JEROME CARDAN 



CHAPTER I 



LIKE certain others of the illustrious personages who 

 flourished in his time, Girolamo Cardano, or, as he has 

 become to us by the unwritten law of nomenclature, 

 Jerome Cardan, was fated to suffer the burden and 

 obloquy of bastardy. 1 He was born at Pavia from the 

 illicit union of Fazio Cardano, a Milanese jurisconsult 

 and mathematician of considerable repute, and a young 

 widow, whose maiden name had been Chiara Micheria, 

 his father being fifty-six, and his mother thirty-seven 

 years of age at his birth. The family of Fazio was settled 

 at Gallarate, a town in Milanese territory, and was one 

 which, according to Jerome's contention, could lay claim 

 to considerable antiquity and distinction. He prefers a 

 claim of descent from the house of Castillione, founding 

 the same upon an inscription on the apse of the principal 



1 Bayle is unwilling to admit Cardan's illegitimate birth. In 

 De Consolatione, Opera, torn. i. p. 619 (Lyons, 1663), Cardan writes 

 in reference to the action of the Milanese College of Physicians: 

 " Medicorum collegium, suspitione oborta, quod (tam mate a patre 

 tractatus) spurius essem, repellebat." Bayle apparently had not 

 read the De Consolatione, as he quotes the sentence as the work of 

 a modern writer, and affirms that the word " suspitio '' would not 

 have been used had the fact been notorious. But in the Dialogus 

 de Morte, Opera, torn. i. p. 676, Cardan declares that his father 

 openly spoke of him as a bastard. 



B 



