According to his own story, he was half drunk on his return home.

His father not only taunted and threatened him, but at last seized the door-bar and began knocking him about the head; and then, at last, maddened with pain and passion, he drew out a knife he had picked up on the road, and stabbed his father, hardly knowing what he did.

On the bare statement of facts, I should deem this version of the story the more probable of the two, but as no details whatever are given of the evidence on either side, it is impossible to judge.

The court at any rate decided that there was no proof of the prisoner having been drunk, and that the evidence of his father having struck him was of a suspicious character, "while," they add, "it would be absurd and immoral to maintain, that a father, whose right and duty it is to correct his children (and indeed on this occasion correction was abundantly deserved by the insolent demeanour of Luigi) could be considered to provoke his son by a slight personal chastisement." The son, by the way, was over one and twenty, a fact to which no allusion is made.

As "a forlorn hope," in the words of the sentence, the counsel for the defence asserted, that whatever the crime of the prisoner might be, it was not parricide, from the simple fact that Luigi was not Venanzio's son.