Emma Bovary attends a performance of Gaetano Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor while still recuperating from her rejection by her lover. At first fortified by a cynicism induced by chagrin, she listens to the opera with a degree of melancholy detachment. Eventually affected by the urgency of the music and the passion of the singing (despite the makeshift scenery that quakes as the singers pace the stage) she pines again for a semblance of the ardor expressed and received by the heroine. This new longing is as intense as that once engendered by her reading of Sir Walter Scott's novel, The Bride of Lammermoor the basis of the opera. The tragic dénouement upon the stage only quickens her romantic impulse. It is obvious that Flaubert's allusions to Lucia di Lammermoor and the Scott novel prompted Eça de Queirós's citation of Giuseppe Verdi's La traviata and the novel from which it was derived, La dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils. It is probable as well that Dumas's ironic use of Donizetti's La favorite, in the play derived from the novel, was noted by the Portuguese author. However, such influences, once observed, should not be allowed to obscure the originality of his consummate elaboration. In O Primo Basílio plot, characterization and theme evolve through a system of musical allusion and analogy. However, only a cursory evaluation has been made of this feature of the novel. This oversight is reflected in Roy Campbell's English translation which deletes, abridges or inexplicably modifies many of the operatic references through which the author establishes the interrelation of his characters, transforming their everyday experiences into allegory. Using Goethe's Faust, as distilled through Charles Gounod's music, as a frame-work, Eça transcended the Naturalism of his models, Balzac, Flaubert and Zola, to recreate, within the four walls of a Portuguese home, the quest of the jaded philosopher and relate a parable of alienation whose lyricism impinged upon Hispanic Modernismo⁴¹.

Eça's residence in England (where he began O Primo Basílio in 1874) and long sojourn in Paris (where he died in 1900) enabled him, a sometime music critic, to see many operas still performed today, and to hear concert artists of the calibre of a Liszt and Thalberg, whom he mentions in the novel. Lisbon may have been a provincial musical center by comparison, but an idiomatic standard of performance was then as now often attained at the Teatro São Carlos. Opera, at that time elicited more general interest, proportionally, than now. Its more appealing tunes were played by the municipal bands. Much emphasis was placed upon the performance of musical masterpieces in the home; entire operas were reduced to piano arrangements, and their principal airs were adapted for various other instruments. Performances in the parlor must have heightened one's appreciation of music old and new. The only mechanical means of reproducing music generally available were the ever more elaborate music boxes and the organ grinder's contrivance. Although a more «popular» type of music, such as the fado, abounded, the gulf which separates «classical» from «popular» was then perhaps less wide and deep. Jorge, a mining engineer, sings operatic snippets and quotes recitatives, all in Italian. Today the Broadway musical is similarly diffused. In America the mere mention of Camelot, in a political context, evokes immediate response: a musical based on Arthurian legend, enjoyed by a young president who

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was assassinated, now symbolic of his brief administration. Eça's musical allusions are often similarly concise and precise. They must be embellished by the reader. Embellished, they evolve naturally as pertinent imagery. The text of a song or the plot of an opera is at times an essential component of the image. In this respect Eça (in 1874) was not obscure. Rarely did he cite an esoteric composition. When he did, he described the melody, quoted or explained the lyrics, so that the significance became inescapable. Many of the compositions he cited are still in vogue, but their audience is more limited proportionally, if not numerically, today.

After Jorge, her husband, goes out the door, Luísa muses wistfully over Alexandre Dumas's La dame aux camélias:

Thus musing she softly sings the tender but impassioned aria, «Addio, del passato», from Giuseppe Verdi's La traviata. The aria occurs after Marguerite (Violetta) reads a letter from the elder Duval (Germont) informing her that he will allow his son, Armand (Alfredo), to return to her; bidding her a speedy recovery; wishing her a bright future⁴². «E tarde!» sighs the consumptive, who then bids farewell to the past and to the future (a thematic undercurrent in Eça's novel). Instantly Luísa recalls the announcement in the newspaper that her cousin, Basílio, is returning from abroad. She hastens to convince herself that the passion she once felt for him is over; that she has found complete satisfaction with Jorge. Yet:

The closing measures of La traviata had assuaged her when Basílio broke their unofficial engagement by letter. Now the newspaper announcement takes its place alongside the music and poetry of Luísa's romantic reverie. She, like Marguerite Gautier, like Violetta, will once again strive to make an idyllic dream real.

From a house down the street come the strains of Thecla Badarzewska's «The Prayer of the Virgin» played «a compasso de estudo» (127) by a girl at her piano. This melody was widely believed to have been written when its composer was eighteen. It earned her world-wide fame when reprinted in the Revue et Gazette Musicale (Paris, 1859)⁴³. Luísa in effect retraces the past of the girl of eighteen yet to be deceived, and undeceived, by Basílio. Outside, an organ grinder plies the aria, «Casta Diva», from Vicenzo Bellini's Norma. It is hard to imagine an aria less suited to the organ grinder's medium. The slow, arching melody, of which each note should flow almost imperceptibly into the next, is an apostrophe to the virgin goddess of the moon. It is sung by Norma, high priestess and prophetess of the Druids, who herself must remain, on pain of death, as chaste as the goddess she represents. Norma, however, has had a lover and keeps two children born of this illicit union hidden in the recesses of her cave. Sublimity yields to crude naturalism at this point in the novel as the author strips away «the diaphanous veil of fantasy over the stark nakedness of truth»⁴⁴. The real jars with the illusory, for the contours of the bel canto aria can only be distorted by the faltering, mechanical instrument which conveys it, as Eça explains:

The women who come out to listen are utterly unlike the goddess described in the aria, unlike the white-robed priestess who emerges seemingly spotless from her cave to sing the aria. Among them is:

The mechanical tinkle of the piano this enervating Sunday afternoon finds a sardonic counterpoint in Bellini's aria as executed by the

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organ grinder⁴⁵. The earthy souls who listen to the aria appear as they are. Not so Norma, who sings it before her congregation, her head crowned by the golden cluster of oak leaves denoting her office. Norma's dilemma in the opera becomes Luísa's anguish as the novel progresses. In fact, both, at this point, are eagerly anticipating a reunion with their erstwhile lovers. Significantly the words of Norma's aria -«Casta diva... a noi volgi il bel sembiante, senza nube e senza vel»⁴⁶- chime against a description of Luísa the day of her wedding:

Luísa is operating on the level of conjecture, the lowest plane of knowledge, according to Plato, characterized by shadows, dim outlines and fantasies. Here the intellect is easily manipulated by charlatans, or purveyors of images -the Mephistophelian figures in the novel- who, adhering to preconceived notions, occlude the immutable forms of truth. Jorge, no less than Basílio, is implicated here⁴⁷. At significant points in the novel Eça alludes to «ancient» and «modern» songs and arias, whose lyrics contain references to night, mist and veils, to accentuate this Platonic idea. For example, anticipating her rendezvous with Basílio, Luísa, in an episode similar to Eça's description of her wedding, notices that «do céu estrelado caía uma luz difusa; janelas alumiadas sobressaíam ao longe, abertas à noite abafada» (71) and plays a few measures of Bellini's pastoral opera, La sonnambula, the story of a sleepwalker whose nocturnal excursions elicit malicious gossip and almost cause her to lose her beloved, with whom she longs to be, and eventually is, reunited⁴⁸. Luísa, lost in her romantic reveries, is not too unlike the somnambulist of Bellini's opera. Towards the end of the novel Eça uses the words «um modo automático e sonâmbulo» (386) to depict a performance of Charles Gounod's Faust at the Teatro São Carlos. Upon that stage, where sixteenth-century Germany is imperfectly represented, Luísa's Portugal will be reflected in startling detail. Twice Luísa unwittingly emulates the operatic heroine, Marguerite, like Luísa «uma alma lírica, nebulosa, nostálgica, sensual, para quem o amor é um magnetismo suave... a morte um libertamento romântico da vida -insuficiente e vazia» (Prosas Bárbaras, 191): when she accepts the illusion of holy matrimony offered by Jorge and the illusion of romance offered by Basílio⁴⁹. In Chapter Two, succumbing to the spell of a Chopin «Nocturne» and a languorously erotic «Malagueña» played on her keyboard by Sebastião on the eve of Jorge's departure from Lisbon, Luísa «rehearses» with Jorge Faust's seduction and abandonment of Marguerite. This episode prefigures Basílio's actual seduction and abandonment of Luísa. In both episodes, it will be noted, Eça alludes to music which parallels in mood and cadence the melodies intoned in the «jardim afrodisíaco» (388) of Gounod's Faust, where Mephistopheles wafts the perfumes and summons the «sombras cúmplices» (388) that entrance Marguerite.

At the end of Bellini's Norma, the errant priestess, reunited with her lover, dons a dark veil when both are condemned to the expiatory flames of the pyre. Luísa's romantic fantasies will be constantly marred by contact with reality in much the same way that the «Casta Diva» becomes ludicrous at a turn of the organ grinder's crank. In her deliriums, with Jorge -«Estão-me a matar a fogo lento!» (432)- at her bedside, and Basílio on her mind, Luísa too will experience the «chamas escarlates» (421). In effect, she too will exchange the diaphanous veil of fantasy -the veil she wore for Jorge the day of their wedding, the veil she dons just prior to seeing Basílio upon his return from abroad-for the «longos véus fúnebres que descem e abafam» (388).

In Chapter Four the organ grinder reappears cranking a medley from Lucia di Lammermoor and Norma. This elicits a vague feeling of melancholy, akin to Luísa's, from her maid and rival, Juliana. Juliana's past disappointments presage Luísa's. The reader is informed that Luísa's «figura da morte» (72) was once attracted to a clean-cut young man; a curt sobriquet from him dispelled her illusion. Later a repulsive stablehand became attracted to her because of her chaste propriety; his importunity repelled her. These suggest, respectively, Basílio and Castro, the latter a banker whom Luísa approaches when the financial problems she deemed so romantic in La dame aux camélias distort her fantasies. Yet the analogy is more complex, for Basílio assumes aspects of the two men in Juliana's life. Sojourning in his native «chiqueiro»

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(447), he plays the gallant, and is perceived as such by Luísa, but desires his cousin primarily because of her «frescura» -the characteristic which drew Luísa to Jorge. Basílio will become Luísa's Faust (the jaded philosopher in the guise of a youth) as well as Luísa's Mephistopheles (the arch-cynic who alternately fosters and denigrates Marguerite's illusions) as Eça makes clear by means of the music associated with him and the way he performs it.

Luísa, to paraphrase St. Paul, believes she has «put away childish things», but still «sees through a glass darkly», a metaphor cultivated by Eça, whose characters never «see» themselves although they parade before Luísa's mirror and see their «images» at the opera house, where the players in turn view their own reflections. She opts for La traviata and its antecedent, Dumas's novel, estimating that more modern means more real. The old-fashioned plots of Lucia di Lammermoor and Il trovatore are not for her⁵⁰. Still she is not impervious to the sentimentality which the older songs and arias convey. These still emit that essence of romance which pervades her «modern» reveries. At the piano she is as apt to play an arrangement of Lucia di Lammermoor as essay a «new» waltz, «The Blue Danube». The latter leads her amorous counterpart, the hopelessly infatuated Dona Felicidade, to reminisce about her own youth. Another waltz, the old-fashioned «Pearl of Ophir», is thus evoked. It recurs in Chapter Eleven when Dona Felicidade briefly imagines that Counselor Acácio returns her affection. As such, Dona Felicidade's «Pearl of Ophir» may be paired with Luísa's «Addio, del passato» from La traviata: both evoke an ideal sustained by an illusion.

In Chapters Two and Six Émile Paladilhe's lilting «La mandolinata» accords with Luísa's new-found gaiety: a mood of delicious anticipation piqued by a sense of danger. The lyrics -an interplay of darkness and light- describe bright nights and amorous escapades. Luísa hums the song as she envisions the rented room she is to share with Basílio, a subtle allusion by the author to the solitude à deux Marguerite-Violetta enjoyed with Armand-Alfredo at a cottage in the country. However, as fear overrides amusement, Luísa experiences not intimate darkness but solitary gloom. Sebastião muses upon just such an eventuality by way of the aria, «La calunnia», from Gioacchino Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia. The lyrics are paraphrased in part: «A calúnia ao princípio leve como o frémito das asas de um pássaro [vai] subindo num crescendo aterrador, até estalar como um trovão!» (203). Not mentioned by Eça, but presumably inferred by his readers, is the concluding maxim of this extremely popular aria: death comes as a mercy to the wretch who must endure the onslaught of adverse public opinion⁵¹. The aria reflects the preoccupation with public opinion shared by the characters of the novel who like Luísa take the illusory for the ideal, to whom a facade of morality is of more immediate importance than morality itself. It was Sebastião who had reminded Jorge: «E o pior é a vizinhança» (50). Jorge had heartily concurred that his house was very like a prison surrounded by prying neighbors. The aria suggests a corollary attitude, one of tragic import for Luísa, but misinterpreted by Machado de Assis who took it out of its context: the discovery of an indiscretion can induce more anguish than pangs of conscience after the fact. It is Luísa who takes up the aria, as it were, where Sebastião leaves off. Contemplating her predicament, lacking the courage to enlist his help in obtaining the incriminating letters purloined by Juliana, she grasps at shards of illusion by asking him to play Mozart's Requiem, adding that this beautiful music is what she would like played at her own funeral⁵². The exasperated Jorge forbids its performance. Luísa nevertheless persists in groping for a sweet dream of death. She requests «Os Dezasseis Compassos da Africana» (345). Sebastião complies; Luísa «com a cabeça apoiada à mão» (345) muses:

Luísa appears to be thinking of Selika, the East-African heroine of Giacomo Meyerbeer's opera, L'Africaine⁵³. Deserted by Vasco da Gama, Selika inhales the lethal fragrance of the manchineel blossom as his ship recedes from shore. The setting and Selika's euphoria as the poison takes effect, even to the mystic voices which beckon her, closely match Luísa's neo-Platonic train of thought while she listens to Sebastião play. The most famous melody of the opera is Vasco da Gama's aria,

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«O paradiso!» sung against a background of chords played in arpeggio, suggestive of the sea. It may have inspired Basílio's name -«Paraíso»- for the shabby room he rented for his rendezvous with Luísa. Perceiving her mood, Jorge interrupts with the Dies irae of the more austere Gregorian setting of the Requiem Mass, adding: «Mas então venha a bela tristeza, venha a tristeza completa» (346). When Luísa dissembles, he bitterly mocks the voices of Mozart and Meyerbeer with the Gregorian Benedictus, intoned in a raucous baritone, thus in effect denying Luísa her romantic illusion of death. Eça here evokes, in musical detail, the Cathedral Scene (where Marguerite is condemned) and the finale (where Marguerite is saved) of Gounod's Faust.

Through his musical performances in Luísa's parlor, Basílio gives a sardonic twist to the moral, intoned by the invisible chorus concluding L'Africaine, that in the kingdom of love all are equal. In the presence of Basílio and Acácio, Luísa, in a dreamy mood, plays the accompaniment of «uma música muito conhecida, já antiga» (107), Meyerbeer's «Komm du schönes Fischermädchen», and asks Basílio to sing the Portuguese adaptation, discovered in a woman's magazine, that she has penned beneath the original by Heinrich Heine. The song is an invitation to love, an invitation praised by the unsuspecting Acácio who, unaware of the subtle communication between singer and accompanist, remarks that the wooer's voice is «o melhor órgão de nossa sociedade!» (109). After singing Meyerbeer's song, Basílio introduces a modinha from Bahia about a little negress who is seduced then abandoned by a white overseer. Catching a reference from the preceding song, the modinha, in Basílio's rendition, which comically exaggerates its pathos, becomes a parody of it, a contemporary re-expression of the scenario of L'Africaine, as recalled by Luísa, but stripped of its Romantic trappings: «E a negra pra os mares seus olhos alonga» (110). Vasco da Gama and Selika, the overseer and the negress, the cosmopolitan Basílio and the provincial Luísa are in essence one couple. The seeds of despair are sown with those of hope, be the milieu Romantic, historical or actual. This is emphasized by Basílio's insensitive dismissal, to Luísa, of the mulata with whom he cohabited in Brazil. Luísa's invitation to love, which Basílio transmits to her accompaniment, is accepted but mocked. The modinha (desertion of the girl) «concludes» the preceding song (wooing of the girl) and anticipates the finale of L'Africaine, whose libretto «encompasses» and «concludes» both songs. As such, the apocryphal «Dezasseis Compasses da Africana» (perhaps a deliberate distortion by Eça of the title of Menozzi's Fantasy No. 16, «sull' Africana») might be understood as an oblique reference to the sixteen chapters of O Primo Basílio, the «scenario» followed by Luísa up to Basílio's ultimate dismissal.

Meyerbeer's opera was first performed in 1865, but was actually begun in 1837, the year his setting of Heine was published, a well-known fact at the time the novel was written, for the premiere of the much revised work had for years been eagerly awaited. The composer, even during his terminal illness, continued to tinker with the score. Barring Gounod's Roméo et Juliette, first performed in 1867, whose score Luísa eagerly awaits, L'Africaine is the latest opera to which Eça alludes, if one dates it from the premiere. Thus it would hardly be considered «uma música... já antiga» by Luísa. Yet the same composer's setting of Heine in her estimation is. By analogy, the fancies which Luísa currently deems à la mode are not so different from those she dismisses as passé. This is emphasized by the author's allusion to the «ancient» Il trovatore and the «modern» La traviata, the two Verdi operas first performed in 1853, the latter being the work whose music overlaps both affairs.

Between visits from Basílio Luísa, accompanied by Sebastião, endeavors to negotiate the melismatic sequence of notes that characterizes Charles Gounod's «Medjé». This Arabian Song (its subtitle), a present given and on a previous occasion sung by Basílio, is an ardent plea by a lover rejected by his beloved, who mistrusts his motives. Its intricacy accords it would seem with Basílio's «firma complicada» (21) on the letter to Luísa terminating their unofficial engagement -the incident which shattered Luísa's youthful dreams and led her, even during her final illness, to pursue more modern, less idealistic fancies just as irreal. The lyrics, reiterating Luísa's own feeling of affection mingled with mistrust, foreshadow the process of illusion and disillusion to be observed in Faust. Again, a song and an opera by one composer are aptly paired. Luísa's unsureness of execution accords with

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her unsureness of herself as regards making love to the accomplished Basílio, who can sign and sing with equal flourish»⁵⁴. When Basílio returns, he dismisses Arabia with selections from Jacques Offenbach's operetta Barbe-Bleue, evocative of another exotic locale, Paris, the center via Dumas and Verdi of Luísa's current fantasies⁵⁵. These are followed by exuberant renditions of similarly frivolous café-concert songs. Offenbach dispels with laughter the sinister legend of Bluebeard. Basílio's performance of the operetta charms and amuses Luísa, yet it accords with his cavalier attitude towards her. His distaste for Portugal (cultivated by Reinaldo) and disdain (not unmixed with relish) for Luísa are implicit in his musical offering. Musically he sweeps away the démodé for the chic once the former has served its purpose. He similarly abets and derides Luísa's aspirations. Luísa can no more achieve her ideal objective than can she negotiate the sinuous line of the «Medjé». In L'Africaine Vasco da Gama asks Selika: «Quel voile to cachait à mes yeux?» She answers: «Quel voile? Le mépris!» (L'Africaine, 14). When Luísa eventually chides Basílio's indifference, Basílio mocks the very music he plays and sings the day he attains her: «Uma ligação como a nossa não é o dueto do "Fausto"» (223).

