de’Cenci and Monsignore Querro, surprised him there.  But Marzio fell into the hands of justice, and his evidence caused the immediate arrest of the Cenci.  It appears that they were tortured and that none of them denied the accusation; so that their advocates could only plead extenuating circumstances.  To this fact may possibly be due the legend of Beatrice.  In order to mitigate the guilt of parricide, Prospero Farinacci, who conducted her defense, established a theory of enormous cruelty and unspeakable outrages committed on her person by her father.  With the same object in view, he tried to make out that Bernardo was half-witted.  There is quite sufficient extant evidence to show that Bernardo was a young man of average intelligence; and with regard to Beatrice, nothing now remains to corroborate Farinaccio’s hypothesis of incest.  She was not a girl of sixteen, as the legend runs, but a woman of twenty-two;[199] and the codicils to her will render it nearly certain that she had given birth to an illegitimate son, for whose maintenance she made elaborate and secret provisions.  That the picture ascribed to Guido Reni in the Barberini palace is not a portrait of Beatrice in prison, appears sufficiently proved.  Guido did not come to Rome until 1608, nine years after her death; and catalogues of the Barberini gallery, compiled in 1604 and 1623, contain no mention either of a painting by Guido or of Beatrice’s portrait.  The Cenci were lodged successively in the prisons of Torre di Nona, Savelli, and S. Angelo.  They occupied wholesome apartments and were allowed the attendance of their own domestics.  That their food was no scanty dungeon fare appears from the menus of dinners and suppers supplied to them, which include fish, flesh, fruit salad, and snow to cool the water.  In spite of powerful influence at court, Clement VIII. at last resolved to exercise strict justice on the Cenci.  He was brought to this decision by a matricide perpetrated in cold blood at Subiaco, on September 5, 1599.  Paolo di S. Croce, a relative of the Cenci, murdered his mother Costanza in her bed, with the view of obtaining property over which she had control.  The sentence issued a few days after this event.  Giacomo was condemned to be torn to pieces by red hot pincers, and finished with a coup de grace from the hangman’s hammer.  Lucrezia and Beatrice received the slighter sentence of decapitation; while Bernardo, in consideration of his youth, was let off with the penalty of being present at the execution of his kinsfolk, after which he was to be imprisoned for a year and then sent to the galleys for life.  Their property was confiscated to the Camera Apostolica.  These punishments were carried out.[200] But Bernardo, after working at Civita Vecchia until 1606, obtained release and lived in banishment till his death in 1627.  Monsignor Querro, for his connivance in the whole affair, was banished to the island of Malta, whence he returned at some date before the year 1633