1On a hill south of Florence, among olive trees, stood a poor convent of the sisters of Saint Clare. In winter the sisters went hungry. In that house lived a nun called Sister Maria Celeste, and she was the daughter of the most famous man in Europe.
2She had been born Virginia, the eldest child of the professor Galileo, in the days when he taught at Padua. Her mother was a woman of Venice whom he never married. A girl born so could not hope for a husband of any rank. So when she was thirteen her father put her and her sister behind the convent wall, and there they would stay until they died.
3She took the name Celeste, for the heavens he studied. She loved God with her whole heart, and after God, her father, and she saw no quarrel between the two.
4She became the convent's apothecary, and made pills and syrups for the sick sisters. And she looked after him, from behind the wall. She bleached his collars and mended his shirts. He sent up wine and meat for the sisters, and mended the convent clock.
5Now hear how the trouble came, for it came slowly, over twenty years.
6After the glass, her father had said openly that the old canon of Frauenburg was right: the earth moves. Some churchmen answered that Scripture says the sun stood still for Joshua, and so it must be the sun that moves. Her father wrote back, borrowing the word of a cardinal he had known, that the holy book was given to teach us how to go to heaven, not how heaven goes. Scripture and nature could not truly disagree, he said, since they had one Author. He was a believer, and he meant it.
7But this was the very time when the Church was torn in two, and each half watched the other for weakness. Rome had ruled that no man might read Scripture by his own light against the fathers. And here was a mathematician telling the cardinals what Joshua meant.
8So the matter went to Rome. The chief judge of such things was Cardinal Bellarmine, the same who had sat on the case of the friar of Nola. He said a thing worth hearing: if there were a true proof that the earth moves, then the Church would have to go carefully and say that she had not understood those verses. But he did not think there was such a proof.
9And in truth her father did not have it. He had the moons of Jupiter and the changing face of Venus. Those broke the old sky. They did not yet show that the earth itself was moving under his feet.
10So the judges ruled. The teaching that the earth moves was declared contrary to Scripture. The old canon's book was taken out of use until it should be corrected. And the cardinal called her father in and told him he must not hold that teaching or defend it.
11Then the old Pope died, and the new one was his friend. Cardinal Barberini was a Florentine, a poet, a lover of learning, who had once written a verse in praise of the glass. He took the name Urban. Her father went to Rome and was received six times.
12He came home with leave to write. He might set the two pictures of the world side by side, the old and the new, so long as he did not say that the new was proved. And he must put in the Pope's own thought: that God is almighty, and could have made the world move in any fashion He chose, so that no man can be sure he has read the Maker's mind.
13Her father wrote that book for six years. He wrote it in Italian, not Latin, so that any shopkeeper could read it, and he made it a conversation among three friends. One was wise and held with the canon. One was a clever man of the world who asked good questions. And one defended the old sky, and him he named Simplicio.
14It was a lively book, and it was not fair. And when it came time to put in the Pope's own thought, her father gave it, at the very end, to Simplicio. The Pope was told that his words had been put in the mouth of the fool.
15That summer the order came from Rome to stop the sale. In the autumn came a second. He was to appear before the Holy Office.
16He was sixty-eight. He had a rupture, and pains in his joints that kept him in bed for weeks. Three doctors signed a paper saying the journey might kill him. And the plague was in Florence that year. Rome's answer was that he could come of his own will, or be brought in irons. He set out in January, in a litter, and was held half a month at the border for fear of the plague.
17In April he was taken into the building of the Holy Office and questioned. The judges set before him a paper from seventeen years ago. It said he had been ordered not to teach the moving earth in any way whatever. He said he had no memory of those words. He had only been told not to hold it or defend it. And then he said a thing that was not so. He said his book did not defend the canon at all. He had meant, he said, to show the canon's reasons were weak.
18In June the Pope gave the order for the last step. The old man was to be questioned once more, and this time told that if he did not speak the truth he would be put to the torture. He could not know whether they would do it, and no one in Italy had forgotten the friar.
19He answered that he did not hold the canon's teaching, and had not held it since he was told to give it up. He said: I am here in your hands. Do with me what you please.
20The next morning they dressed him in the white shirt of a penitent and took him to a hall in the convent of the Dominicans. There were ten of them. Seven had signed the sentence. Three had not, and one of the three was the Pope's own nephew.
21The sentence was read. He was found strongly suspected of heresy. His book was forbidden. He was to be held in prison as long as it pleased the Holy Office, and to say the seven psalms of penance once a week for three years.
22Then he knelt. He was a heavy old man with bad knees, and it took him some time. They put the paper in his hand, and he laid his other hand on the Gospels and read aloud what had been written for him. He said that with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith he did "abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies," and swore never again to say or write that the earth moves.