Basílio's musical offering is «reciprocated» by Leopoldina, another visitor who takes a turn at Luísa's keyboard. She begins with selections from Barbe-Bleue, then starts to sing one of her favorite ditties, the «Drinking Song» from the same composer's La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein⁵⁶. The song is a parody of the «Ballad of the King of Thule» from Gounod's Faust. In Chapter Thirteen Luísa hears Gounod's original setting sung by the artist interpreting Marguerite, the ingénue Faust is about to seduce. Gounod's meditative Ballad is a metaphysical expression of courtly love: an aged king, true to his deceased beloved, on solemn feast days drinks his wine from the chalice of gold fashioned in her memory. This is the consecration of the divine, a symbol Eça employs throughout the novel and parodies, for example, through Julião vis-à-vis Juliana (400). In Offenbach's parody the devoted king is merely an old carouser. The Grand-Duchess sings the parody, initiating a round of drinking. Luísa herself is denigrated to the status of singer of this travesty when Juliana mutters «Canta, bêbedazinha!» (192) as Luísa prepares to meet Basílio. Leopoldina manages to sing just the opening measures -«Ouvi dizer que meu avô de vinho era um tal amador...» (126)- before Luísa, who finds the parody too blatant, interrupts to request a fado⁵⁷. Leopoldina obliges with a romantic fado whose trite sentimentality is in essence a neo-Platonic expression of courtly love not unlike the Ballad she has just parodied. This fado becomes Luísa's Ballad. This is what she sings prior to Basílio's arrival the day he claims her, thus re-enacting the part of the medieval Marguerite. Again the links between past and present are accentuated. Musically Leopoldina and Basílio have much in common. Significantly Luísa suspects a sexual liaison as well⁵⁸.

Several strands of irony are to be noted when Sebastião performs the Serenade, «Deh vieni alla finestra», from Mozart's Don Giovanni⁵⁹. In the opera, Don Giovanni addresses the Serenade to a peasant girl whom Donna Elvira, already seduced and abandoned by the singer, wishes to safeguard. The Serenade at the same time satirizes Don Giovanni's «courtship» of Donna Elvira; it is in fact sung before Donna Elvira's window and follows closely upon a mock serenade which he uses as a ruse to draw her away from his intended victim. Because the classic simplicity of the melody is matched by refined words of sentiment held in check -the lecherer in the guise of Petrarch- the Serenade stylistically is not incongruous at the hands of a Sebastião. Mozart's Serenade accords with a satiric one sung by Mephistopheles, posing like a courtier, beneath Marguerite's window, in Gounod's Faust. Mephistopheles's mock serenade occurs after Marguerite, seduced and abandoned by Faust, returns from the cathedral, where Mephistopheles and his minions have interrupted her prayers. Sebastião's rendition of Don Giovanni's Serenade is what Luísa, seduced and abandoned by Basílio, hears upon return from the Misericórdia church, where she found she was unable to pray. Again, two works by one composer (in this case the disparate Requiem and Serenade) are shown by Eça to converge to illustrate the plight of this latter-day Marguerite, «sentimental, mal-educada, nem espiritual (porque o cristianismo já o não tem; sanção moral da justiça, não sabe o que isso é), arrasada de romance... nervosa pela falta de exercício e disciplina moral» (Eça to Braga, cited).

In Chapter Eleven the strains of the «Wedding Chorus» from Lucia di Lammermoor emanate from Acácio's music box, an elaborate mechanism capable of emitting eighteen tunes. There is remarkable irony here. Those who half listen to the tune are, for the most part, spiritual reflections of the physical ugliness of those who stopped to hear the organ grinder purvey Norma's aria. The svelte Acácio, presiding over his elegant toy and over the conversation, in this respect is not unlike his physical opposite, «um homem grosso, de pernas tortas, curvado sob um realejo» (32). Acácio is hosting a stag dinner celebrating his exaltation to the rank of «Cavaleiro da Ordem de Sant'Iago, atendendo aos seus grandes merecimentos literários» (326). At this banquet of philosophes (a parody as well, perhaps, of the Cenáculo, of which Eça was a member) the celebrants cynically dissect womankind, all the while affirming the male prerogative (an imbalance Eça addresses throughout the novel)⁶⁰. The sanctity of marriage is upheld but debased. Sebastião alone defends mutual fidelity and devotion, his unrealized ideal. With Bellini's «Casta Diva» the author probes the illusion of integrity, no less than the unresolved dichotomy of the real and the ideal, by satirizing the concealment of impudicity. With Donizetti's «Wedding Chorus» he probes the conventional concept of connubial love. It opens with words similar to Paladilhe's «La mandolinata»: «D'immenso giubilo s'innalzi un grido... che a noi sorridono le stelle ancor»⁶¹. The lyrics accrue significance as the novel continues, suggesting heedless abandon in the face of impending disaster. In the opera the heroine has been tricked and coerced into a marriage of convenience. Maddened by despair, she stabs the bridegroom in the confines of the bridal chamber. The «Wedding Chorus» -interrupted by the announcement of the crime- resumes in the minor key: «Notte, ricopri la ria sventura col tenebroso tuo denso vel»⁶²: Luísa's white veil of chastity, which she donned the day of her wedding and just prior to meeting Basílio upon his return from Brazil, presages the dark veil of endless night which accompanies her final retreat from reality.

In Lucia di Lammermoor a dramatic effect is achieved through the incongruity of the «Wedding Chorus». If one follows the discourse at Acácio's celebration, one eavesdrops upon a perversion of human charity and sensibility couched in terms of moral and patriotic rectitude. In Acácio's chambers the mechanical tinkle of the «Wedding Chorus» accentuates a moral paradox: the distortion of values by those who claim to uphold them. Didactically this is the focal point of the novel. Luísa's dilemma is but one aspect, her delusions but a reflection of moral disarray. In Chapter Fourteen, when Acácio (representing the new political order) and Ernestinho (representing the arts) flank Julião (medical scientist and dissector of the body politic), Eça reveals the farce underpinning the social order. Not one of these men reflects the ideal he presumes to realize. The social order is itself a macabre fantasy, a game of concealment, as Julião implies when he parts the curtains of Acácio's bed and discovers «sobre o travesseiro duas fronhazinhas chegadas de um modo conjugal e terno» (329). Ironically, Acácio's peccadillo -the incident is in harmony with Basílio's dévoilement of Luísa- is «unveiled» by a charlatan. The real revelation is the lack of an ethical center. Eça's use of Lucia di Lammermoor and other operas seems to anticipate Proust's theory that even a philosophically inconsequential work of art has the power to reveal eternal truths. Julião's discovery foreshadows the lifting of the curtain at the São Carlos, where a fantasy on-stage reveals the farce off-stage.

Basílio's seduction of Luísa follows closely the scenario of the Garden Scene of Gounod's Faust. The characters of the novel are refractions of those in the opera. Faust desires Marguerite for her innocence as much as her beauty. He courts her with some genuine ardor in the absence of Valentin, her brother and guardian, while Mephistopheles, in the background but controlling the action, parodies this semblance of true love. Having attained Marguerite, Faust abandons her (Basílio goes to Paris) for the sensual beauties of history and antiquity proffered by his demonic mentor. Not even Siebel, Marguerite's devoted and understanding admirer, is able to attenuate her grief and despair. Dame Marthe, Marguerite's garrulous neighbor, goes after the devil himself, a hopeless infatuation akin to Dona Felicidade's for Acácio. The byplay of Dame Marthe and Mephistopheles occurs in humorous counterpoint to the love duet of Faust and Marguerite (Goethe's «quartette»). Through Dona Felicidade's devotion for Acácio, Eça similarly parodies Luísa's desire to realize her romantic dreams with Basílio. Acácio-fiddler-turned-statistician,

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self-styled representative of «New Constitutionalism» and presider at Luísa's wedding -passes for Mephistopheles; but Eça reduces this purveyor of images, in his youth «dado à flauta» (107), the sensual instrument Plato considered banning from his ideal Republic, to a caricature on par with Dame Marthe, the unwitting onlooker who must be humored. Julião draws attention to his book-cluttered study, a replica of Faust's. This fading image of Faust is a patent caricature of Descartes, whose traits are implicit in Acácio's physique; his «compartmentalization» of mind and matter; his equivocal asceticism; his ambivalence towards the church (he dismisses Dona Felicidade as retrograde, but keeps a lithograph of the Pietà in his bed-chamber); finally his «cosmopolitan» outlook but avowal to live and die in the «provincial» city of his birth. He sacrifices the violin (this suggests the lyre, Plato's instrument of divine intuition) for statistics and becomes a «realist» like Jorge, or rather a purveyor of analytic formulas that fail to inform. This man of new ideas is zealously pursued by Dona Felicidade who fits this description of Dame Marthe: «Questa vecchia spietata avrebbe volutto sposarsi ancor con Satanasso!⁶³» She is the materialistic Church, obsessed with an outward display of morality (belied by her lack of charity) and tied to superstition (resorting, oddly like Faust, to witchcraft to gain the object of her affection). The love she enshrines, like the stuffed dog in its glass case, satirizes the anxiety of the Church to ally itself with the ineffectual reformist government.

Luísa's house is Marguerite's garden, where the dream is released, as well as Marguerite's prison, where the dream is confined. Jorge wishes to protect his wife, yet he opens the door to various refractions of Mephistopheles's evil genius, well-meaning as some are. These are entertained in the parlor (her humble salon) which may be taken to represent her mind, refined and sensual, groping for what is real yet ideal, confused by the irreal and the illusory. Here Luísa devours her sensational novels and -unconsciously mocked by Dona Felicidade and Acácio- strives to re-create them on the physical and ideal planes. Here Julião, the man of scientific principles who would destroy the good with the bad supposedly to start afresh, like Juliana seething with resentment, acts the poseur. Here Juliana, Julião's alter ego, like Julião disliked but accepted by Luísa, parades her chastity and poses as the virtuous wife. Her attempts to usurp Luísa's place are satirized, as has been observed, when the organ grinder plays a medley from Norma and Lucia di Lammermoor, ironic suggestions of chastity and connubial bliss. Here Luísa confides in Jorge's opposite, Sebastião, who represents idealism devoid of substance; who as such is not too unlike the «complete» Ernestinho, whose profitable plays are replays of Scribe's⁶⁴. Here Luísa receives Basílio, the brilliant but brittle youthful potential of Portugal, who has sold his soul to the tune of Reinaldo's pipe-dream. Good at everything, he offers nothing. Reinaldo, in Portugal to sell his estates in order to vegetate abroad, remains outside the door but, like Mephistopheles, exerts influence from beyond the pale. This epitome of Wilde's cynic, or arch-empiricist, who judges Luísa by her cotton stockings, whose «philosophy» (a parody of Hume's) and tastes are English, to whom Portugal (in a reversal of the parable) is the Prodigal's pig-sty, represents the corrosive influence of self-haters who disdain their heritage. As Eça implies, through the Faust-Mephistopheles analogy, they not only sell their birthrights but deflower the youth of Portugal: provincial, at the mercy of the money-changers (represented by Castro) who purport to save her. Luísa, urged by the «divinas vibrações» (Prosas Bárbaras, 68) that Eça perceived in Marguerite, is the inarticulate searcher whose every step leads to misadventure. She opens the door to Leopoldina and sees, but refuses to recognize, herself. Her death, like Juliana's, is induced by emotional stress; but, significantly, it is Luísa's mind, not her heart, that gives out. The mind unable to cope suggests her ignorance. The weak heart aptly denotes Juliana's suppressed sensibilities.

