by Stendhal
The third portrait in the Barberini gallery is that of Lucrezia Petroni, stepmother to Beatrice and executed along with her. It is the very type of the Roman matron in her beauty and her natural pride.13 The features are large and the flesh strikingly white, the eyebrows black and very pronounced, the gaze both imperious and charged with eroticism. It makes a fine contrast with the sweet, simple, almost German figure of her stepdaughter.
The fourth portrait, brilliant in both its truth and its stunning colors, is one of Titian’s masterpieces; it is of a Greek slave who was the mistress of the famous doge Barberigo.
Almost all foreigners who visit Rome come, very early in their tour, to the Barberini gallery; they are called there, women especially, by the portraits of Beatrice Cenci and her stepmother. I have shared in the common curiosity; and, like everyone else, I then sought out permission to read the records of the famous trial. But if you were to get that permission, you would be surprised in reading these records, all in Latin except the responses of the accused, to find almost no exposition of the facts. This is because in Rome in 1599, there was no one who did not already know the facts. I was granted permission to copy out a contemporary narrative; I believed I could present a translation of it without violating any decency; in any case, this translation can be read out loud in front of ladies in 1823. It must be understood that the translator ceases to be faithful when it is no longer possible to be so: the horror of it would overwhelm any interest or curiosity.
The sad role of the pure Don Juan—he who seeks no ideal to conform to and he whose only concern with the opinions of others is to outrage them—is exposed here in all its horror. The excesses of his crimes forced two women to have him killed before their eyes; one of these women was his spouse and the other his daughter, and the reader will find it difficult to decide upon their guilt. Their contemporaries felt they should not have been executed.
I am convinced that the tragedy of Galeoto Manfredi (who was killed by his wife, a subject treated by the great poet Monti),14 along with so many other domestic tragedies of the fifteenth century that are less well known and scarcely noted in the histories of Italian towns, ended in a scene like that at the castle of Petrella.
What follows is the translation of the contemporary account; it is in Roman Italian and was written on September 14, 1599.
True History
of the death of Giacomo and Beatrice Cenci, and of Lucrezia Petroni, their stepmother, executed for the crime of parricide Saturday last, September 11, 1599, in the reign of our Holy Father the pope Clement VIII, Aldobrandini.
The detestable life lived by Francesco Cenci, born in Rome and one of our richest citizens, has ended in his being led to his downfall. He has drawn down to an early death his sons, strong and brave young men, and his daughter Beatrice, who was led to her own execution (it was four days ago now) and was scarcely sixteen years old but was considered one of the most beautiful girls in the Papal States and of all Italy. News has spread that Signor Guido Reni, a student of that admirable Bologna school, wanted to paint the portrait of the poor Beatrice Friday last, the day before her execution. If that great painter has performed his task as well as he has with other portraits here in the capital, posterity will be able to have some idea of what the beauty of this admirable girl was like. So that posterity will also have some memory of her unparalleled sufferings and the strength with which this truly Roman heart of hers fought against them, I have resolved to write down what I have learned about the acts that led to her death, as well as what I saw on the day of her glorious tragedy.
The persons from whom I have gleaned my information were so placed as to know the most secret circumstances, which remain unknown in Rome even today, even though for the last six weeks the Cenci trial has been the only topic of discussion. I will write with a certain freedom, in the assurance that I shall be able to deposit my commentary in a respectable archive and that it will certainly not be read until after my death. My only sorrow lies in having to speak, as truth requires, against the innocence of this poor Beatrice Cenci, adored and respected by everyone who knew her, just as much as her father was hated and detested.
This man to whom, it must be admitted, heaven had given an equally stunning intelligence and eccentricity was the son of Monsignor Cenci, who, under Pius V, Ghislieri, had been elevated to the post of treasurer (minister of finances). That holy pope, entirely preoccupied as we know with his just hatred for heresy and the reestablishment of his splendid Inquisition, had nothing but contempt for the temporal administration of his state, a situation that enabled Monsignor Cenci, who was treasurer for some years before 1572, to find ways to bequeath to that horrible man, his son and the father of Beatrice, a net income of 160,000 piastres (which amounts to about 2.5 million francs in 1837).