23There is a tale that as he got up from his knees he muttered, And yet it moves. No one who was in that hall wrote it down, and it was not told until long after he was dead. Leave it out. What he truly did afterward is better than the tale.
24The news came up the hill to the convent in a letter. Sister Maria Celeste read it standing in the yard. She wrote to him that same day that the blow had pierced her to the soul. And then, being who she was, she turned to what could be done.
25First, the house. Her father's villa lay a short walk from the convent, shut up, and in it were his papers. If the officers of the Holy Office came to search it, who knew what they would find to hold against him? She could not pass her own gate. But she had been left the keys. Two of his friends came to her at the grille, and she gave the keys into their hands, and they went in and took out what ought not to be found. She told him of it in a letter, in careful words.
26Second, the psalms. Seven psalms, every week, for three years. She wrote to him that she had got a copy of his sentence and read it through, and that this part of it she could lift from him. She would say them for him.
27So through that year a young woman knelt on a stone floor each week and did penance for the crime of saying that the earth goes round the sun, so that an old man would not have to.
28He was let out of Rome after a time, to the house of an archbishop who was his friend, and then, in December, home. But not free. He was to stay in his villa to the end of his life. He might not print anything, anywhere, on any subject at all.
29She had been failing all that autumn. In the spring a sickness of the bowels went through the house. She took it in the last days of March. He walked up from the villa each day to ask for her at the gate. On the second night of April she died. She was thirty-three years old.
30He wrote to a friend that he heard her calling him, constantly. He wrote that he was struck out of the book of the living. A philosopher in Holland, hearing what had been done to him, put his own finished book on the world in a drawer and left it there. That is what one kneeling does: it shuts mouths a thousand miles off.
31Now hear what the old man did, in the years that were left.
32He went back to the first questions he had ever asked. Not the sky. The ground. How does a thing fall?
33The schools taught that heavy things fall faster than light ones, in proportion to their weight, and that each thing moves as its nature bids it. No one had measured. He had measured, long ago, and had the notes still. He had rolled bronze balls down a groove in a sloping plank, a hundred times and more, and timed them by weighing the water that ran from a jar.
34A falling thing does not just fall. It gathers speed, and it gathers it by a rule. In the first beat of time it goes one span. In the second beat, three. In the third, five; in the fourth, seven. It is the same for a ball of bronze and a ball of wood. Take away the air, and a feather would keep pace with a stone.
35And a thing thrown, a ball from a cannon, a stone from the hand, does two things at once that do not hinder each other. It goes forward evenly. It falls by the rule of the odd numbers. Put the two together and the path it draws in the air is a clean curve that the Greeks had known and named, a cousin of Kepler's long round.
36A stone, a cannonball, a drop of rain kept a law of numbers as strictly as the moons of Jupiter kept theirs. He had only ever been forbidden to speak of the sky.
37He wrote it down as another talk among the same three friends. He was going blind as he finished it; first one eye and then the other filmed over, the eyes that had first seen the mountains of the moon. By the end he could not read his own page.
38It could not be printed in any country where the Church of Rome ruled. So the pages went out of the villa under a friend's cloak, a few at a time. They went north, to the one land in Europe where a printer could set what he liked: the free cities of Holland. A printer of Leiden put it out. When a copy came back at last to the villa on the hill, its author could not see it. He held it and turned it over in his hands.
39He died in the winter of his seventy-eighth year. The Pope would not allow a monument. He was laid in a side room of a church, under the bell tower, without a stone. It was nearly a hundred years before the city moved him to a tomb fit for him. When they opened the old grave they found beside his coffin another, with the bones of a young woman. It is believed that someone who loved them both had laid his daughter there.
40Now think about the friar and the professor.
41The friar would not kneel, and burned, and they threw his ashes in the river. The professor knelt, and said a thing he knew was false with his hand on the Gospels, and lived nine years more, and in them wrote the book from which the whole knowledge of moving things was to grow.
42Do not be quick to say which was right. One kept his word whole and lost his days. One spoiled his word and kept his days, and paid for it with shame, and with the silence of every frightened scholar who heard of it. Neither price was small. You were not in that hall, old and sick.
43And do not say the Church was the enemy of the sky. The old canon was a churchman. The fathers of the Roman College looked through the glass and wrote down what was there. Three cardinals would not sign. A nun did his penance. The fault was one that every power has in it, churches and kings and schools alike: it was afraid, and it had a prison. In time that Church said plainly, before the whole world, that the judges had been wrong.
44As for the earth, it went on round the sun through all of this, at the same pace as before. No sentence was ever read that slowed it.
45The old man died in the first days of January. Before that year was out, by the calendar of the English, on Christmas morning, in a stone farmhouse in the wet green middle of England, a widow gave birth before her time to a boy so small that the women said he would fit in a quart pot.
46Now hear what came after.