alone and unarmed save for his sword and dagger.  When his horse fell from fatigue, he bought another; were the owner unwilling to sell he took it by force; if resistance were made, he struck, and always with the point, never the hilt.  In most cases, being well known throughout the Papal States as a free-handed person, nobody tried to thwart him; some yielding through fear, others from motives of interest.  Impious, sacrilegious, and atheistical, he never entered a church except to profane its sanctity.  It was said of him that he had a morbid appetite for novelties in crime, and that there was no outrage he would not commit if he hoped by so doing to enjoy a new sensation.

At the age of about forty-five he had married a very rich woman, whose name is not mentioned by any chronicler.  She died, leaving him seven children—­five boys and two girls.  He then married Lucrezia Petroni, a perfect beauty of the Roman type, except for the ivory pallor of her complexion.  By this second marriage he had no children.

As if Francesco Cenci were void of all natural affection, he hated his children, and was at no pains to conceal his feelings towards them:  on one occasion, when he was building, in the courtyard of his magnificent palace, near the Tiber, a chapel dedicated to St. Thomas, he remarked to the architect, when instructing him to design a family vault, “That is where I hope to bury them all.”  The architect often subsequently admitted that he was so terrified by the fiendish laugh which accompanied these words, that had not Francesco Cenci’s work been extremely profitable, he would have refused to go on with it.

As soon as his three eldest boys, Giacomo, Cristoforo, and Rocco, were out of their tutors’ hands, in order to get rid of them he sent them to the University of Salamanca, where, out of sight, they were out of mind, for he thought no more about them, and did not even send them the means of subsistence.  In these straits, after struggling for some months against their wretched plight, the lads were obliged to leave Salamanca, and beg their way home, tramping barefoot through France and Italy, till they made their way back to Rome, where they found their father harsher and more unkind than ever.

This happened in the early part of the reign of Clement VIII, famed for his justice.  The three youths resolved to apply to him, to grant them an allowance out of their father’s immense income.  They consequently repaired to Frascati, where the pope was building the beautiful Aldobrandini Villa, and stated their case.  The pope admitted the justice of their claims, and ordered Francesco, to allow each of them two thousand crowns a year.  He endeavoured by every possible means to evade this decree, but the pope’s orders were too stringent to be disobeyed.

About this period he was for the third time imprisoned for infamous crimes.  His three sons then again petitioned the pope, alleging that their father dishonoured the family name, and praying that the extreme rigour of the law, a capital sentence, should be enforced in his case.  The pope pronounced this conduct unnatural and odious, and drove them with ignominy from his presence.  As for Francesco, he escaped, as on the two previous occasions, by the payment of a large sum of money.