: Galileo’s patron, gone at age thirty. This was the kind of disaster his Venetian friends had warned him against, when he had opted for Florence’s patronage over Venice’s employment.

But Cosimo’s heir, Ferdinando II, only ten years old, was put under the regency of his grandmother, the Grand Duchess Christina, and his mother, the Archduchess Maria Maddelena. In Christina, Galileo still had his patron, which was a very lucky thing. She took up his offer to tutor the new prince as he once had his father, and on they went, Galileo and his Medicean Stars. But this particular arrangement did not lead to much time with the boy, and when Galileo did meet with him he found it a very melancholy thing—instructing and entertaining a sweet little boy of ten, who so resembled his father at the same age that it was uncanny to experience, like living a loop in time. Another way his life was repeating itself, although he himself grew older at every repetition. A particularly dark kind of déjà vu. He walked in his own footsteps.

Then Marina died. When the maestro got the news from Padua, he sat out on the terrace of Bellosguardo all night long, a fiasco of wine at his side. The telescope was set up, but he did not look through it.

More than once that night, he recalled the time the two women had fought so furiously, and he had stood there holding them apart. How these things stick in the mind. Everyone is equally proud. Now when he relived that scene he held them apart with his heart full of an anguished affection. They had been strong people. He had been crucified between two harpies. He could even for once see the comedy of that ridiculous scene. No doubt the servants had laughed about it for years afterward. Now he laughed himself, full of remorse and love.

Then Pope Paul V died. The cardinals gathered in Rome, and could not agree on a successor; in the end they elected an obvious placeholder, Alessandro Ludovisi, an old man who chose the name Gregory XV. No one had any expectations of him, but as soon as he was invested he named two Lynceans to secretarial posts, an excellent sign, possibly a portent of things to come. Certainly Cesi was pleased. But for the most part everyone waited for the next puff of white smoke to tell them who would really shape the next period in their lives.