Galileo nodded. Certainly the best scientific names were always either Latin or Greek. Kepler had been calling it a perspicillum.
“The root words are very old and basic,” Demisiani said, “and the compounding method as well.”
Galileo surged to his feet and raised his glass, waited for the group to notice and go quiet. “Telescopio!” he bellowed, dragging out the syllables as if calling for Mazzoleni, as if announcing the name of a champion. The group cheered, and Galileo leaned over to give the grinning Greek a hug, filled with sudden glee: of course his invention was such a new thing in the world that it needed a new name! No mere occhialino this!
“TEL! E! SCOP! IO!” Who knows how many of the surrounding hills of Rome heard the party shouting out the new word. Galileo alone could have been heard halfway to Salerno.
The very next day, word came: the pope wanted to see him. The routine at the Palazzo Firenze took on a slightly frenzied air. Sleep was difficult. Galileo didn’t even try, but watched Jupiter and considered what was to come, and so slept eventually. He woke early, before sunrise, and took a slow dawn walk in the formal garden among the statues. He performed his ablutions, ate a small meal. Perhaps on this day it was even smaller than usual. Then Cartophilus and Giuseppe helped him dress in his best clothes, choosing the darker and more formal of his two dress jackets, which were getting a lot of wear on this visit.
Niccolini came by while he was completing his toilet, to discuss the audience, and to tell him all the latest from the Avvisi, Rome’s broadsheet of rumor and gossip, concerning His Holiness’s previous week and what seemed to be on his mind. Like everyone else, Galileo already knew the pope’s background: he had been Cardinal Camillo Borghese, a heretofore obscure member of that most powerful and dangerous of families, a canon lawyer whose election as pope was so unlooked-for that he himself considered it an intercession of the Holy Ghost, and all his subsequent pontifical actions therefore divinely intended. This included the hanging of one Piccinardi, who had been so remiss as to write (though not to have published) an unauthorized biography of Paul’s predecessor, Clement VIII. That had set a tone that no one forgot.
Niccolini did not remind Galileo of that particular example of Paul’s severity, but made the point in more roundabout ways. The pontiff, he warned, was rigid, headstrong, peremptory. In these difficult years of the Counter-Reformation, he brooked no deviation from the rules and tactics laid out by the Council of Trent half a century before. In short, a pope. “He has grown a bit fat with papal power, in the usual way,” Niccolini concluded.
The audience was held at the Villa Malvasia, right where Galileo had been the night before. This was the pope’s idea; he wanted to get away from the Vatican. So Niccolini led Galileo into the villa’s giant antechamber, and there introduced him to Paul, using rather stiff and nervous phrases.
The pope was indeed fat—an immense man, nearly spherical under his red robes, his neck fleshy and as thick as his head, his piggish eyes deep in thick folds of skin. He had a triangular goatee. Galileo knelt before him and kissed the offered ring, murmuring the prayer of obeisance Niccolini had taught him.
“Rise,” Paul said gruffly, interrupting him. “Speak to us standing.”
This was a great honor. Holding his features steady, Galileo got to his feet with the least clumsiness he could manage, then bowed his head.
“Walk with us,” Paul said. “We wish to take a turn in the garden.”
Galileo followed the pope and walked with him, with Niccolini and a clutch of papal assistants and servants trailing behind. They wandered through the hilltop’s vineyard, already well known to Galileo from the many banquets of the previous weeks, and as he grew used to the big man’s blunt manner, and his slow gait, he grew more comfortable. He seemed to forget the stiletto sticking in and out of Paolo Sarpi’s head, and spoke as if to God Himself. Mostly he talked about the joy of seeing new stars in the sky, and of the blessing it was to witness the new powers now given to man by God.
“Some speak of theological problems arising from the new discoveries,” Galileo said calmly, “but really these problems are not possible, as creation is all one. God’s world and God’s word are necessarily the same, both being God’s. Any apparent discrepancies are only a matter of human misunderstanding.”
“Of course,” Paul said shortly. He did not like theology. He waved these problems aside as if they were the bees humming in the vineyard. “You have our support in this.”
After that, Galileo spoke of other things, billowing on this pronouncement like a sail filled with the wind. He became less serious, more his usual courtier persona. Then, after three quarters of an hour of this slow stroll through the vines, Paul glanced back at his secretaries and simply walked away, down to his litter at the front of the villa.
Startled by this abrupt departure, Galileo stood with his mouth hanging open, wondering if he had said something to offend. But Nic-colini assured him that this was Paul’s way—that given the frequency of his audiences, the time he saved by dispensing with the always-lengthy farewells added up to an hour or more a day. “The amazing thing is that he stayed as long as he did. If he had not been truly interested he would have left much earlier.” In truth the audience had gone wonderfully well, and Galileo had been shown great favor by being commanded to walk with the pope. It had been one of the friendliest audiences the ambassador had ever witnessed. A triumph for both Galileo and for Florence. Coming from Niccolini, who was suddenly enthusiastic, Galileo knew it must be so.
After that Galileo lost his head; everyone around him saw it. The endless parade of banquets at which he was the center of all attention and praise; the rich food; the balthazars and fiascos of wine; the long nights, when despite all the revelry he would stay up afterward to get some more sightings of Jupiter and its moons, so that even in the midst of everything else he was homing in on good orbital times for I, II, III, and IV—and yet still had to rise early on the mornings after to prepare for yet another feast. All these began to take their toll on him. The idea that he would keep his mouth shut during a banquet discussion, be it on pride or anything else, became laughable. He discoursed, he lectured, he conversed, he boasted. He had always known that he was smarter than other people, but in the years when that had not actually seemed to benefit him, he had not been so impressed by it. Now, as he became ever more full of himself, he began to use his wit like a sword, or to be more accurate, given the rough buffo tenor of his humor, like a club. Buffo became buffare as he swelled up.
Speaking one night on the uneven surface of the moon, for instance, revealed so clearly by his telescope, he reminded everyone that this was a big problem for the poor Peripatetics, as the Aristotelian orthodoxy was that everything in the heavens was perfectly geometrical, and the moon therefore a perfect sphere. Even Father Clavius, he said, had ventured, and in print, that although the visible surface of the moon was uneven, this could be illusory, and all its mountains and plains could be encased in a clear crystal shell that constituted its perfect sphericality. Galileo’s tone of voice expressed his incredulity at this opinion, and as the audience chuckled they also grew more attentive; this was treading a little close to the edge. Cartophilus had joined some of the other servants in borrowing a pillow and a bottle of wine and lying out in the vineyard, outside the cast of the torchlight bathing the long banquet table, there to watch and listen, the guests in their bejeweled finery like a tableau vivant come to life and performing for them alone. But he sat up and put the bottle down as Galileo began to poke fun at the famous old Jesuit: