NOTES
- The root of the awkwardness and distance which affected both writers, especially Machado, in later years was undoubtedly the accusation of plagiarism in the 1878 article. See Alberto Machado da Rosa, Eça, discípulo de Machado? (Lisbon: Presença, n/d [1964]), 303–31. I wonder whether the passing mention of Eqa in an (admittedly anonymous) crônica of the Bons dias! series, which appeared not long after the publication of Os Maias, and in which Machado jokingly denies having plagiarized Eqa, was not a typically roundabout way of apologizing. Full reconciliation only came after Eqa's death in 1900. See Machado de Assis, Bons dias!, ed. John Gledson (Sāo Paulo: Hucitec, 1989), 112, and ‘Eça de Queirós’, in Machado de Assis, Obra completa (Rio de Janeiro: Aguilar, 1962) III, 933. All references to Machado's works are to this edition.
- On the latter (i.e. on Dona Plácida) see the brilliant article by Robert Schwarz ‘A velha pobre e o retratista’ in Os pobres na literatura brasileira (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1983), 46–50. Its substance is repeated in Um mestre na periferia do capitalismo: Machado de Assis (Sao Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1990), 98–105.
- See Machado da Rosa, Eça, discípulo de Machado?
- This goes back further than one might think. Balzac himself opens his 1844 preface to Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 659, by saying that ‘L'aplatissement, l'effacement de nos moeurs va croissant’.
- Eqa de Queirós, Obras (Oporto: Lello e Irmāo, n/d), II, 1647. All references to Eqa's works will be to this edition, except those to the novels, which will be to the more accessible Livros do Brasil edition.
- See especially the letter to Teófilo Braga of 12 March 1878: Eça de Queirós, Correspondência, ed. de Guilherme de Castilho (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional/Casa da Moeda, 1983), 2 vols., I, 133–37.
- O crime de Padre Amaro, 616.
- For a juxtaposition of the two versions, see Alberto Machado da Rosa, Eça, discípulo de Machado?, 279. It would be unlikely that the word ‘socialist’ would have dawned on the consciousness of Amaro or of Cônego Dias, or that they would see it as characterizing the ‘turba’: Oliveira Martins’ A teoria do socialismo was published in 1872, and the Partido Operário Socialista was not founded until 1875.
- Joaquim Pedro de Oliveira Martins, Portugal contemporâneo (Lisbon: Parceria António Maria Pereira, 1925), I, xxix.
- Ibid., I, xxx.
- See Alan Freeland, O leitor e a verdade oculta: Ensaio sobre ‘Os Maias’ (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional/Casa da Moeda, 1989), esp. 123–34. As the reader will see, this article owes a very great deal to this excellent book, and does not contradict its conclusions: rather it adds further evidence to them.
- In a letter of 12 June 1888: see Correspondência, I, 480.
- This retrospective revelation of the truth has much in common with the structure of L'Education sentimentale, as analysed by Peter Brooks, in Reading for the Plot (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), Ch. 7.
- It is notable, however, that Eça—or at any rate Ega—tries to justify its occurrence on the level of realistic likelihood; V, 621–22.
- Correspondencia, I, 541.
- Eça identifies Alfonso carefully as such when he is shown, at the beginning of the novel, ‘relendo o seu Guizot’ (13).
- For those—many, in my experience—whose knowledge of Gambetta is limited to the fact that he is a station on the Paris Metro, this quotation from the useful handbook France 1815–1914: The Bourgeois Century (London: Fontana, 1983) by Roger Magraw, may help them as it did me: ‘This triumph [the victory of the Republicans in the 1876 elections] owed much to Gambetta's political evolution. In 1869 he had appeared a radical firebrand, a quasi-socialist who alarmed conservatives. After 1871 he changed his spots, happily accepting the label “opportunist” from radicals who viewed him as a traitor. He abandoned calls for revanche and sought a modus vivendi with Thiers, who viewed his radical rhetoric as harmless. He accepted the senate. He preserved a studious neutrality over the Commune issue, his hand stained with the blood of neither Versaillais or Communards, and refused to negotiate for an amnesty. Portraying the royalists as the new warmongers, he posed as the true conservative. His republic meant order, prosperity, peace and national unity’ (212).
- It seems to me that there is a small mistake of fact on Eça's part here, since, although Grévy was elected to the Presidency of the Chamber of Deputies in 1875, when the novel begins, MacMahon did not ‘fall’, but remained President of France until 1880. The chronology of the novel in relation to external facts has one or two discrepancies of this kind—it seems curious that Ega and Craft should discuss Naturalism so vehemently, and in particular, the story of ‘uma lavadeira que dorme com um carpinteiro’(164), which can hardly be any other novel than L'Assommoir, when the latter was not published until 1877, when the movement became a public scandal.
- Obras, II, 1125. The ‘sapateiro’ Trinquet, one of those exiled for their part in the Commune, is given the appelation because he is earlier referred to as ‘fabricando tamancos nos presidios da Nova Caledonia’.
- See Freeland, op. cit., 133–34.
- It is curious that Machado de Assis refers to Gambetta in almost identical terms in a crônica of 1889 (seven years after his death), as a ‘papoula crescida’ to be bracketed with Boulanger. See Bons dias!, ed. cit., 158.
- See Correspondência, I, 227 and Ecos de Paris (art. cit.), II, 1124.
- Op. cit., 154.
- It will be evident that this article, for reasons of space, has only been able to concentrate on this single, though, I believe, structurally vital example of the vast range of historical reference in Os Maias, of which, I believe, the reference to non-Portuguese events and personalities should be taken as seriously as the rest. The question of the role of French politics in particular is well dealt with by Ofélia Paiva Monteiro in ‘Napoleão e o Segundo Império n'Os Maias: da produção da verosimilhança ao funcionamento simbólico’ in Actas do 1 Encontro Internacional de Queirosianos, Porto 22 a 25 de novembro de 1988 (Oporto: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto/Ediçōes Asa, 1990).