When Cardan received the first letter from Scotland the manuscript of the _De Varietate_ must have been ready or nearly ready for the printer; but, for some reason or other, he determined to postpone the publication of the work until he should have finished with the Archbishop, and took his manuscript with him when he set forth on his travels. In 1550 there came another break in Cardan's life as Professor at Pavia, the reason being the usual one of dearth of funds.[134] In 1551 he went back for a short time, but the storms of war were rising on all sides, and the luckless city of Pavia was in the very centre of the disturbance. The French once more crossed the Alps, pillaging and devastating the country, their ostensible mission being the vindication of the rights of Ottavio Farnese to the Duchy of Parma. Ottavio had quarrelled with Pope Julius III., who called upon the Emperor for assistance. War was declared, and Charles set to work to annex Parma and Piacenza as well to the Milanese. Cardan withdrew to Milan at the end of the year. Gian Battista had now completed his medical course, so there was now no reason why he should continue to live permanently at Pavia. Moreover at this juncture he seems to have been strongly moved to augment the fame which he had already won in Mathematics and Medicine by some great literary achievement, and he worked diligently with this object in view.[135] At the beginning of November 1551, a letter came to him from Cassanate,[136] a Franco-Spanish physician, who was at that time in attendance upon the Archbishop of St. Andrews, requesting him to make the journey to Paris, and there to meet the Archbishop, who was suffering from an affection of the lungs. The fame of Cardan as a physician had spread as far as Scotland, and the Archbishop had set his heart on consulting him. Cassanate's letter is of prodigious length. After a diffuse exordium he proceeds to praise in somewhat fulsome terms the _De Libris Propriis_ and the treatises _De Sapientia_[137] and _De Consolatione_, which had been given to him by a friend when he was studying at Toulouse in 1549. He had just read the _De Subtilitate_, and was inflamed with desire to become acquainted with everything which Cardan had ever written. But what struck Cassanate more than anything was a passage in the _De Sapientia_ on a medical question, which he extracts and incorporates in his epistle. Cardan writes there: "But if my profession itself will not give me a living, nor open out an avenue to some other career, I must needs set my brains to work, to find therein something unknown hitherto, for the charm of novelty is unfailing, something which would prove of the highest utility in a particular case. In Milan, while I was fighting the battle against hostile prejudice, and was unable to earn enough to pay my way (so much harder is the lot of manifest than of hidden merit, and no man is honoured as a prophet in his own country), I brought to light much fresh