Francesco Cenci, apart from this great fortune, also had a reputation in his youth for greater courage and prudence than any other Roman could claim; and this reputation gave him even greater credit with the pope and with the people, and all the more so given that, when criminal actions started to be imputed to him, they were of the kind society finds easy to forgive. Many Romans still remember, with a sense of bitter regret, the freedom of thought and action we enjoyed in the days of Leo X, who was taken from us in 1513,15 and under Paul III, who died in 1549. Talk began to circulate, under this latter pope, of this Francesco Cenci and certain singular love affairs that had been brought to their successful conclusions by even more singular methods.
Under Paul III, a time when one could still talk with a certain degree of security, many said that Francesco Cenci was eagerly seeking out bizarre experiences that could give him peripezie di nuova idea, new and disturbing sensations; this point is supported by entries in his account books such as this:
“For adventures and peripezie in Toscanella, 3,500 piastres (about 60,000 francs in 1837), e non fu caro (and not very expensive at that).”
People in the other cities in Italy perhaps do not realize that in Rome, our destiny as well as our way of living will change depending on the character of the reigning pope. Thus, for the thirteen years of the reign of good Pope Gregory XIII, Buoncompagni, everything was permitted in Rome; if you wanted to put a dagger into your enemy and not be arrested for it, you had only to be sure you did it in a quiet, modest fashion. This excess of indulgence was followed by an excess of severity during the five years’ reign of the great Sixtus V, of whom it has been said, as it was of the emperor Augustus, he either should never have come or should have stayed forever. In those days, murders and poisonings that had been forgotten for ten years now led to executions—for those who had been unlucky enough to have made their confession to Cardinal Montalto before he became Sixtus V.
It was principally in the reign of Gregory XIII that the talk about Francesco Cenci started to be widespread; he had married a very rich woman, one suited to his high station; she died after having given him seven children. Soon after her death, he took as a second bride Lu crezia Petroni, a rare beauty celebrated for the striking whiteness of her complexion, but a little too plump, the common failing of our Roman women. From Lucrezia he had no children.
The lesser vice attributed to Francesco Cenci was a propensity to an infamous form of love,16 and the greater one was not to believe in God. During his entire life, no one had ever seen him enter a church.
Imprisoned three different times for his infamous affairs, he got himself released by giving 200,000 piastres to people in favor with the twelve successive popes under whom he had lived. (Two hundred thousand piastres would be about 5 million francs in 1837.)
I saw Francesco Cenci only when his hair was already graying, during the reign of the Buoncompagni pope, when everything was permitted to the one who dared. He was a man of about five feet four, well built though a little thin; he had the reputation of being extremely strong, a rumor he may have started himself; his eyes were large and expressive, but the upper eyelid drooped a bit too much; his nose was prominent and overlarge, his lip
s were thin, and his smile charming. That same smile could become terrible when he fixed his gaze upon his enemies; when something made him upset or irritated, he would tremble excessively, to the point where this physically inconvenienced him. I saw him in my youth, under the Buoncompagni pope, traveling on horseback from Rome to Naples, no doubt in pursuit of one of his little love affairs; he would ride through the forests of San Germano and Fajola with no fear of bandits, and it was said he made the trip in less than twenty hours. He always traveled alone and without telling anyone; when his first horse was fatigued, he would buy or steal another. If anyone raised the slightest difficulty about it, he had no qualms about using his dagger on the man. But it is also true that in the years of my youth, that is to say, when he was forty-eight or fifty, there was no one courageous enough to try to resist him. His great pleasure was in confronting his enemies.
