The Cenci Murder Retold
CANTARELLA, HELENE
The Cenci Murder Retold A Tale for Midnight. By Frederic Prokosch. Little, Brown. 354 pp. $3. Reviewed by Helene Cantarella Former chief, Foreign Language Review Section, 0WI Motion Picture...
...The Vatican Archives have served Mr...
...his vindictive persecution of his elder son...
...When the sinister fortress looms into view, Lucrezia and Beatrice fear the worst, and with reason...
...There they spent endless months in a squalor and consuming loneliness broken only by the terror of his sadistic cruelty...
...Reviewed by Helene Cantarella Former chief, Foreign Language Review Section, 0WI Motion Picture Bureau The mysterious, brooding face that looks out, unafraid, from the portrait hanging in the Barberini Palace in Rome is, so popular legend would have it, that of Beatrice Cenci...
...Prokosch nevertheless does not try to exculpate his daughter Beatrice...
...Unfortunately for all involved, the murder was badly bungled and the macabre truth eventually came to light...
...his alleged incestuous intentions toward his daughter...
...Tending rather toward the interpretation of facts given by Stendhal and Shelley than toward that of Bertolotti, which claims that legend has calumniated Francesco Cenci...
...When all avenues of escape failed, Beatrice plotted her father's death with the seneschal Olimpio Calvetti (whom she had taken as her lover) and the connivance of her brother and stepbrother...
...Jealous, intemperate and perverse, Francesco had his wife and daughter virtually imprisoned in their rooms at La Petrella...
...But she does not, and the ferocity of the punishment meted out to her and her accomplices makes the mind reel with horror...
...Their crime was no worse than those of many other nobles of the period who used assassination with impunity for the attainment of personal ends or as an instrument of power...
...He gives such a graphic picture of her gruesome plight, however, that it is not hard to see why she was driven, under the circumstances, to seek her father's death...
...Why were they executed...
...Prokosch well...
...There were powerful and eloquent extenuating circumstances: Francesco's incurable profligacy: his notorious sexual outrages...
...Prokosch devotes the second and best half of his exciting work...
...here is a hair-raiser to satisfy the most exacting tastes...
...The novel starts well: Why is wealthy, worldly, depraved Francesco Cenci fleeing Rome to bury himself in the lonely and austere castle of La Petrella...
...These are the points to which Mr...
...Why were Beatrice, her brother and stepmother prosecuted...
...The ride from Rome sets the lone...
...Its tragic, haunting quality hints at the horrendous events which marked the life of that strangely beautiful and ill-fated girl...
...Once beyond the enchanting campagna romana, the countryside takes on an increasingly nightmarish quality the farther they progress toward the stark hills of the Abruzzi...
...As the Prosecutor weaves, with microscopic patience, the web of evidence which will enmesh the culprits, the suspense grows and one hopes, as futilely as did the people of Rome, that somehow the luckless Beatrice will escape...
...In a dramatic and richly-hued fictional reconstruction, Frederic Prokosch unravels for twentieth-century readers the mystery that has shrouded the bloody deeds which brought the stormy history of the sixteenth-century Roman patrician family of the Cenci to its climax and swift, untimely end...
...No one knows, not even Lucrezia, his second wife, and Beatrice, who have been forced to accompany him...
...Moreover, no one in Rome wanted them to die...
...Focusing on the investigations of the Papal Prosecutor, he takes the reader through the series of further murders, inquisitions, tortures and betrayals which lead implacably to final and total catastrophe...
Vol. 38 • November 1955 • No. 46
