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Updated: May 5, 2025
Giacomo Cenci, whom the Pope ordered to be flayed alive, no doubt admired the romance of destiny that laid him on his ultimate island, a raised plank, so that the executioner might conveniently roll up the skin of his belly like an apron.
"Is this the one you choose, sir?" asked Blakeney. "Nay! which do you advise, Sir Percy," replied Chauvelin lightly. "Which of those two blades think you is most like to hold after two hundred years the poison of the Cenci?" But Blakeney neither started nor winced.
At this juncture of affairs, a certain nobleman, Paolo Santa Croce, killed his mother as the result of a family quarrel; and the pope, newly angered against the Cenci family because he considered it to have set the example for this parricidal mania, ordered them all to be executed according to the terms of the original judgment, with the exception of the youngest son, Bernardo, who was given a free pardon.
And yet, the situation might have been taken from the times of the Medici, of Paolo Giordano Orsini, of Beatrice Cenci, of the Borgia. There was a frightful incongruity between civilization and his life between broad, flat, comfortable, every-day, police-regulated civilization, and the hideous drama in which he was suddenly a principal actor.
Lucrezia Petroni was a veritable Roman she-wolf, passionate alike in love and vengeance; she endured all, but pardoned nothing. Some days after this, the Abbe Guerra arrived at the Cenci palace to carry out what had been arranged. Rich, young, noble, and handsome, everything would seem to promise him success; yet he was rudely dismissed by Francesco.
It is impossible to become so entirely absorbed in the story of the Cenci as to prevent the morning's telegram from home intruding, and so it came about that this time we did less moralizing than before. We were fortunate in being in Rome during Easter Week, which gave us an opportunity to hear the best music; and certainly there is no choir for vocal music which can rank with that of the Pope.
After an hour, the door closed, and the seductive vision vanished, leaving Beatrice full of trouble and amazement. The night following, the same apparition again presented itself, only, on this occasion, Francesco Cenci, undressed, entered his daughter's room and invited her to join the fete.
"Signor Bernardo Cenci, in the name of our blessed Redeemer, our Holy Father the Pope spares your life; with the sole condition that you accompany your relatives to the scaffold and to their death, and never forget to pray for those with whom you were condemned to die."
The truth is plain enough; the unspeakable crimes of Francesco Cenci, his more than inhuman cruelty to his children and his wives, his monstrous lust and devilish nature, outdo anything to be found in any history of the world, not excepting the private lives of Tiberius, Nero, or Commodus. His daughter and his second wife killed him in his sleep.
Count Guide Franceschini is not a miracle of evil rendered credible, like Shakespeare's Iago, nor a strange enormity of tyrannous hate and lust like the Count Cenci of Shelley. He has no spirit of diabolic revelry in crime; no feeling for its delicate artistry; he is under no spell of fascination derived from its horror. He is clumsy in his fraud and coarse in his violence.
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