ine causa: periit filius meus, qui nec
jusserat dari."--_De Utilitate_, p. 339.

[195] Gian Battista seems to have boasted about the family wealth, and
thus stirred up the Seroni to demand an excessive and impossible sum. "Haec
et alia hujusmodi cum protulissem, non valere, nisi eousque, ut decretum
sit, si impetrare pacem potuissem vitae parceretur. Sed non potuit filii
stultitia, qui dum jactat opes quae non sunt, illi quod non erat
exigunt."--_De Vita Propria_, ch. x. p. 34.

[196] _De Vita Propria_, ch. x. p. 33.

CHAPTER X

CARDAN had risen to high and well-deserved fame, and this fact alone might
account for the existence of jealousy and ill-feeling amongst certain of
those whom he had passed in the race. Some men, it is true, rise to
eminence without making more than a few enemies, but Cardan was not one of
these. His foes must have been numerous and truculent, the assault they
delivered must have been deadly and overwhelming to have brought to such
piteous wreck fortunes which seemed to rest upon the solid ground of
desert. The public voice might accuse him of folly, but assuredly not of
crime; he was the victim and not the culprit; his skill as a physician was
as great as ever, but these considerations weighed little with the hounds
who were close upon his traces. Now that the tide of his fortune seemed to
be on the ebb they gathered around him. He writes: "And this, in sooth,
was the chief, the culminating misfortune of my life: forasmuch as I could
not with any show of decency be kept in my office, nor could I be
dismissed without some more valid excuse, I could neither continue to
reside in Milan with safety, nor could I depart therefrom. As I walked
about the city men looked askance at me; and whenever I might be forced to
exchange words with any one, I felt that I was a disgraced man. Thus,
being conscious that my company was unacceptable, I 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."[197]

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