During those terrible days, when his son had just died a felon's death, and when he himself was haunted by the real dangers which beset him, and almost maddened by the signs and tokens which seemed to tell of others to come, the belief which Fazio his father had nourished easily found a lodgment in his shaken and bewildered brain. In the _Dialogus de Humanis Consiliis_, one of the speakers tells of a certain man who is clearly meant to be Cardan himself. The speaker goes on to say that he is sure this man is attended by a genius, which manifested itself to him somewhat late in his life. "Aforetime, indeed, it had been wont to convey to him warnings in dreams and by certain noises. What greater proof of his power could there be than the cure of this man, without the use of drugs, of an intestinal rupture on the right side? If indeed it had not fared with him thus, after his son's death, he would at once have passed out of this life, whereby many and great evils might have come to pass. He was freed also from another troublesome ailment. In sooth, so many and so mighty are the wonderful things which had befallen him, that I, who am very intimate with him (and he himself thinks the same), am constrained to believe that he is attended by a genius, great and powerful and rare, and that he is not the master of his own actions. What he would have, he has not; and what he has, he would not have chosen, or even wished for. This thing causes him much trouble, but he submits when he reflects that all things are God's handiwork." The speaker ends by saying that he never heard of any others thus attended, save this man, and his father before him, and Socrates.[238]