The Torture.
The relators of the torture fable ask us to believe that an old man bending under the weight of seventy years, after undergoing imprisonment and mental anguish, suffered the peine forte et dure of torture on the 21st of June, and on the next day was capable of remaining more than an hour on his knees to receive his sentence, and then, unaided, arose, stamped his foot, and thundered out, "E pur si muove!" Truly a vigorous performance, but not more hardy than the story which relates it.
No; these fables can no longer have place in history; and we know positively that Galileo, who, on the evening of June 24th, after his three days' detention at the holy office, (the sentence of imprisonment being immediately commuted by the pope,) was conducted by Niccolini to the Villa Medici, and who, on the 6th of July, old as he was, was able to walk four miles without inconvenience, could not have been tortured on the 21st of June.
"Those who undertake," says the German Protestant Von Reumont, "to accuse the Inquisition on this point, are forced to have recourse to fiction."
Lord Brougham, after an examination of the case, says, in his Analytical View of the Principia, that "the supposition of Galileo having been tortured is entirely disproved by Galileo's own account of the lenity with which he was treated."
Biot dismisses the matter thus: "II y a là une réunion d'invraisemblances qui ne permet pas de concevoir raisonnablement un soupçon pareil." [Footnote 146]
[Footnote 146: "There is here such a conjunction of improbabilities as to exclude all reasonable possibility of such a suspicion.">[
Galileo survived his sentence eight years. Is it credible that, during that long period spent in intimate personal intercourse and literary correspondence with his friend, no word or hint of complaint of such an outrage as torture should have escaped his lips?
Castelli was constantly with him to the hour of his death, and heard no whisper of it.
In August, 1638, writing to Bernegger, Galileo could boast that neither the freedom nor the vigor of his spirit was repressed.