The Crime and Trial of Beatrice Cenci. to support the road leading thereto and for the celebration forever of a daily mass for the repose of her soul. The application of this money was to be under the control of her confessor, Fra Andrea, a friar of the convent. By other bequests, she leaves over seventeen hundred crowns to thirty-one different churchas for the saying of some thirty-two hundred masses. The fact that the Cenci and particularly Giacomo, to whom the entailed estates had descended, were allowed full power of dis posal over their property, militates strongly against the statement that their wealth eventually passed into the possession of the Aldobrandini family. Extant also is a record of the last prayer of Beatrice : О Christ, my Master, thou callest me and I flee to thee with all my heart. Do not refuse me thy forgiveness for the great sin that I have committed. Since thou, innocent, didst suffer so many torments and even an ignominious death, why should I, a sinner, hesitate to throw myself into the arms of death and a too easy death when my sins are remembered? I am about to depart with a firm hope of going to
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dwell near thee in thy paradise, or at least in a place of purification and deliverance. But little more remains to be said anent the fate of the ill-starred race. Of Bernardo, sole survivor, we have no record save that he died some twenty-eight years later, leav ing two sons and a daughter. The last scene of the tragedy was to be enacted at the square of the castle of St. Angelo, where the wretched conspirators suffered the punishment due to their crime. A curious incident is found in the fact that while the head of Beatrice rested on a block and before the blow was struck, a cannon from St. Angelo gave the signal to Clement, then at Monte Cavallo, and absolution was bestowed " in articulo mortis " e'er the blow had descended. Her wishes were carried out and she rests in San Pietro. If she has sinned, so has she suffered. If great was the crime — bitter was its punishment. Que la terre lui soit légère. For us, her career was finished with the announcement of worthy Master Allessandro —• the Sansón of his day — "This is the head of Beatrice Cenci — a Roman maiden."
