mid the general popping of theological small-arms, Galileo moved steadily forward. If he had many enemies he surely had a few friends. As he once had proved more than Pisa could digest, so now he was bringing to the surface of things more truth than Padua could assimilate.
Venice too was getting uncomfortable. Even the Doge said, in reply to an enthusiastic admirer of Galileo, "Your master is not famous: he is merely notorious."
It was discovered that Galileo had been living with a woman by the name of Marina Gamba, at Venice, even while he held the professorship at Padua, and that they had a son, Vincenzo Gamba, and two daughters. One of the enemy drew a map of the heavens, showing Galileo as the sun, Marina Gamba as the moon, and around them circulated numerous little satellites, which were supposed to be their children. The picture had so great a vogue that the Doge issued an order that all copies of it be destroyed.
Of Marina Gamba we know very little; but the fact that she made entries in Galileo's journal and kept his accounts proves that she was a person of considerable intelligence; and this, too, was at a time when semi-oriental ideas prevailed and education was supposedly beyond the feminine grasp.
Galileo did not marry, for the reason that he was practically a priest, a teacher in a religious school, living with and looking after the pupils; and the custom then was that whoever was engaged in such an occupation should not wed.
The stormy opposition to Galileo was not without its advantages. We are advertised no less by our rabid enemies than by our loving friends. Cosimo the Second, Grand Duke of Tuscany, had intimated that Florence would give the great astronomer a welcome. Galileo moved to Florence under the protection of Cosimo, intending to devote all his time to Science.
In giving up schoolteaching and popular lecturing, Galileo really made a virtue of necessity. No orthodox lyceum course would tolerate him; he was neither an impersonator nor an entertainer; the stereopticon and the melodramatic were out of his line, and his passion for truth made him impossible to the many.
He was treading the path of Bruno: the accusations, the taunts and jeers, the denials and denunciations, were urging him on to an unseemly earnestness.
Father Clavius said that Galileo never saw the satellites of Jupiter until he had made an instrument that would create them; and if God had intended that men should see strange things in the heavens, He would have supplied them sufficient eyesight. The telescope was really a devil's instrument.