Then another of Galileo’s disciples, and one of his most enthusiastic supporters, a young man named Giovanni Ciampoli, was appointed to the powerful position of papal secretary. This almost defied belief, given Ciampoli’s grandiloquent self-importance relative to his actual accomplishments and station. He was a rooster, in fact, and yet now he was gatekeeper to the pope and in his company every day—advising, conversing, even reading aloud to him as he ate his meals. Ciampoli read Il Saggiatore to him, in fact, and afterward wrote to Galileo and the Lynxes to say that Urban had often laughed out loud as he listened to it.
And not just the pope was reading Il Saggiatore, it seemed, but everyone in Rome—the literati, the virtuosi, the philosophers, the Jesuits, and everyone else with an interest in intellectual matters. It was the book of the hour; it had completely transcended the original question of the comets, or any of the individual scientific controversies Galileo had gotten embroiled in. It was a rock that people were using to shatter the heavy, somnolent, resentful conformity of the Pauline years. Someone had spoken freely at last, and in the vernacular, about all the new things being discovered. High Barberinian culture was born, emerging like an Athena. Galileo was no longer alone, or part of a faction, but the leader of a movement. With Urban VIII on the Throne of Peter, anything was possible.
Again, however, Galileo’s trip to Rome was delayed by illnesses, and not all of them his own. Urban VIII was so exhausted by his intense campaign for the papacy that he retired into the Vatican for over two months. By the time he was well enough to receive supplicants and visitors, and Galileo had recovered from his own ailments enough to travel, it was the spring of 1624.
But finally the time came. On his last day at Bellosguardo, Galileo rode his mule over to San Matteo to say good-bye to Maria Celeste.
She knew perfectly well why he had to go. She felt that this new pontiff was a direct answer to her prayers, an intercession from God in their favor; she was the one who had first called it a “miraculous conjunction,” giving Galileo both the idea and the phrase. In her letters to him, she had revealed her ignorance of courtly protocol by expressing the hope that he would write Urban VIII to congratulate him on his ascension, not understanding that one at Galileo’s level could not address directly someone so much higher, but must express thanks and best wishes through an intermediary, which Galileo had of course done, using for the purpose Cardinal Francesco Barberini, as he had explained to her in his return letter.
Now Maria Celeste clung to him in her usual way, trying not to cry. Just in the way that she held him, he could feel that no one had ever loved him so intensely. And so of course she always hated it when he went away.
“Are you sure I can’t ask His Holiness to give you all some property?” he said, trying to distract her.
But Maria Celeste said, “What we need is better spiritual guidance! These so-called priests they have inflicted on us, well—you know what they have done. It’s really too much. If we could only have a decent priest, a real priest.”
“Yes yes,” Galileo said. “But not perhaps some land that you could rent? Or an annuity?”
Maria Celeste frowned her quick frown. This was not the kind of thing one asked the pope for, her look said. “I’ll ask the abbess,” she temporized.
Back at Bellosguardo, making his final preparations, a letter from her was brought to him by the convent’s servant Geppo. Please ask Urban for a real priest, it reiterated. Someone educated, and at least somewhat pure of spirit.
Galileo cursed as he read this. There on the page lay his daughter’s beautiful Italian script, the big loops inclining in perfect diagonals to the northeast and northwest, if it had been a map; a true work of art, as always, written by candle in the middle of the night, after the day’s chores were finally done and she had some time to herself. In so many of these beautiful letters, she excused herself for falling asleep as she wrote, and it often took several nights for her to compose one. She apologized also for mentioning the most pressing physical need of the moment, for begging a blanket, or his oldest hen to thicken their broth. And yet now she asked him to ask the new pope for a better spiritual advisor.
“I see the way it is,” he said gloomily as he stared through her letter. “In order to be a Poor Clare and yet not go mad, you have to believe it all, utterly and to the depths of your soul. Otherwise despair would drown you.”
As it had Arcangela, and several other of the sisters, including the poor abbess. Maybe you could even say that most of them were sunk into despair, weighed down by hunger and cold and illness, while Maria Celeste buoyed herself with her belief, and held the rest of them up with her otherworldly goodness. Galileo muttered sulphurously as he considered his two daughters, stuck in the same situation and thereby illustrating a truly Aristotelian either-or in their response to it. Neither was quite sane; but Maria Celeste was beautiful. A saint.
Later, in Rome, when he made the request she had asked for, he also asked for a sinecure for his son Vincenzio, combined with a papal indulgence that would legitimize his birth. This too was granted. The sinecure gave the youth sixty crowns a year, but since it came with the requirement that he perform some religious exercises, he refused to accept it. At this news, Galileo threw up his hands. “I’ve done my duty by these people!” he roared. “They won’t get another scudi from me, not another quattrini. Family, what a fraud! Blood is no thicker than water, as you see when you cut yourself.”
“When it congeals it gets thicker,” Cartophilus pointed out.
“Yes, and when it dries it sticks to you. And so family is the scab on a wound. I’m sick of it. I renounce them all!”
Cartophilus ignored this, knowing it was just talk. And by then there were more pressing problems.
Unfortunately the Grand Duchess Christina was not convinced of the necessity of this trip to Rome, and did not want to pay for it. The new Medici ambassador to Rome, a Francesco Niccolini, cousin to the previous ambassador but one, was informed in a letter from the young Grand Duke Ferdinando II that Galileo was not invited to stay at the embassy or at the Villa Medici. So Galileo had to make arrangements to stay with his ex-student Mario Guiducci, who lived near the church of Santa Maria Maddalena.
This was the first sign that the mirabile congiunture was not quite as miraculous as it had seemed—or that it was already disjuncting, in the way of many a spectacular but brief astrological conjunction.
The second sign of disjunction was far worse. He was still on his way to Rome, resting at Cesi’s villa in Acquasparta, when the news came that Virginio Cesarini, that brilliant and melancholy young cardinal, had died.
This was a real blow, for Cesarini had been perhaps the leading figure in all the competing intellectual circles of the city—known to everyone, high up in the Vatican, and at the same time very much a Lynx, a true Galilean. No one had expected his death, despite his slight frame; but these things happened.
His vacant position at the Holy Office was soon given to the enormously fat Fra Niccolo Riccardi—a priest who seemed sympathetic to the Lynxes, and who loved Galileo’s new book, but who was also anxious to please everybody. He would be little help to them.
Conjunctions and disjunctions; there was nothing for it but to get to Rome as soon as possible, and do what he could. So it was back into the litter to endure again the jounce and squeak of the ruined springtime roads.