Jerome Cardan: A Biographical Study. W. G. Waters
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 often performs its task more thoroughly than the finished painting, and Cardan's autobiography is a fragment of this sort. It lets pass in order of procession the moody neglected boy in Fazio's ill-ordered house, the student at Pavia, the youthful Rector of the Paduan Gymnasium, plunging when just across the threshold of life into criminal excess of Sardanapalean luxury, the country doctor at Sacco and afterwards at Gallarate, starving amongst his penniless patients, the University professor, the famous physician for whose services the most illustrious monarchs in Europe came as suppliants in vain, the father broken by family disgrace and calamity, and the old man, disgraced and suspected and harassed by persecutors who shot their arrows in the dark, but at the same time tremblingly anxious to set down the record of his days before the night should descend.
Until he had completed his nineteenth year Jerome continued to dwell under the roof which for the time being might give shelter to his parents. The emoluments which Fazio drew from his profession were sufficient for the family wants—he himself being a man of simple tastes; wherefore Jerome was not forced, in addition to his other youthful troubles, to submit to that execrata paupertas and its concomitant miseries which vexed him in later years. To judge from his conduct in the matter of Otto Cantone's estate, Fazio seems to have been as great a despiser of wealth as his son proved to be afterwards. His virtue, such as it was, must have been the outcome of one of those hard cold natures, with wants few and trifling, and none of those tastes which cry out daily for some new toy, only to be procured by money. The fact that he made his son run after him through the streets of Milan in place of a servant is not a conclusive proof of avarice; it may just as likely mean that the old man was indifferent and callous to whatever suffering he might inflict upon his young son, and indisposed to trouble himself about searching for a hireling to carry his bag. The one indication we gather of his worldly wisdom is his dissatisfaction that his son was firmly set to follow medicine rather than jurisprudence, a step which would involve the loss of the stipend of one hundred crowns a year which he drew for his lectureship, an income which he had hoped might be continued to a son of his after his death.[19]
Amidst the turmoil and discomfort of what must at the best have been a most ill-regulated household, the boy's education was undertaken by his father in such odds and ends of time as he might find to spare for the task.[20] What with the hardness and irritability of the teacher, and the peevishness inseparable from the pupil's physical feebleness and morbid overwrought mental habit, these hours of lessons must have been irksome to both, and of little benefit. "In the meantime my father taught me orally the Latin tongue as well as the rudiments of Arithmetic, Geometry, and Astrology. But he allowed me to sleep well into the day, and he himself would always remain abed till nine o'clock. But one habit of his appeared to me likely to lead to grave consequences, to wit the way he had of lending to others anything which belonged to him. Part of these loans, which were made to insolvents, he lost altogether; and the residue, lent to divers persons in high places, could only be recovered with much trouble and no little danger, and with loss of all interest on the same. I know not whether he acted in this wise by the advice of that familiar spirit[21] whose services he retained for eight-and-thirty years. What afterwards came to pass showed that my father treated me, his son, rightly in all things relating to education, seeing that I had a keen intelligence. For with boys of this sort it is well to make use of the bit as though you were dealing with mules. Beyond this he was witty and diverting in his conversation, and given to the telling of stories and strange occurrences well worth notice. He told me many things about familiar spirits, but what part of these were true I know not; but assuredly tales of this sort, wonderful in themselves and artfully put together, delighted me marvellously.
"But what chiefly deserved condemnation in my father was that he brought up certain other youths with the intention of leaving to them his goods in case I should die; which thing, in sooth, meant nothing less than the exposure of myself to open danger through plots of the parents of the boys aforesaid, on account of the prize offered. Over this affair my father and my mother quarrelled grievously, and finally decided to live apart. Whereupon my mother, stricken by this mental vexation, and troubled at intervals with what I deem to have been an hysterical affection, fell one day full on the back of her neck, and struck her head upon the floor, which was composed of tiles. It was two or three hours before she came round, and indeed her recovery was little short of miraculous, especially as at the end of her seizure she foamed much at the mouth.
"In the meantime I altered the whole drift of this tragedy by a pretended adoption of the religious life, for I became for a time a member of the mendicant Franciscan brotherhood. But at the beginning of my twenty-first year[22]