Jerome Cardan | Page 3

how the celestial bodies were leagued together so as to mar him both in body and mind. "Wherefore I ought, according to every rule, to have been born a monster, and, under the circumstances, it was no marvel that it was found necessary to tear me from the womb in order to bring me into the world. Thus was I born, or rather dragged from my mother's body. I was to all outward seeming dead, with my head covered with black curly hair. I was brought round by being plunged in a bath of heated wine, a remedy which might well have proved hurtful to any other infant. My mother lay three whole days in labour, but at last gave birth to me, a living child."[12]
The sinister influences of the stars soon began to manifest their power. Before Jerome had been many days in the world the woman into whose charge he had been given was seized with the plague and died the same day, whereupon his mother took him home with her. The first of his bodily ailments,--the catalogue of the same which he subsequently gives is indeed a portentous one,[13]--was an eruption of carbuncles on the face in the form of a cross, one of the sores being set on the tip of the nose; and when these disappeared, swellings came. Before the boy was two months old his godfather, Isidore di Resta of Ticino, gave him into the care of another nurse who lived at Moirago, a town about seven miles from Milan, but here again ill fortune attended him. His body began to waste and his stomach to swell because the nurse who gave him suck was herself pregnant.[14] A third foster-mother was found for him, and he remained with her till he was weaned in his third year.
When he was four years of age he was taken to Milan to be under the care of his mother, who, with her sister, Margarita, was living in Fazio's house; but whether she was at this time legally married to him or not there is no evidence to show. In recording this change he remarks that he now came under a gentler discipline from the hands of his mother and his aunt, but immediately afterwards proclaims his belief that the last-named must have been born without a gall bladder, a remark somewhat difficult to apply, seeing he frequently complains afterwards of her harshness. It must be remembered, however, that these details are taken from a record of the writer's fifth year set down when he was past seventy.[15] He quotes certain lapses from kindly usage, as for instance when it happened that he was beaten by his father or his mother without a cause. After much chastisement he always fell sick, and lay some time in mortal danger. "When I was seven years old my father and my mother were then living apart--my kinsfolk determined, for some reason or other, to give over beating me, though perchance a touch of the whip might then have done me no harm. But ill-fortune was ever hovering around me; she let my tribulation take a different shape, but she did not remove it. My father, having hired a house, took me and my mother and my aunt to live with him, and made me always accompany him in his rounds about the city. On this account I, being taken at this tender age with my weak body from a life of absolute rest and put to hard and constant work, was seized at the beginning of my eighth year with dysentery and fever, an ailment which was at that time epidemic in our city. Moreover I had eaten by stealth a vast quantity of sour grapes. But after I had been visited by the physicians, Bernabo della Croce and Angelo Gyra, there seemed to be some hope of my recovery, albeit both my parents, and my aunt as well, had already bewept me as one dead.
"At this season my father, who was at heart a man of piety, was minded to invoke the divine assistance of San Girolamo (commending me to the care of the Saint in his prayers) rather than trust to the working of that familiar spirit which, as he was wont to declare openly, was constantly in attendance upon him. The reason of this change in his treatment of me I never cared to inquire. It was during the time of my recovery from this sickness, that the French celebrated their triumph after defeating the Venetians on the banks of the Adda, which spectacle I was allowed to witness from my window.[16] After this my father freed me of the task of going with him on his rounds. But the anger of Juno was not yet exhausted; for,