The Cenci: Celebrated Crimes, Book 2

Alexandre Dumas

Apr 2014 · Celebrated Crimes Book 2 · Freshwater Seas · Narrated by Robert Bethune

About this audiobook

To paraphrase the note from the translator, The Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas père was not written for children. The novelist has spared no language—has minced no words—to describe violent scenes of violent times. In particular, the torture of Beatrice Cenci at the hands of the authorities of Rome is given in brutal and clinical detail, sparing nothing.

In this, the second of the series, Dumas tells the frankly horrifying story of the tragic sons and daughers of Francesco Cenci. More beast than man in Dumas' portrait, Francesco hated them all with extraordinary cruelty and exploited them all diabolically; in particular, he sexually exploited his two daughters, especially Beatrice, both at the same time and often in the same bed as his wife Lucrezia (no relation to the famouse Borgia princess of the same name.) When, finally, his family turned on him and had him murdered, it looked for a while as though they might get away with it, but their fortunes were not that fortunate. The authorities, from Pope Clement VI on down, took bloody and terrible vengeance upon them. In what is arguably the first battered-woman defence, the crimes of the father meant nothing; the crimes of the women, everything.

Never one to allow a mere fact to stand in the way of a good story, Dumas seems to restrain himself more than usual here, though he does occasionally portray a scene from the point of view of the proverbial fly on the wall. Again, as the translator notes, "The careful, mature reader, for whom the books are intended, will recognize, and allow for, this fact." We're reading Dumas here, not Tuchman or Toynbee.

Enjoy!

About the author

After an idle youth, Alexandre Dumas went to Paris and spent some years writing. A volume of short stories and some farces were his only productions until 1927, when his play Henri III (1829) became a success and made him famous. It was as a storyteller rather than a playwright, however, that Dumas gained enduring success. Perhaps the most broadly popular of French romantic novelists, Dumas published some 1,200 volumes during his lifetime. These were not all written by him, however, but were the works of a body of collaborators known as "Dumas & Co." Some of his best works were plagiarized. For example, The Three Musketeers (1844) was taken from the Memoirs of Artagnan by an eighteenth-century writer, and The Count of Monte Cristo (1845) from Penchet's A Diamond and a Vengeance. At the end of his life, drained of money and sapped by his work, Dumas left Paris and went to live at his son's villa, where he remained until his death.