"cenci11" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dumas Alexandre)

fell with all the greater intensity on his two unhappy daughters.
Their situation soon became so intolerable, that the elder,
contriving to elude the close supervision under which she was kept,
forwarded to the pope a petition, relating the cruel treatment to
which she was subjected, and praying His Holiness either to give her
in marriage or place her in a convent. Clement VIII took pity on
her; compelled Francesco Cenci to give her a dowry of sixty thousand
crowns, and married her to Carlo Gabrielli, of a noble family of
Gubbio. Francesco driven nearly frantic with rage when he saw this
victim released from his clutches.

About the same time death relieved him from two other encumbrances:
his sons Rocco and Cristoforo were killed within a year of each
other; the latter by a bungling medical practitioner whose name is
unknown; the former by Paolo Corso di Massa, in the streets of Rome.
This came as a relief to Francesco, whose avarice pursued his sons
even after their death, far he intimated to the priest that he would
not spend a farthing on funeral services. They were accordingly
borne to the paupers' graves which he had caused to be prepared for
them, and when he saw them both interred, he cried out that he was
well rid of such good-for-nothing children, but that he should be
perfectly happy only when the remaining five were buried with the
first two, and that when he had got rid of the last he himself would
burn down his palace as a bonfire to celebrate the event.

But Francesco took every precaution against his second daughter,
Beatrice Cenci, following the example of her elder sister. She was
then a child of twelve or thirteen years of age, beautiful and
innocent as an angel. Her long fair hair, a beauty seen so rarely in
Italy, that Raffaelle, believing it divine, has appropriated it to
all his Madonnas, curtained a lovely forehead, and fell in flowing
locks over her shoulders. Her azure eyes bore a heavenly expression;
she was of middle height, exquisitely proportioned; and during the
rare moments when a gleam of happiness allowed her natural character
to display itself, she was lively, joyous, and sympathetic, but at
the same time evinced a firm and decided disposition.

To make sure of her custody, Francesco kept her shut up in a remote
apartment of his palace, the key of which he kept in his own
possession. There, her unnatural and inflexible gaoler daily brought
her some food. Up to the age of thirteen, which she had now reached,
he had behaved to her with the most extreme harshness and severity;
but now, to poor Beatrice's great astonishment, he all at once became
gentle and even tender. Beatrice was a child no longer; her beauty
expanded like a flower; and Francesco, a stranger to no crime,
however heinous, had marked her for his own.

Brought up as she had been, uneducated, deprived of all society, even
that of her stepmother, Beatrice knew not good from evil: her ruin
was comparatively easy to compass; yet Francesco, to accomplish his