xt night she threw herself on her bed without undressing. At the
accustomed hour the door opened, and the nocturnal spectacle reappeared.
This time, Lucrezia Petroni was among the women who passed before
Beatrice's door; violence had compelled her to undergo this humiliation.
Beatrice was too far off to see her blushes and her tears. Francesco
pointed out her stepmother, whom she had lacked for in vain the previous
evening; and as she could no longer make any opposition, he led her,
covered with blushes and confusion, into the middle of this orgy.

Beatrice there saw incredible and infamous things....

Nevertheless, she resisted a long time: an inward voice told her that
this was horrible; but Francesco had the slaw persistence of a demon. To
these sights, calculated to stimulate her passions, he added heresies
designed to warp her mind; he told her that the greatest saints venerated
by the Church were the issue of fathers and daughters, and in the end
Beatrice committed a crime without even knowing it to be a sin.

His brutality then knew no bounds. He forced Lucrezia and Beatrice to
share the same bed, threatening his wife to kill her if she disclosed to
his daughter by a single word that there was anything odious in such an
intercourse. So matters went on for about three years.

At this time Francesco was obliged to make a journey, and leave the women
alone and free. The first thing Lucrezia did was to enlighten Beatrice
an the infamy of the life they were leading; they then together prepared
a memorial to the pope, in which they laid before him a statement of all
the blows and outrages they had suffered. But, before leaving, Francesco
Cenci had taken precautions; every person about the pope was in his pay,
or hoped to be. The petition never reached His Holiness, and the two
poor women, remembering that Clement VIII had on a farmer occasion driven
Giacomo, Cristaforo, and Rocco from his presence, thought they were
included in the same proscription, and looked upon themselves as
abandoned to their fate.

When matters were in this state, Giacomo, taking advantage of his
father's absence, came to pay them a visit with a friend of his, an abbe
named Guerra: he was a young man of twenty-five or twenty-six, belonging
to one of the most noble families in Rome, of a bold, resolute, and
courageous character, and idolised by all the Roman ladies for his
beauty. To classical features he added blue eyes swimming in poe