The timber had to yield before the man. Through the flooring of the balcony, the slayers fashioned an aperture; below, the corpse of Francesco Cenci was meant to narrate the tale of a fall. The observer’s eye was to travel from the shattered balustrade down to the body, and there pause, contented by so deceitful a correspondence. An accident requires no confederates. It demands neither the fury of a daughter, nor the abetting hand of a son, nor the presence of two men within a bedchamber. A few displaced planks were thus intended to efface an entire family from the theater of the crime.
Francesco Cenci was slain at Petrella Salto in September 1598. He left behind an immense fortune, children arrayed against him in open hatred, and two women for whom he had turned his roof into a prison. Justice would soon seek to determine how he had perished. Rome would presently demand why those who encompassed him had not been stayed before arriving at such an extremity.
Wealth had in no measure rendered this man easy of endurance. The heir to a prelate enriched through public charges, Francesco possessed palazzi, broad lands, and revenues over whose employment he kept a jealous vigil. Yet his violence exposed him to ruinous penalties. He paid for the consequences of his misdeeds, then visited upon his own household an authority that nothing beneath the domestic hearth seemed capable of restraining. Money forced open the gates that shut upon him; for his daughter, it served merely to keep them bolted.
In 1595, Beatrice and her stepmother, Lucrezia Petroni, were relegated to the mountain fortress of Petrella Salto, a stronghold belonging to the Colonna. The place removed them far from Rome and from any to whom they might have looked for aid. Strife with the sons had already torn the lineage asunder. For Beatrice, the reclusion commanded by her father extinguished the very prospect of another existence: to depart, to wed, to possess a destiny apart from his sovereign will.
The narrative of Stendhal, penned much later from an ancient account, converts these domestic brutalities into the prime spring of a tragedy. He drives the portrait of Francesco to the verge of the monstrous, attributing to the women desperate appeals for help that went unanswered. Here literary tradition touches a reality attested with greater sobriety: the two women were kept under lock, abused, and the duress grew ever more unyielding. The father deemed himself the sole master of their captivity’s duration. His kindred began to prepare the termination of his own.
Beatrice entered into a conspiracy in which her brother Giacomo, Olimpio Calvetti, and Marzio bore part. Olimpio was familiar with the stronghold, having formerly served as its castellan. The close proximity of place and persons rendered feasible what an external adversary could scarcely have compassed. To strike Francesco, there were needed individuals capable of approaching his slumber; to conceal his death, those who could abide within the walls after the deed was done.
In the version handed down by Stendhal, a first scheme proposed to have him seized by brigands, delaying the payment of ransom until the outlaws should dispatch him. The stratagem miscarried. The novelist goes on to recount messages exchanged beneath the casements, financial pledges, and the smuggling of the assassins into the castle. Wrath was no longer sufficient unto itself: it had hardened into an apparatus. With every confederate, the secret broadened by the number of those who might betray it.
Francesco was dispatched by the instruments of the plot. His body was cast down from the balcony, and the floorboards were hewn away to foster the belief that his fall had begun there. Beatrice was present. Death was at last to release the women from the fortress; they returned to Rome. Yet the recovered mansion was not yet a sanctuary. From afar, the circumstances of the demise were already awakening inquisitorial scrutiny.
The magistrates of the Colonna, of the Kingdom of Naples, and of the pontifical government turned their gaze upon the affair. In the relation adopted by Stendhal, a sheet stained with blood, entrusted to a laundress, becomes an essential token: the explanation offered by Beatrice appeared to her discordant with the marks upon the linen. This scene appertains to the legendary tradition; it also illustrates the flaw in the contrivance. A fall accounted for the posture of the corpse. It could not suffice to obliterate what had transpired within the chamber.
The apprehensions began. Giacomo and Bernardo were cast into ward, followed by the women. Marzio fell into the hands of the officers of justice and expired under the torture. Olimpio was assassinated to forestall his confirmation of the family’s guilt. Those who had consented to strike the blow were no longer merely hirelings to be rewarded: they had become witnesses to be silenced. A second crime was intended to keep the first shrouded in darkness; it served only to widen the circle of the inquest.
The interrogation of the Cenci was likewise accompanied by the question. Their depositions entered into a dossier wherein the father’s cruelties were balanced against the resolution to slay him. The entire dilemma of the defense lay within that chasm. To establish the oppression endured did not dissolve the premeditation of the deed; to prove premeditation could not efface the years of tyranny.
Prospero Farinaccio, chief among the advocates, endeavored to preserve Beatrice by alleging the sexual violence of her parent. Their historical reality and their precise place within the judicial proceedings remain disputed among the chronicles. Stendhal presents them as indubitable; the historian Corrado Ricci, by contrast, deemed this plea a late invention of the advocate’s craft. This divergence has contributed to the division of the affair’s memory. One truth, however, stood beyond dispute: at Petrella, paternal guardianship had degenerated into an imprisonment enforced by raw violence.
Clement VIII would not relent. On September 10, 1599, the sentence of condemnation fell upon both estate and body. Giacomo was doomed to an exceptionally barbarous execution; Beatrice and Lucrezia were to be beheaded. Bernardo’s life was spared, but he was condemned to witness the slaughter of his kin before being led away to the galleys. The mercy extended to the younger brother thus carried with it an ordeal that no word of pardon could soften to the sight.
On the morrow, a vast concourse of people pressed toward the Ponte Sant’Angelo. They came to watch the destruction of the house that had occupied the tongue of Rome for months. Beatrice was twenty-two years of age. Her fortitude, her youth, and the outrages she had suffered drew forth a compassion that found no echo in the decree. Lucrezia, Beatrice, and Giacomo were executed; Bernardo saw fulfilled the doom that had granted him his life.
The patrimony was confiscated, the voices of the condemned were hushed, yet the cause remained unextinguished. Around Beatrice there arose the likeness of an innocent, purchased at times by the erasure of the homicide in which she had taken part. The planks of the balcony had failed to transform an assassination into a mischance. The scaffold, in its turn, failed to transmute the agony of an entire house into an unmitigated guilt.