ought two asses, laden with charcoal, and
limped up and down the streets of Rome, crying, "Charcoal! charcoal!"
Then, whilst all the detectives were hunting high and low for him, he
got out of the city, met a company of merchants under escort, joined
them, and reached Naples, where he embarked. What ultimately became of
him was never known; it has been asserted, but without confirmation,
that he succeeded in reaching France, and enlisted in a Swiss regiment
in the pay of Henry IV.

The confession of the sbirro and the disappearance of Monsignor Guerra
left no moral doubt of the guilt of the Cenci. They were consequently
sent from the castle to the prison; the two brothers, when put to the
torture, broke down and confessed their guilt. Lucrezia Petroni's full
habit of body rendered her unable to bear the torture of the rope, and,
on being suspended in the air, begged to be lowered, when she confessed
all she knew.

As for Beatrice, she continued unmoved; neither promises, threats, nor
torture had any effect upon her; she bore everything unflinchingly, and
the judge Ulysses Moscati himself, famous though he was in such matters,
failed to draw from her a single incriminating word. Unwilling to take
any further responsibility, he referred the case to Clement VIII; and
the pope, conjecturing that the judge had been too lenient in applying
the torture to a young and beautiful Roman lady, took it out of
his hands and entrusted it to another judge, whose severity and
insensibility to emotion were undisputed.

This latter reopened the whole interrogatory, and as Beatrice up to
that time had only been subjected to the ordinary torture, he gave
instructions to apply both the ordinary and extraordinary. This was the
rope and pulley, one of the most terrible inventions ever devised by the
most ingenious of tormentors.

To make the nature of this horrid torture plain to our readers, we give
a detailed description of it, adding an extract of the presiding judge's
report of the case, taken from the Vatican manuscripts.

Of the various forms of torture then used in Rome the most common were
the whistle, the fire, the sleepless, and the rope.

The mildest, the torture of the whistle, was used only in the case of
children and old persons; it consisted in thrusting between the nails
and the flesh reeds cut in the shape of whistles.

The fire, frequently employed before the invention of the sleepless
torture, was simply roasting the