Moments after attaining Luísa in her parlor, Basílio sings distractedly a segment of the love duet from Faust, yet another evocation of the misty morn of Luísa's wedding and of the veil she donned before encountering her seducer: «Al pallido chiaror, che vien dagli astri d'or, e posa un lieve velo sul volto tuo si bel...⁶⁵». Hearing the melody, Luísa recalls the night she and Jorge heard Faust at the São Carlos. She had been dazzled by the brilliance of the nocturnal garden, for the first time lit by electricity. Jorge, moved by the

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music, had gazed at her ardently. On their way home in a cab he too had sung the words. Here as elsewhere Eça conjoins Jorge and Basílio, underscoring musically this remark to Teófilo Braga: «[O marido oferece] o casamento peninsular que é ordinariamente a luxúria [e] o amante [a luxúria] sem paixão» (Eça to Braga, cited). Both «serenade» Luísa after, not before, attaining her. This discrepancy in timing, novel versus opera, appears to be deliberate. Eça peals back the layer of sentimentality implicit in the musical offering of husband and lover; underneath, he reveals the mock serenades, also sung after the fact, of two master illusionists, Don Giovanni and Mephistopheles.

When Marguerite in her delirium recalls the recent past, melodies from the preceding scenes of the opera return to haunt her. Luísa undergoes just such a reminiscence in Chapter Thirteen when she hears a reprise of Faust at the São Carlos: «Mas na orquestra correram fortes estremecimentos metálicos, dando um pavor sobrenatural» (384). Reality intrudes, for those in charge of the mise-en-scène had yet to master the use of electricity to achieve effective lighting. The crude electric light cast upon Marguerite at her spinning wheel reveals not Faust's vision of rapture but the pathetic face of the deranged girl at the end of the opera. Eça's description here tallies with his description of Luísa in the serenity of death. Faust, under this glare of electricity, becomes the figure of death: «vestido cor de lilás, coberto de pó de arroz» (384).

Mephistopheles appears «laçando a perna com um ar charlatão» (384), a gesture, not indicated in the libretto, evocative of the «indecent gesture» made by his counterpart in the Witch's Kitchen Scene of Goethe's Faust⁶⁶. He intones the aria, «Dio del oro», a paean to the Calf of Gold of the Old Testament. Describing the aria as executed on-stage -«a sua voz arremessada afirmava, num tom brutal, o poder do dinheiro» (386)- and later the obvious greed with which Marguerite, overplayed by the prima donna, grasps her jewels, Eça not only allows that lust for money rules the soul but underscores the theme, implicit in the Old Testament episode, that the ideal is often debased by its material facsimile. At the start of the novel, Jorge left his house singing the Devil's apostrophic aria, Eça's wry commentary on Valentin's pious apostrophe, «O santa medaglia», sung prior to his departure as he clasps the token of protection given him by Marguerite: «Valentin, com uma longa pêra, à beira da rampa, beijava sofregamente uma medalha» (391). Eça, substituting one apostrophe for another, seems to imply that the holy medal can no more ward off impending disaster than can the holy metal (gold -the incorruptible metal of the gods, the nation's commercial interests) safeguard Luísa-Portugal from corrosive influences within and without. The glory of conquest and the glory of commerce are seen as two facets of the same coin, a fact Eça underscores when he describes the «Soldiers' Chorus» (discussed later on) which marks Valentin's homecoming. Valentin goes to war, leaving the home he wishes to safeguard unprotected. Jorge departed on business with similar intentions, similar results. For Luísa, who would demean herself for it, money ironically could buy respectability, but at the price of self-esteem, as witness her rendezvous with Castro, the banker. Unlike Leopoldina, she cannot pay the price. Rather, she whips this money-changer who would defile the temple of the soul, or at least strip it of its illusory veil of fantasy.

Singing «La mandolinata» Luísa anticipates her rendezvous with Basílio. In the opera its equivalent is the music of the Kermesse Scene where, amid the carefree waltzing and casual flirting of the young people, and the cautionary refrain of their elders, Marguerite first encounters Faust. On-stage, however, the frivolity of the scene is belied by the desultory performance of chorus and dancers:

Cast and audience, illusion and reality commingle. It is the populace of Portugal that is here depicted by Eça, all automatically following, as though at the sound of a bell, the paces seemingly choreographed for them.

The sequence of events in the opera and in the novel are calculated by Eça to occur in the same order. Between her two renditions of «La mandolinata» Luísa encounters Basílio. Between the two executions of the Kermesse waltz Marguerite encounters Faust. During the first rendition of «La mandolinata» Jorge, retiring to his study, wary of public

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opinion, imparts his concern for the «childlike» Luísa, whom he is about to leave for a mining expedition, to Sabastião, in whose care he entrustes her. During a lull in the first execution of the Kermesse waltz Valentin expresses a similar concern for Marguerite, whom he must leave for the wars, to Siebel, in whose care he confides her. This sequence is broken only when Jorge, assuming the persona of Mephistopheles, sings the Devil's «Dio del oro» as he goes out the door. With her second rendition of «La mandolinata» Luísa begins the «modern» sequel of a romance already plotted in the «ancient» scenario of the Kermesse.

On-stage the Garden Scene unfolds with the «Ballad of the King of Thule» sung by Marguerite «caracterizada de virgem» (387). The chaste splendor of Norma (like Marguerite traditionally clad in white) is evoked, as are Lucia's wedding gown and Luísa's own attire when she met Basílio upon his return from Brazil. Marguerite's trance-like singing lulls Luísa into a dreamy mood different only in detail from her reverie the evening Sebastião played the «dezasseis compassos» of L'Africaine:

Death lingers in the periphery of Luísa's mind. The title of the aria suggests Ultima Thule, a poetic euphemism for death, an idea reenforced by Luísa's vision of a cold, pallid country. Luísa's terrace of aristocratic sorrows, or Platonic lyceum, could pass for a cemetery. Marguerite relates that the King of Thule «na sua torre que molha a espuma do mar» (Prosas Bárbaras, 189) allowed the golden chalice to slip from his grasp as he expired, having drained once more its contents in the name of his lamented one. Towards the end of the novel Basílio and Jorge, the former unaware of Luísa's demise, the latter mourning her, in tandem re-create the Ballad:

In the opera Marguerite symbolically proffers Faust in song the pristine chalice and its contents: her life's blood flowing with her ideal love. Luísa's humble parody, the fado transmitted by Leopoldina, is employed in the same way by Eça.

