full effect of which he did not experience
all at once. In the closing days of 1546 he lost his wife. There is very
scant record of her life and character in any of her husband's
writings,[83] although he wrote at great length concerning her father; and
the few words that are to be found here and there favour the view that she
was a good wife and mother. That Jerome could have been an easy husband to
live with under any circumstances it is hard to believe. Lucia's life, had
it been prolonged, might have been more free of trouble as the wife of a
famous and wealthy physician; but it was her ill fortune to be the
companion of her husband only in those dreary, terrible days at Sacco and
Gallarate, and in the years of uncertainty which followed the final return
to Milan. In the last-named period there was at least the Plat lectureship
standing between them and starvation; but children increased the while in
the nursery, and manuscripts in the desk of the physician without
patients, and Lucia's short life was all consumed in this weary time of
waiting for fame and fortune which, albeit hovering near, seemed destined
to mock and delude the seeker to the end. Cardan was before all else a man
of books and of the study, and it is not rare to find that one of this
sort makes a harsh unsympathetic husband. The qualities which he
attributes to himself in his autobiography suggest that to live with a man
cursed with such a nature would have been difficult even in prosperity,
and intolerable in trouble and privation. But fretful and irascible as
Cardan shows himself to have been, there was a warm-hearted, affectionate
side to his nature. He was capable of steadfast devotion to all those to
whom his love had ever been given. His reverence for the memory of his
tyrannical and irascible father had been noted already, and a still more
remarkable instance of his fidelity and love will have to be considered
when the time comes to deal with the crowning tragedy of his life. If
Cardan had this tender side to his nature, if he could speak tolerant and
even laudatory words concerning such a father as Fazio Cardano, and show
evidences of a love strong as death in the fight he made for the life of
his ill-starred and unworthy son, it may be hoped--in spite of his almost
unnatural silence concerning her--that he gave Lucia some of that
tenderness and sympathy which her life of hard toil and heavy sacrifice so
richly deserved; and that even in the da