The Third Day was then a technical discussion of the astronomical issues, which Galileo augmented with many small geometrical line drawings, to make clearer his meaning concerning the Earth’s movement. Some of Tycho’s data were included, and a dense discussion of all Galileo’s telescopic work: the attempt to find parallax, the phases of Venus, the odd motions of Mars, the difficulty of seeing Mercury. It turned out to be the longest dialogue of the four, and inevitably, it seemed, the least entertaining.
The Fourth Day was a revision of Galileo’s earlier treatise on tides and how they provided clear evidence of the Earth’s rotation. This meant that the final fifty pages of his masterpiece were devoted to a false argument. Galileo was obscurely aware of this, but he wrote the chapter out anyway, following the plan he had set down years before—because, among other reasons, it seemed to him that his Jovian understanding of the cause of tides was too weird to be true, as well as impossible to describe. “I don’t like this,” he grumbled to Cartophilus one night. “It’s giving me that feeling again. I’m just doing what I always have done.”
“So change it then, maestro.”
“The changes too have already happened,” Galileo growled. “Fate changes, not us.” And dipped his pen and forged on. It was the book of his life; he had to finish it in style. But would it be enough to convince Urban VIII of its views?
By now Galileo over the course of his life had accrued three kinds of enemies. First came the Dominicans, the Dogs of God (cani Domini), who since Trent had been using the Inquisition to smash all challenges to orthodoxy. Then there were the secular Aristotelians, all the professors and philosophers and laymen who stood by the Peripatetic philosophy. Lastly and most recently, for they had supported Galileo during his first trips to Rome, the Jesuits too had turned on him, perhaps because of his attack on Sarsi; no one was quite sure about that, but enemies they now were. It was getting to be quite a crowd. His character Simplicio would be certain to offend scores, even hundreds of men. Galileo was perhaps being ironical when he had Simplicio say, late in the Second Day, The further this goes on, the more confused I become, and Sagredo then replies, This is a sign that the arguments are beginning to change your mind.
Or perhaps it was a sign that Galileo still had not learned that arguments never change anyone’s mind.
One day, returning from the convent of San Matteo alone, his mule Cremonini shied away from a startled rabbit and threw the inattentive Galileo to the ground. Galileo was too sore to remount, and had to limp all the way home.
“We’re too far away,” he declared when he got there. “We need to move closer to San Matteo.” He had said this often before, but now he meant it.
No one at Bellosguardo was pleased. Arcetri, where San Matteo was located, was a village in the hills west of the city. It was not as easy to get to Florence from there as it was from Bellosguardo. And Bellosguardo was such a big place that any villa in Arcetri would be smaller, and so would not require as large a staff.
Still, this became a new project for Galileo. The Dialogo was nearing completion, so he could give the matter some attention, when he was not working on the problem of publication. Then also Maria Celeste was happy to help organize a house hunt in Arcetri. Indeed she was so good at it, so industrious and resourceful, that Galileo began to wish aloud that she could arrange for his book’s publication as well. And then Vincenzio and his sweet wife Sestilia returned to Bellos-guardo, and the hunt for a new house became something they all did together, a kind of family outing, a pleasure for all.
Things might have gone equally well in regard to publishing the Dialogo, except Federico Cesi died. Another great young Roman Galilean dead in his meridian, long before his time; it was a pattern of bad luck that almost looked providential, or diabolical, and some of us worried about that.
This time it was a disaster for Galileo beyond what he realized. Cesi was the only patron who might have been powerful enough to publish the Dialogo without trouble. And with him gone, his Lyncean Academy immediately collapsed too. Only now did it become obvious that it had been his private club all along.
His loss meant Galileo had to seek a publisher in Florence, which meant obtaining formal approval from the censor there as well as from Father Monster in Rome. And in Florence, the likely prospect that publication would cause political trouble was upsetting the Medicis. Young Ferdinando had by now come into full possession of his crown, and he was concerned to consolidate his power. The last thing he wanted was for his father’s old court astronomer to be causing trouble with the Inquisition. So there were Florentine factions to add to the Roman ones opposed to publication. Indeed, with the single faction that had been in favor of it now defunct, only an irregular band of Galileans scattered all over Italy were left to hope for its success.
BY 1629, THE BOOK’S SITUATION had become so complicated that Galileo decided another trip to Rome was in order, to make sure his permission to publish was secure. He went in 1630, at great trouble and expense, and against the will of the Medicis.
As with all his previous trips to Rome, everything there seemed to have changed. It was as if each time he visited it was the Rome of a slightly different universe.
This time Urban agreed to meet with him only once, and that only after a great diplomatic effort by Ambassador Niccolini, who made this effort on his own, apparently because of his liking for Galileo.
And so once again Galileo woke in the Medici’s Roman embassy, and carefully dressed in his threadbare finest, remembering all the times this had happened before. He was conveyed down to the Vatican in an embassy litter, mentally rehearsing his points, and so intensely curious as to what he would find that he saw nothing of the narrow alleys and broad strada of the endless hilly city.
This time Urban was calmly formal. Lacking an invitation to rise, Galileo remained on his knees and spoke from there.
Urban’s carapace of power was now reinforced by a solid layer of flesh. He was more voluble than before. He spoke of his garden, his Florentine relatives, the poor state of the roads. He made it clear that he did not want the subject of astronomy to arise—not yet, anyway. He left it unclear if he were ever going to want it to arise. Galileo felt his knees begin to splinter under him as he made his part of the conversation; from this perspective he saw a different man. It was not just that Barberini’s face had thickened, his jaw gone more massive, his small eyes smaller, his skin more coarse and pale; it was not even that his goatee had been colored a brown that did not quite match the hair on his head. He looked down at Galileo as if from an enormous distance, of course, but also as if he knew things about Galileo that he thought Galileo should know but didn’t. As was indeed the case, because of the secret denunciation of Il Saggiatore. Spies had recently passed along word that Urban had had the charge investigated, but no one had heard the result. Occasionally there were times when the Vatican was like a black box with no lid, and this was one of them.
The silence on that topic made it seem possible that Urban had set the matter aside, at least for now. And there were developing aspects of the larger situation in Europe that oddly protected Galileo from Urban. Prosecuting his previously favored scientist for heresy would not help Urban in his struggles with the Spanish, but merely be taken by them as a sign of weakness, a baring of the throat. Urban did not want that at all.