154 JEROME CARDAN. 



by which he had been despised. He became by right 

 the medical adviser of the great men of the place. The 

 governor, Gonzaga, courted him soon after his return, on 

 behalf of his relative, the Duke of Mantua. He pro- 

 posed to buy his service to the duke in perpetuity, for 

 thirty thousand crowns, of which the first thousand were 

 displayed at once : Cardan refused them. Gonzaga saw 

 no harm in such an offer, but to the philosopher it sounded 

 like an insult. He refused it steadily. Ferrante was 

 astonished and displeased. Having in vain laboured to 

 persuade Jerome, he betook himself to threats, but the 

 physician, who refused to sell himself into a kind of 

 bondage, explained boldly why it was that *' he would 

 rather die than be disgraced." To the credit of the 

 governor, it is to be added that he liked him afterwards 

 the better for his self-assertion 1 . 



From this point in Cardan's career we may glance 

 back upon the past, and illustrate the change in his con- 

 dition by referring to a few small objects of ambition not 

 yet specified, which he had in the days of his adversity 

 failed to attain. When he was leaving Sacco he had 

 some designs upon the village or town of Caravaggio, 

 where he would have received something less than a 

 stipend of eighty crowns a year. He had been willing 

 to take fifty-five crowns for a like position at Mazenta, 

 1 De Vita Propria, cap. xxix. 



