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While seeking toimmortalize your fameBy the time Galileo finished writing his book about the world systems, just as December 1629 drew to a close,he had established a new closeness with his daughter. Ever a source of love and financial aid to Suor MariaCeleste, as well as the grateful recipient of her labors, he now began to do favors for her that required the skilledwork of his own hands. And she, emboldened either by her recent assistance on the manuscript for the Dialogueor by the maturity of her nearly thirty years, engaged her father with increased confidence. Before too long, thestrength of their mutual affection and deepening interdependence would submit to tests neither one of them couldyet imagine.Having moved into her private room, Suor Maria Celeste found it spacious enough to accommodate a smallparty of sisters at afternoon needlework. The single, small, high window, however, admitted only a dim light,and so she asked Galileo if she might send him the window frames to be refitted with newly waxed linen. “I donot doubt your loving willingness in this matter,” she said of her request, “but the fact that the work is rathermore suited to a carpenter than a philosopher gives me pause.”She also prevailed on him several times to repair the convent’s temperamental clock. He fixed it once when itschime failed to wake the sacristan (who in turn failed to summon the other sisters from sleep to the MidnightOffice) and again whenever it developed a different quirk. “Vincenzio worked on our clock for a few days, butsince then it sounds worse than ever,” she told Galileo on January 21, 1630. “For my part, I would judge thedefect to be in the cord, which, owing to its being old, no longer glides. Still, as I am unable to fix it, I turn itover to you, so that you can diagnose its deficiency, and repair it. Perhaps the real defect was with me, in notknowing the right action to take, which is the reason I have left the counterweights attached this time, suspectingthat perhaps they are not in their proper place; in any event I beseech you to send it back as quickly as youpossibly can, because otherwise these nuns will not let me live.”Galileo’s brother, Michelangelo, had purchased the convent’s portable clock, which stood about two feet tall, inGermany. Like all mechanical timekeepers of its day, this one offered no precision improvement over thesundial, though it did mark time through the dark or the rain and strike the hour aloud.Italians numbered the hours of the seventeenth century from one to twenty-four, beginning at sunset, so that ifSuor Maria Celeste told her father she was “writing at the seventh hour,” she meant she worked far into thenight. And when she reported the death of an ailing nun “at the fourteenth hour” of a November Sunday, the timeindicated was about half past six in the morning.“The clock that traveled back and forth between us so many times now runs beautifully,” Suor Maria Celestesaid in a thank-you note on February 19, “its flaw having been my fault, as I adjusted it improperly; I sent it toyou in a covered basket with a towel, and have not seen either of these since; if you find them by chance aboutyour house, Sire, please do return them.” *As he performed these services, Galileo initiated the rigmarole of licensing and printing his recently completedbook. Since Prince Cesi of the Lyncean Academy intended to publish the Dialogue in Rome, the work wouldhave to undergo censorship there in the Holy City, despite the fact that its author lived in Florence. Galileo, nowalmost sixty-six, planned personally to deliver the manuscript to the relevant authorities at the Vatican. ButRome was a distant country, and an old man risked his life adding wintry weather to the perils inherent in atwo-hundred-mile journey.In February, while Galileo waited for spring, Pope Urban VIII unexpectedly issued a formal salute to his “honestlife and morals and other praiseworthy merits of uprightness and virtue.” With these words Urban gave Galileo aprebend in Pisa—similar but unrelated to the previously granted canonry at Brescia, which had bounced fromVincenzio to Vincenzio and then out of the Galilei family bounds. Rather than accept the Pisan prebend rightaway, however, Galileo tried instead to reclaim the Brescian one, now that its incumbent had died, for his infant