Nevertheless, she resisted a long time: an inward voice told her that
this was horrible; but Francesco had the slow 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 on 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
former 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 poetic