arm and
intermittent affection for their child. Nevertheless they were in a way
indulgent to him. His father permitted him to remain in bed till the
second hour of the day had struck, or rather forbade him to rise before
this time--an indulgence which worked well for the preservation of his
health. He adds that in after times he always thought of his father as
possessing the kindlier nature of the two.[6]

It would seem from the passage above written, as well as from certain
others subsequent, that Jerome had little affection for his mother; and
albeit he neither chides nor reproaches her, he never refers to her in
terms so appreciative and loving as those which he uses in lamenting the
death of his harsh and tyrannical father. In the _Geniturarum Exempla_[7]
he says that, seeing he is writing of a woman, he will confine his remarks
to saying that she was ingenious, of good parts, generous, upright, and
loving towards her children. Perhaps the fact that his father died early,
while his mother lived on for many years, and was afterwards a member of
his household--together with his wife--may account for the colder tone of
his remarks while writing about her. She was the widow of a certain
Antonio Alberio,[8] and during her marriage had borne him three children,
Tommaso, Catilina, and Joanni Ambrogio; but when Jerome was a year old all
three of these died of the plague within the space of a few weeks.[9] He
himself narrowly escaped death from the same cause, and this attack he
attributes to an inherited tendency from his mother, she having suffered
from the same disease during her girlhood. There seems to have been born
to Fazio and Chiara another son, who died at birth.[10]

Jerome Cardan was born on September 24, 1501, between half-past six
o'clock and a quarter to seven in the evening. In the second chapter of
his autobiography he gives the year as 1500, and in _De Utilitate_, p.
347, he writes the date as September 23, but on all other occasions the
date first written is used. Before he saw the light malefic influences
were at work against him. His mother, urged on no doubt by the desire to
conceal her shame, and persuaded by evil counsellors, drank a potion of
abortive drugs in order to produce miscarriage,[11] but Nature on this
occasion was not to be baulked. In recording the circumstances of his
birth he writes at some length in the jargon of astrology to show how the
celestial bodies were leagued together so as to