Marguerite, whose Ballad is interrupted at regular intervals by her recollections of Faust, leaves her spinning wheel to admire the flowers left as a token of respectful love by the youthful Siebel. Marguerite then espies the bright jewels and hand-mirror clandestinely placed against her door by Mephistopheles on Faust's behalf. The unassuming maid tentatively banishes her qualms about Faust, Mephistopheles's counterfeit cavalier, as she sings the «Jewel Song» and admires her own false splendor in the looking-glass. One of Basílio's gift to Luísa was the same composer's «Medjé», whose lyrics speak of jewels forfeited for love. Its irreal allure -Faust's offering is contrived through witchcraft by Mephistopheles- likewise induces Luísa to seize a facsimile of the ideal. In an ironic reversal typical of Eça, from the auditorium, with unwitting insight, Dona Felicidade (unlike her operatic counterpart, Dame Marthe, who urges Marguerite to accept gift and giver at face value) observing the singer rather than the character the singer portrays: «preocupava-se também corn as jóias. Seriam falsas? Seriam dela? "É pra tentar, não é verdade?"» (388).

The mirror and the flowers further accentuate the link between Luísa and Leopoldina. It was Leopoldina who first sang a parody of Marguerite's Ballad, the «Drinking Song» from La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein. It too was interrupted only to resume with Luísa's unintentional parody, the fado she requested in its place, it too first sung by Leopoldina, who admired herself in Luísa's mirror. In Leopoldina's daydream the mirror image evanesced as her full-length figure, like a sensual madonna, took its place on the wall above an arrangement of flowers. In her daydream the lustre of a chandelier refracted like jewels against this mirror of her imagination that temporarily occluded reality. Through Leopoldina -«É uma estátua, é uma Vênus»!» (24)- Eça departs from Gounod, where Mephistopheles conjures up a vision of the innocent Marguerite, to evoke the vision of physical perfection in Goethe's original, that grew more opaque the closer Faust approached the mirror. However, Leopoldina, who spent her formative years poring over La dame aux

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camélias, was presumably thinking of Dumas's description of a portrait of Marguerite Gautier. The porcelain figurines in the boudoirs of Dumas's Marguerite and Eça's Luísa are similarly placed amid flowers before a mirror: Gounod's «jardim afrodisíaco» (388) in miniature. Marguerite Gautier detested her figurine, presumably because it was a constant, elegant reminder of her inward lack of refinement. Luísa's «pastorinhos de porcelana sobre o toucador riam pretensiosamente» (374) when Juliana (whose mockery of Luísa shows her to be modeled in part on the witch in Goethe's Faust, Witch's Kitchen Scene) intent on blackmail mentioned Basílio's letters.

In Gounod's opera the offering of flowers comes with a discreet serenade sung by Siebel that Marguerite never hears. With the score of Gounod's Roméo et Juliette under his arm, Sebastião calls on Luísa, but withdraws discreetly when informed that she was entertaining Basílio. Luísa dies before she has a chance to hear a note of Gounod's latest opera, whose score she eagerly awaited. As Luísa is about to depart for the São Carlos, Sebastião gives her «um ramo de camélias vermelhas, rodeadas de violetas dobradas» (380), an offering which evokes Dumas's Marguerite and Verdi's Violetta. Sebastião's sensual bouquet is given with discernment: it is the ideal courtesan, not Goethe's Eternal Feminine, that he celebrates.

The Garden Scene continues with Acácio for the second time in the novel (having earlier been the unwitting eavesdropper in Luísa's parlor) observing yet not observing Basílio-Faust «levar a desonra ao seio de uma família» (388). Luísa's dismissal of Basílio the first time he kissed her after returning from Brazil (114), is a word-for-word translation of Marguerite's yearningful dismissal of Faust.

When the female portraying the youthful Siebel appears, Acácio remains «sentado por trás de Luísa começando logo a explicar que aquela (Siebel colhendo flores no jardim de Margarida), posto que segunda dama, ganhava quinhentos mil réis por mês» (387). Continuing to observe the player, but the wrong character, he affirms reprovingly: «Mas apesar destes ordenadões morrem quase sempre na miséria... Vícios, ceias, orgias, cavalgadas» (387). Acácio is one of the exceptions. He might have cited his own banquet where an indiscretion uncovered by Julião paled before the perverted ethics of the diners. Acácio, unlike Don Giovanni, survives his banquet. The parallel of doddering counselor and suave libertine is ironically apt: both wine and dine to operatic medleys; both are pursued by a noblewoman (Dona Felicidade and Donna Elvira, each of whom retires to a convent) but have a peasant maid waiting in the wings; both have an «underling» (Julião and Leporello) who chides the «master» yet continues to accompany him.

Marguerite seeks consolation in the cathedral only to endure the mockery of Mephistopheles and his minions who parody the Dies irae, pronounce judgment and proclaim her doom. When the proper choir intones the proper chant, her horror increases. Similarly, in Chapter Ten, subconsciously reliving Marguerite's experience, Luísa enters -«Não sabia para quê» (323)- the Misericórdia church, then finds that she is unable to pray. Back home Sebastião was playing the Serenade from Don Giovanni, which accords with Mephistopheles's sarcastic serenade at a similar point in Faust, that he tries to exchange for Mozart's Requiem. Mozart's Requiem precipitates Jorge's raucous rendition of the proper, Gregorian, Requiem. When she tells Jorge that she has just returned from church, it is he, in tones of mockery, who reiterates Marguerite's despair: «Da igreja! Que horror!» (325). Unlike Mephistopheles (or Valentin, his unwitting disciple, who also curses Marguerite) Jorge will decide not to curse Marguerite-Luísa. Yet he achieves the same result when he breaks the seal upon Basílio's letter. In Luísa's case, the curse may be said to have been determined by her education and the conventions to which Jorge, the self-styled free-thinker, and his «enlightened» colleagues adhere. His Benedictus, hurled like a curse in denigration of his wife's fantasies, anticipates the benediction at the prison where Marguerite finally distinguishes truth from fiction, and abandons life.

