Monsignore Cristoforo Rischio

Cristoforo Rischio, called Créso by the crowd, holds a three-hour clinic twice weekly in the open daylight, a skeleton swaying beside him and skulls grinning below. He is no diplomaed physician, yet may have mastered enough Materia Medica to effect real cures — which only makes his pretension to greater wisdom the sharper fraud. His career, from Siennese farm boy to bankrupt Alfieri aspirant to druggist's hawker, illustrates how disappointed ambition curdles into humbug.