Jerome Cardan | Page 4

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, before I had fully recovered my health,
I fell down-stairs (we were then living in the Via dei Maini), with a
hammer in my hand, and by this accident I hurt the left side of my
forehead, injuring the bone and causing a scar which remains to this
day. Before I had recovered from this mishap I was sitting on the
threshold of the house when a stone, about as long and as broad as a nut,
fell down from the top of a high house next door and wounded my head
just where my hair grew very thickly on the left side.
"At the beginning of my tenth year my father changed this house,
which had proved a very unlucky one for me, for another in the same
street, and there I abode for three whole years. But my ill luck still
followed me, for my father once more caused me to go about with him
as his famulus, and would never allow me on any pretext to escape this
task. I should hesitate to say that he did this through cruelty; for, taking
into consideration what ensued, you may perchance be brought to see
that this action of his came to pass rather through the will of Heaven
than through any failing of his own. I must add too that my mother and
my aunt were fully in agreement with him in his treatment of me. In
after times, however, he dealt with me in much milder fashion, for he
took to live with him two of his nephews, wherefore my own labour
was lessened by the amount of service he exacted from these. Either I
did not go out at all, or if we all went out together the task was less
irksome.

"When I had completed my sixteenth year--up to which time I served
my father constantly--we once more changed our house, and dwelt with
Alessandro Cardano next door to the bakery of the Bossi. My father
had two other nephews, sons of a sister of his, one named Evangelista,
a member of the Franciscan Order, and nearly seventy years of age, and
the other Otto Cantone, a farmer of the taxes, and very rich. The
last-named, before he died, wished to leave me his sole heir; but this
my father forbad, saying that Otto's wealth had been ill gotten;
wherefore the estate was distributed according to the directions of the
surviving brother."[17]
This, told as nearly as may be in his own words, is the story of Cardan's
birth and childhood and early discipline, a discipline ill calculated to let
him grow up to useful and worthy manhood. It must have been a
wretched spring of life. Many times he refers to the hard slavery he
underwent in the days when he was forced to carry his father's bag
about the town, and tells how he had to listen to words of insult cast at
his mother's name.[18] Like most boys who lead solitary lives,
unrelieved by the companionship of other children, he was driven in
upon himself, and grew up into a fanciful imaginative youth, a lover of
books rather than of games, with an old head upon his young shoulders.
After such a training it was only natural that he should be transformed
from a nervous hysterical child into an embittered, cross-grained man,
profligate and superstitious at the same time. Abundant light is thrown
upon every stage of his career, for few men have left a clearer picture
of themselves in their written words, and nowhere is Cardan, from the
opening to the closing scene, so plainly exhibited as in the De Vita
Propria, almost the last work which came from his pen. It has been
asserted that this book, written in the twilight of senility by an old man
with his heart cankered by misfortune and ill-usage, and his brain upset
by the dread of real or fancied assaults of foes who lay in wait for him
at every turn, is no trustworthy guide, even when bare facts are in
question, and undoubtedly it would be undesirable to trust this record
without seeking confirmation elsewhere. This confirmation is nearly
always at hand, for there is hardly a noteworthy event in his career
which he does not refer to constantly in the more autobiographic of his
works. The De Vita Propria is indeed ill arranged and full of

inconsistencies, but in spite of its imperfections, it presents its subject
as clearly and effectively as Benvenuto Cellini is displayed in his own
work. The rough sketch of a great master