e always fell sick, and lay some time in mortal danger.
"When I was seven years old my father and my mother were then living
apart--my kinsfolk determined, for some reason or other, to give over
beating me, though perchance a touch of the whip 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.[16] 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 my health, I fell down-stairs (we were
then living in the Via dei Maini), with a hammer in my hand, and by this
accident I hurt the left side of my forehead, injuring the bone and
causing a scar which remains to this day. Before I had recovered from this
mishap I was sitting on the threshold of the house when a stone, about as
long and as broad as a nut, fell down from the top of a high house next
door and wounded my head just where my hair grew very thickly on the left
side.

"At the beginning of my tenth year my father changed this house, which had
proved a very unlucky one for me, for another in the same street, and