wards stood me in good stead--but bore
my misfortunes with mind undisturbed."[59]

Cardan's worldly fortunes were now at their lowest ebb. Burdened with a
wife and child, he had found it necessary to return, after a second futile
attempt to gain a living by his calling in a country town, to Milan, his
"stony-hearted step-mother." If he had reckoned on his mother's bounty he
was doomed to disappointment, for Chiara was an irritable woman, and as
her son's temper was none of the sweetest, it is almost certain that they
must have quarrelled occasionally. It is hard to believe that they could
have been on good terms at this juncture, otherwise she would scarcely
have allowed him to take his wife and child to what was then the public
workhouse of the city;[60] but this place was his only refuge, and in
October 1534 he was glad to shelter himself beneath its roof.

There was in Cardan's nature a strong vein of melancholy, and up to the
date now under consideration he had been the victim of a fortune
calculated to deepen rather than disperse his morbid tendencies. A proof
of his high courage and dauntless perseverance may be deduced from the
fact that neither poverty, nor the sense of repeated failure, nor the
flouts of the Milanese doctors, prevailed at any time to quench in his
heart the love of fame,[61] or to disabuse him of the conviction that he,
poverty-stricken wretch as he was, would before long bind Fortune to his
chariot-wheels, and would force the adverse world to acknowledge him as
one of its master minds. The dawn was now not far distant, but the last
hours of his night of misfortune were very dark. The worst of the
struggle, as far as the world was concerned, was over, and the sharpest
sorrows and the heaviest disgrace reserved for Cardan in the future were
to be those nourished in his own household.

Writing of his way of life and of the vices and defects of his character,
he says: "If a man shall fail in his carriage before the world as he fails
in other things, who shall correct him? Thus I myself will do duty for
that one leper who alone out of the ten who were healed came back to our
Lord. By reasoning of this sort, Physicians and Astrologers trace back the
origin of our natural habits to our primal qualities, to the training of
our will, and to our occupations and conversation. In every man all these
are found in proper ratio to the time of life of each individual;
nevertheless it will be easy to discern