On 5th November Galileo was attacked by an insidious hectic fever, which slowly but surely brought him to the grave.[594] Violent pains in his limbs threw him on a sick bed, from which he did not rise again. In spite of all these sufferings, which were augmented by constant palpitation of the heart and almost entire sleeplessness, his active mind scarcely rested for a moment, and he spent the long hours of perpetual darkness in constant scientific conversation and discussions with Torricelli and Viviani, who noted down the last utterances of the dying man with pious care. As they chiefly related to the “Dialoghi delle Nuove Scienze,” they are to be found in the two supplementary Dialogues added to that work.
On 8th January, 1642, the year of Newton’s birth, having received the last sacraments and the benediction of Urban VIII., Galileo breathed his last, at the age of nearly seventy-eight years. His son Vincenzo, his daughter-in-law Sestilia Bocchineri, his pupils Torricelli and Viviani, and the parish priest, were around his bed.[595] And when Vincenzo closed his father’s sightless eyes for their last long sleep, they gave not a thought at Rome to the severe loss sustained by science by Galileo’s death, but only prepared in hot haste to guard the interests of the Church, and as far as it lay in their power, to persecute the Cæsar of science even beyond the grave. The aim was now, as far as possible, to extinguish his memory, with which so many perils for Rome were bound up.
Even around his bier the struggle began. Some pettifogging theologians went so far as to wish that Christian burial should be denied him, and that his will should be declared null and void, for a man condemned on suspicion of heresy, and who had died as a prisoner of the Inquisition, had no claim to rest in consecrated ground, nor could he possess testamentary rights. A long consultation of the ecclesiastical authorities in Florence, and two circumstantial opinions from them were required to put these fanatics to silence.
Immediately after Galileo’s death his numerous pupils and admirers made a collection for a handsome monument to the famous Tuscan. The Inquisitor, Fanano, at once sent word of this to Rome, and received a reply by order of the Pope, dated 23rd January, that he was to bring it in some way to the ears of the Grand Duke that it was not at all suitable to erect a monument to Galileo, who was sentenced to do penance by the tribunal of the Holy Office and had died during that sentence; good Catholics would be scandalised, and the reputation of the Grand Duke for piety might suffer. But if this did not take effect, the Inquisitor must see that there was nothing in the inscription insulting to the reputation of the holy tribunal, and exercise the same care about the funeral sermon.[596]