He was well known along all the roads in the states of His Holiness; he paid generously, but he was also capable, two or three months after some offense had been done him, of dispatching a hired assassin to kill the man responsible.
The only virtuous action he performed in his whole life was to have built a church dedicated to Saint Thomas in the court of his vast palazzo near the Tiber; but he was moved to this fine deed only by the singular desire to have the graves of all his children under his gaze:17 he hated them with an excessive, unnatural passion from their earliest infancy, when they could not possibly have done anything to have offended him.
“I want them all put there,” he would say often, with a bitter laugh, to the workers employed in constructing his church. He sent his three eldest—Giacomo, Cristoforo, and Rocco—to study at the university at Salamanca in Spain. Once they were in a distant land, he took a wicked pleasure in not sending them any money, so that these unfortunate young men, having addressed numerous letters to their father with no response whatever, were reduced to the miserable necessity of returning to their native country by means of borrowing small sums and begging along the way.
In Rome, they found their father even more severe and rigid, more miserly than ever despite his great wealth, unwilling to clothe them or to give them the money necessary to buy the most basic food. They were forced to have recourse to the pope, who forced Francesco Cenci to give them a small allowance. And with this mediocre assistance, they took their leave of him.
Soon after, as a result of one of his infamous affairs, Francesco was put in prison for the third and final time; at this, the three brothers solicited an audience with our Holy Father the pope at the time, all three pleading with him to have their father, Francesco Cenci, executed, for, they said, he had dishonored their house. Clement VIII was strongly inclined to do it, but he had second thoughts and decided not to placate these unnatural children, and he had them chased shamefully out of his presence.
The father, as we have said, got out of prison by giving a large sum of money to a man with enough power to protect him. It is likely that the strange failed attempt of his three eldest sons only strengthened the hatred he had for his children. He cursed them constantly, the eldest along with the youngest, and every day he used a stick to beat his two poor daughters, who lived with him in the palazzo.
The elder daughter, despite being kept under close surveillance, found a way of presenting a plea to the pope; she entreated His Holiness either to marry her to someone or to place her in a convent. Clement VIII took pity on her suffering and married her to Charles Gabrielli, from the noblest family in Gubbio; His Holiness forced the father to provide her a solid dowry.
Following this unforeseen blow, Francesco Cenci flew into an extreme rage, and to prevent his daughter Beatrice, who was growing up, from getting the idea of imitating her sister, he imprisoned her in one of the apartments of his immense palazzo. There, no one had permission to see Beatrice, who was then scarcely fourteen and already splendid in her ravishing beauty. But above all she had a gaiety, a frankness, and a comic wit that I have never seen in anyone else. Francesco Cenci himself brought her food to her. It was probably then that the monster began to grow amorous, or feigned growing amorous, in order to torture his unfortunate daughter. He often spoke to her about the perfidious turn her sister had done him and, working himself up into a rage by the sound of his own words, he would end by showering blows upon her.
At this juncture, Rocco Cenci, his son, was killed by a pork butcher, and the following year Cristoforo Cenci was killed by Paolo Corso of Massa. On this occasion, he showed his grim impiety by refusing to give even a copper baiocco for the candles. Upon learning of the death of his son Cristoforo, he cried out that he would not know real joy until every last one of his children was buried and that while the last one lay dying, he would set fire to his palazzo as a sign of his happiness. Rome was shocked by this statement, but people believed anything was possible with such a man, whose greatest pride was in scorning the world’s opinion, and even that of the pope himself.
(Here it becomes absolutely impossible to follow the Roman narrator in his obscure account of the strange things Francesco Cenci did to shock his contemporaries. His wife and his unfortunate daughter were, to all appearances, made the victims of these abominable acts.)
All these things were not enough for him; he tried with threats and then with force to rape his own daughter Beatrice, who was already grown and beautiful; he felt no shame in going and lying in her bed in a completely nude state. He walked with her through the rooms of the palazzo, entirely nude; then, he brought her into his wife’s bed so that, in the lamplight, the poor Lucrezia could see what he was doing with Beatrice.
