JEROME CARDAN 7 



might then have done me no harm. But ill-fortune 

 was ever hovering around me; she let my tribulation 

 take a different shape, but she did not remove it. My 

 father, having hired a house, took me and my mother 

 and my aunt to live with him, and made me always 

 accompany him in his rounds about the city. On this 

 account I, being taken at this tender age with my weak 

 body from a life of absolute rest and put to hard and 

 constant work, was seized at the beginning of my eighth 

 year with dysentery and fever, an ailment which was at 

 that time epidemic in our city. Moreover I had eaten 

 by stealth a vast quantity of sour grapes. But after I 

 had been visited by the physicians, Bernabo della Croce 

 and Angelo Gyra, there seemed to be some hope of my 

 recovery, albeit both my parents, and my aunt as well, 

 had already bewept me as one dead. 



" At this season my father, who was at heart a man of 

 piety, was minded to invoke the divine assistance of San 

 Girolamo (commending me to the care of the Saint in 

 his prayers) rather than trust to the working of that 

 familiar spirit which, as he was wont to declare openly, 

 was constantly in attendance upon him. The reason of 

 this change in his treatment of me I never cared to 

 inquire. It was during the time of my recovery from 

 this sickness, that the French celebrated their triumph 

 after defeating the Venetians on the banks of the Adda, 

 which spectacle I was allowed to witness from my 

 window. 1 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 



1 The illness would have occurred about October 1508, and the 

 victory of the Adda was on May 14, 1509. This fact fixes his birth 

 in 1501, and shows that his illness must have lasted six or seven 

 months. 



