1 82 JEROME CARDAN 



shunned my friends. I had no notion what I should do, 

 or whither I should go. I cannot say whether I was more 

 wretched in myself than I was odious to my fellows." 1 



Cardan gathered a certain amount of consolation from 

 meditating over the ills which befell all those who were 

 concerned in Gian Battista's fate. The Senator Falcutius, 

 a man of the highest character in other respects, died 

 about four months later, exclaiming with his dying 

 breath that he was undone through the brutal ignorance 

 of a certain man, who had been eager for the death 

 sentence. One Hala shortly afterwards followed Fal- 

 cutius to the grave, having fallen sick with phthisis 

 immediately after the trial. Rigone, the President of 

 the Court, lost his wife, and gave her burial bereft of the 

 usual decencies of the last rite, a thing which Cardan 

 says he could not have believed, had he not been assured 

 of the same by the testimony of many witnesses. It 

 was reported too, that Rigone himself, though a man 

 of good reputation, was forced to feign death in order 

 to escape accusation on some charge or other. His only 

 son had died shortly before, so it might be said with 

 reason that his house was as it were thrown under an 

 evil spell by the avenging Furies of the youth whom he 

 had sent to die in a dungeon. Again, within a few days 

 the prosecutor himself, Evangelista Seroni, the man who 

 was the direct cause of his son-in-law's death, was thrown 

 into prison, and, having been deprived of his office of 

 debt collector, became a beggar. Moreover, the son 

 whom he specially loved was condemned to death in 

 Sicily, and died on the gallows. Public and private 

 calamity fell upon the Duca di Sessa, 2 the Governor of 



1 De Vita Propria, ch. xxvii. p. 71. 



2 "Quin etiam dominusac Princepsalioquingenerosus et humanus, 

 cum ipsum ob invidiam meam et accusatorum multitudinem dese- 