He taught the poor girl to believe in a terrifying heresy, one I scarcely dare report, to the effect that when a father knows his own daughter, their children are necessarily saints, and that all the greatest saints venerated by the church were born in this fashion—that is, that their maternal grandfather was their father.
When Beatrice resisted his vile wishes, he beat her cruelly, to the point where the poor girl, unable to continue living so miserable a life, had the idea of following her sister’s example. She addressed a fully detailed complaint to our Holy Father the pope; but apparently Francesco Cenci had taken precautions, because it appears that this entreaty never reached the hands of His Holiness; in any case, it could not be found in the secretariat of the Memoriali when, Beatrice being in prison, her defender had the most urgent need of this article, for it could have served as some proof of the unheard-of excesses that were practiced in the Petrella castle. Would it not have been evident to all that Beatrice had been in need of some legitimate defense? This memorial also was signed with the name of Lucrezia, the stepmother of Beatrice.
Francesco Cenci found out about this initiative, and one can imagine with what rage he redoubled the ill treatment of these two unfortunate women.
Life having become absolutely intolerable, and the women having found that they could hope for nothing from the justice of the sovereign, whose courtiers were corrupted by the rich gifts of Francesco, they conceived the idea that was to be their undoing but even so still had this advantage: it would put an end to their sufferings in this world.
The reader must understand that the famous Monsignor Guerra often came to the Cenci palazzo; he was tall and a handsome man as well, and he had received one special gift from destiny, that whatever thing he attempted, he succeeded, and did so with a grace that was all his own. Some have thought that he loved Beatrice and that he was planning to abandon the manteletta and marry her,18 but despite his efforts to hide his feelings as carefully as possible, he was loathed by Francesco, who reproached him for being in league with his children. When Monsignor Guerra learned that Signor Cenci was away from the palazzo, he went up to the women’s apartment and spent several hours talking with them, listening to their complaints about the unbelievable mistreatments heaped upon the two of them. It appears that Beatrice was the first to speak plainly to Monsignor Guerra about the plan they had arrived at. After a time, he gave them his h
ands; and, repeatedly and vigorously entreated by Beatrice, he at last consented to communicate this strange plan to Giacomo Cenci, without whose consent they could do nothing, given that he was the elder brother and the head of the house after Francesco.
They found it very easy to attract him to the conspiracy; he had been extremely mistreated by his father, who never gave him any financial help, a point which had become sorer now that Giacomo was married, with six children. They decided to meet in Monsignor Guerra’s apartment and discuss possible means of killing Francesco Cenci. The business was treated with all appropriate formalities, and the votes of the stepmother and the young girl were taken on every point. Ultimately, they decided to use two of Francesco Cenci’s vassals, both of whom had conceived a mortal hatred for him. One was called Marzio; a man of courage, and one who had been strongly attached to the unfortunate children of Francesco, and in order to do something good for them, he consented to take part in the parricide. Olympio, the second, had been named chatelain of the Petrella fortress in the kingdom of Naples because of his powerful standing with Prince Colonna, but Francesco Cenci had managed to get rid of him.
The two men agreed to everything; Francesco Cenci having announced that in order to avoid the unhealthy air of Rome, he was going to spend the next summer in that Petrella fortress, they had the idea of recruiting a dozen Neapolitan bandits. Olympio took it upon himself to furnish them. They decided that the bandits would be hidden in the forest near Petrella and that they would be informed the minute Francesco Cenci was on the path; they would then abduct him on the road and announce to the family that he would be freed as soon as they paid a large ransom. The children would then be obliged to travel back to Rome to get the money the bandits demanded; they would pretend to have trouble raising the money quickly enough, and the bandits, following through on their threats when no money was forthcoming, would put Francesco Cenci to death. In this way, no one would be led to suspect the real authors of the murder.