on his return home. His father not only taunted and
threatened him, but at last seized the door-bar and began knocking him
about the head; and then, at last, maddened with pain and passion, he
drew out a knife he had picked up on the road, and stabbed his father,
hardly knowing what he did. On the bare statement of facts, I should
deem this version of the story the more probable of the two, but as no
details whatever are given of the evidence on either side, it is
impossible to judge. The court at any rate decided that there was no
proof of the prisoner having been drunk, and that the evidence of his
father having struck him was of a suspicious character, "while," they
add, "it would be absurd and immoral to maintain, that a father, whose
right and duty it is to correct his children (and indeed on this occasion
correction was abundantly deserved by the insolent demeanour of Luigi)
could be considered to provoke his son by a slight personal
chastisement." The son, by the way, was over one and twenty, a fact to
which no allusion is made. As "a forlorn hope," in the words of the
sentence, the counsel for the defence asserted, that whatever the crime
of the prisoner might be, it was not parricide, from the simple fact that
Luigi was not Venanzio's son. The facts of the case appear to have been,
that Maria Rosa Battistoni being then unmarried, gave birth in July 1835
to a son, who was the prisoner at the bar; that shortly afterwards the
vicar of Cannara gave information to the Episcopal court of Assisi, that
Maria Rosa had been seduced by Venanzio Bonci and had had an illegitimate
child by him; that, in consequence, a formal requisition was addressed by
the above court to Venanzio, and that he thereupon acknowledged the
paternity of the child, and expressed his readiness to marry the mother.
The marriage was therefore solemnized, and the child entered in the
church-books as the legitimized son of Venanzio and Maria Bonci, in June,
1836. Against this strong presumptive evidence of paternity, and the
natural inference to be drawn from the child having been brought up and
educated as Venanzio's son, there were only, we are told, to be set,
alleged expressions of doubt on the father's part, when in a passion, as
to his being really the father, and also certain confessions of the
mother to different parties, that Luigi was not the child of her husband.
All these confessions however, so it is asserted, were proved to be
subse