JEROME CARDAN 33 



scant attention the while to my studies. I feared no 

 hurt, I paid my respects to the Venetian gentlemen 

 living in the town, and frequented their houses. I, too, 

 was in the very flower of my age, and no time could 

 have been more delightful than this which lasted for 

 five years and a half." 1 



But for almost the whole of this period Cardan was 

 labouring under a physical misfortune concerning which 

 he writes in another place in terms of almost savage 

 bitterness. During ten years of his life, from his twenty- 

 first to his thirty-first year, he suffered from the loss of 

 virile power, a calamity which he laments in the following 

 words : "And I maintain that this misfortune was to me 

 the worst of evils. Compared with it neither the harsh 

 servitude under my father, nor unkindness, nor the 

 troubles of litigation, nor the wrongs done me by my 

 fellow-townsmen, nor the scorn of my fellow-physicians, 

 nor the ill things falsely spoken against me, nor all the 

 measureless mass of possible evil, could have brought me 

 to such despair, and hatred of life, and distaste of all 

 pleasure, and lasting sorrow. I bitterly wept this misery, 

 that I must needs be a laughing-stock, that marriage 

 must be denied me, and that I must ever live in solitude. 

 You ask for the cause of this misfortune, a matter which 

 I am quite unable to explain. Because of the reasons 

 just mentioned, and because I dreaded that men should 

 know how grave was the ill afflicting me, I shunned the 

 society of women ; and, on account of this habit, the 

 same miserable public scandal which I desired so 

 earnestly to avoid, arose concerning me, and brought 

 upon me the suspicion of still more nefarious practices : 



1 De Vita Propria, ch. xxxi. p. 92. In taking the other view he 

 writes : "Vitamducebam in Saccensi oppido, ut mihi videbar, infeli- 

 cissime." Opera, torn. i. p. 97. 



D 



