In the present instance, the vengeance of the bereaved wife took a yet wider sweep. Not only were the families of the guilty men, even women and innocent children and infants at the breast, slaughtered indiscriminately; but the slightest cause of suspicion sufficed to involve others wholly unconnected with them in destruction.[134] This seems to have been the only occasion in the strangely varied life of Catherine, when evil passions, unmixed with political reasons, or calculations of expediency, governed her conduct, and urged her to excesses of cruelty. And it is impossible to avoid comparing the calm, judicial proceedings, and not wholly unreasonable chastisement, consequent upon the death of Riario, with the wild excesses of vindictive fury that followed that of Giacomo Feo. Surely it cannot be supposed that all this was simulated rage, acted out in such terrible earnest, merely to divert suspicion from herself as the murderess! Not even acquaintance with the unnatural atrocities so common in that age and clime, nor the wonderful deadness of the moral sense which prevailed, can justify so shocking a belief. No! Either we must suppose, that passing years, the habits of despotism, familiarity with bloodshed, and much trouble and adversity had potently changed Catherine's character for the worse. Or we must, with perhaps more probability, seek an explanation of her altered conduct in the difference of the feelings the two bereavements may be supposed to have occasioned. In the first case, we have a princess decorously mourning; and with high stern justice punishing the political fanatics, who had taken from her a husband, the partner indeed of her greatness, and fellow-labourer in the toils of ambition; but one, who had been assigned to her solely for the purposes of that ambition, and whom no preference or personal sympathy had had any share in selecting. In the second instance, we have a woman, raging with tiger-like fury against the murderers of her love. This so faultlessly beautiful form, ruthlessly made a mangled corpse before her eyes, was the first and last love of this vehement and strong-willed woman;—her only taste of real natural heart's joy;—the one pet, private sanctuary of her life, not dedicated to the weary life-long toil of building up the Riario name. Hence the almost indiscriminate slaughter, hanging, quartering, torturing, banishments, and ruin, that scared all Forlì with fear who next might be the victim, when Giacomo Feo fell. Above forty persons, counting men, women, and children, were put to death, of whom the greater part were in all probability wholly innocent of any participation in the crime! More than fifty others suffered lesser degrees of persecution. [Sidenote: THE FUNERAL.]