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An ever-recurring and growing terror would dog each step of the solitary paternal despot, and necessitate an unceasing watchfulness against danger, and even an anticipation of death. For when old age, or sickness decreased his power of holding his own, then the tables would be turned, and the younger men, so hardly oppressed, would raise their hands against him in parricidal strife.
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 thus blindly are brought about the parricidal tragedies that Zola, Guy de Maupassant and other novelists have utilized in fiction, and with which we are familiarized in French criminal reports parents and grandparents got rid of for the sake of their coveted hoardings.
Have we not seen the Jesuits, under the cloak of our holy religion, thrust into the parricidal hand of blind enthusiasts the dagger with which kings were to be assassinated!
I often doubt, whether amongst so many men as meddle in such affairs, there is not to be found some one of so weak understanding as to have been really persuaded that he went towards reformation by the worst of deformations; and advanced towards salvation by the most express causes that we have of most assured damnation; that by overthrowing government, the magistracy, and the laws, in whose protection God has placed him, by dismembering his good mother, and giving her limbs to be mangled by her old enemies, filling fraternal hearts with parricidal hatreds, calling devils and furies to his aid, he can assist the most holy sweetness and justice of the divine law.
For the present I confine myself to formally protesting against your Holiness's unprecedented and parricidal conduct in invading your country at the head of an army of loathsome vermin." "Unprecedented!" exclaimed Borgia. "Am I not the modern Coriolanus? Did Narses experience blacker ingratitude than I? Where would the temporal power be but for me? Who smote the Colonna? Who squashed the Orsini?
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