To this fact may possibly be due the legend of Beatrice.

In order to mitigate the guilt of parricide, Prospero Farinacci, who conducted her defense, established a theory of enormous cruelty and unspeakable outrages committed on her person by her father.

With the same object in view, he tried to make out that Bernardo was half-witted.

There is quite sufficient extant evidence to show that Bernardo was a young man of average intelligence; and with regard to Beatrice, nothing now remains to corroborate Farinaccio's hypothesis of incest.

She was not a girl of sixteen, as the legend runs, but a woman of twenty-two;[199] and the codicils to her will render it nearly certain that she had given birth to an illegitimate son, for whose maintenance she made elaborate and secret provisions.