ed by the payment
of a sum of money entirely beyond Cardan's means, their demand having been
stimulated through some foolish boasting of the family wealth by the
condemned prisoner.[195] Cardan was powerless to arrest the course of the
law, and Gian Battista was executed in prison on the night of April 7,
1560.

In the whole world of biographic record it would be hard to find a figure
more pathetic than that of Cardan fighting for the life of his unworthy
son. No other episode of his career wins from the reader sympathy half so
deep. The experience of these terrible days certainly shook still further
off its balance a mind not over steady in its calmest moments. Cardan
wrote voluminously and laboriously over Gian Battista's fate, but in his
dirges and lamentations he never lets fall an expression of detestation or
regret with regard to the crime itself: all his soul goes out in
celebrating the charm and worth of his son, and in moaning over the ruin
of mind, body, and estate which had fallen upon him through this cruel
stroke of adverse fate. When he sat down to write the _De Vita Propria_,
Cardan was strongly possessed with the belief that all through his career
he had been subject to continuous and extraordinary persecution at the
hands of his enemies. The entire thirtieth chapter is devoted to the
description of these plots and assaults. In his earlier writings he
attributes his calamities to evil fate and the influences of the stars;
his wit was indeed great, and assuredly it was allied to madness, so it is
not impossible that these personal foes who dogged his steps were largely
the creatures of an old man's monomaniacal fancies. The persecution, he
affirms, began to be so bitter as to be almost intolerable after the
condemnation of Gian Battista. "Certain members of the Senate afterwards
admitted (though I am sure they would be loth that men should hold them
capable of such a wish) that they condemned my son to death in the hope
that I might be killed likewise, or at least might lose my wits, and the
powers above can bear witness how nearly one of these ills befell me. I
would that you should know what these times were like, and what practices
were in fashion. I am well assured that I never wrought offence to any of
these men, even by my shadow. I took advice how I might put forward a
defence of some kind on my son's behalf, but what arguments would have
prevailed with minds so exasperated against me as were theirs