The reprise of Faust continues, as it were, to the end of the novel. It is the means by which Eça pulls the strands of fact and fancy, past and present, into coherence. By the time the curtain falls at the Teatro São Carlos, Juliana is dead. The «Soldiers' Chorus» becomes her funeral march when Julião, helping Sebastião remove the cadaver, intones a few measures. For Faust Gounod composed two soldiers' choruses. Eça appears to allude to both, at times overlapping them. The first

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(part of a larger emsemble in the Kermesse Scene and based on Part One, lines 884-902, of Goethe's Faust) marks the departure of Marguerite's brother and guardian, Valentin. The second (a set piece) marks his return. The returned Valentin suggests Jorge: Jorge as head of the house, Jorge as Luísa visualizes him in the role of avenging husband⁶⁷. Yet Jorge, no less than Basílio, plays Faust to Luísa's Marguerite. In Chapter Four Luísa's spirits had risen when the band in the Passeio «a grande ruido de cobres» (96) plays an arrangement of this martial music. It was in the Passeio -evoking the public square by a river near the city gates in the Kermesse Scene, where Faust met Marguerite- that Jorge met Luísa: «Jorge queria comprar um cavalo; mas conheceu Luísa no Passeio, e daí a dois meses passava todo o seu dia na Rua da Madalena» (120). Jorge's marriage to Luísa not only causes him to forego his horse -a reminder of the steed which bore Faust on a wild ride into the Harz Mountains away from Marguerite, this in turn a prefiguration of the jolting saddle of the hired mount which bears Jorge into the highlands of Alentejo away from Luísa- but also precludes his plan to move in with Sebastião, his complementary opposite: «Sebastião teve um grande pesar. E era ele, depois, que fornecia os ramos de rosas que Jorge levava a Luísa... Era ele que tratava dos arranjos do "ninho"» (120). Faust's steed bears him into the arms of voluptuous beauties of history and myth conjured up by Mephistopheles. Significantly, in his Lisbon hotel room «com janelas para o rio» (260) Basílio keeps a portrait of Luísa next to a picture of a horse, and these next to a «library» consisting of risqué novels: Faust's quarters off a public promenade by a river, here transferred to nineteenth-century Lisbon. Faust's gifts to Marguerite, a mirror and a casket of jewelry, were concocted by Mephistopheles. Jorge's gifts, the roses and the cottage, are provided on his behalf by Sebastião. Temporarily Jorge assumes the mask of Faust, and Sebastião the mask of Mephistopheles. Sebastião accompanies Jorge «até ao Barreiro» (35) when Jorge goes to Alentejo where «feito um Don Juan» (275), Luísa learns, he has his first extramarital affair. However, unlike Mephistopheles, who accompanied Faust all the way, Sebastião retraces his steps to assume anew the mask of Siebel. When Basílio-Faust approached Luísa in her parlor, «a campainha, fora, tocou» (111) announcing Sebastião who, like Siebel in the opera, withdraws discreetly. In the opera house the mask of Mephistopheles is assumed by the engineer who, having divulged his gossip with dramatic panache, quits Luísa's box «em bicos de pés» (385) when the bell tinkled to announce the lifting of the curtain for the scene in which Valentin quits and Faust meets Marguerite. Variation follows upon variation: one recalls that Jorge is an engineer, that he gave a dramatic recital of Leopoldina's amours, that he at one point abandoned Luísa singing not Valentin's but Mephistopheles's aria. Through these variations, or exchanges of masks, Eça reduces the well-meaning Jorge, who offers Luísa the elusive security of a marriage contract, and the well-meaning Sebastião, who furthers the courtship, to unwitting disciples of Mephistopheles, the arch-deceiver or purveyor of images. The engineer's behavior before the curtain, about to rise upon the Kermesse Scene, anticipated its descent «entre as gargalhadas do Diabo e o roncar dos rabecões» (388) at the conclusion of the Garden Scene -a dramatic coup analogous to Sebastião's ironic Serenade from Don Giovanni, Basílio's nightmarish fiddling in the parlor (in a dream of Luísa's) and Juliana's caustic «Lettre adorée». Juliana is stilled, but in death becomes a keener figure of satire, prompting Julião's peroration on the decline of Portugal: «O país está a preceito para um intrigante com vontade! Esta gente toda está velha, cheia de doenças, de catarros de bexiga, de antigas sífilis! Tudo isto está podre por dentro e por fora!» (400). To a tune of glory that becomes a dirge, Julião, clearing away the rubble of ideals distorted for too long, carries Juliana to her room, where she lies amid her treasures gained by extortion. At the opera house

This is the Prussian army of 1870, flushed with the triumph of its conquest of Alsace and Lorraine, as perceived by a Francophile.

Eça develops this study of zeal cum avarice by balancing Gounod's «Soldiers' Chorus» against Offenbach's «Lettre adorée». Julião's «fanfarronada» (399) as he essays the former,

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for example, accords with Juliana's strident singing of the latter. Both set pieces deal with the cessation of warfare. Offenbach's, actually a gay but refined waltz for female ensemble, in which girls back home read letters from their sweethearts at the front, offsets and complements Gounod's vigorous march for male chorus. The latter rings like a national anthem. The former comes from La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, a spoof of Prussian militarism. Juliana's retaliatory song of triumph occurs when she first sees the envelope containing Basílio's letter; hears Luísa's second rendition of «La mandolinata»; expels her rival, the cook. On the second occasion, the only time the lyrics are quoted, Juliana sings the stanza -«Além d'amanhã termina a campanha» (192)- representing the letter addressed to Iza (Luísa?), a subtlety the author leaves for the reader to discover. Juliana's abasement is intimated when Luísa, departing for the São Carlos, and counting upon Sebastião's help, assures the evicted cook that she may return «além de amanhã» (379) even as Juliana «com um júbilo estridente» (387) performs the number.

Offenbach's chorus, attended by the commotion which according to Luísa rendered her house, as the cook was expelled, «Uma praça! Uma taberna!» (379), tallies with Eça's description of the fracas at the opera house attending Gounod's chorus, which in the Kermesse Scene takes place at a public square before a tavern: the police intervened to eject from the auditorium a demonstrator who vomited when the flag of Bismarck's Germany was raised. Across town Juliana, having sipped and spewed Luísa's wine, was being lifted in mock triumph to her room on the top storey. The colors most often used to depict her (negroid, black shawl, red shoes, sallow complexion, lust for gold) are the colors of the flag displayed on the stage. Dona Felicidade, in a parody of religious compunction, insists that respect be paid to the body of this woman who, when alive, she had suggested should be cast into the gutter. The undertaker arrives to dispel, with a grotesque parody of naturalness, the signs of decay, but pines for the unravaged corpse of a girl of eighteen (Portugal idealized).

The finale of Faust is left for the reader to infer. Mentally and physically broken by her ordeal, sensing that Faust's offer of help (vide Basílio's letter) is her perdition, Marguerite beseeches the angels to bear her soul aloft. In the final scene, the Apotheosis, the prison walls evanesce, an unseen choir intones her salvation, and she is borne heavenward. Marguerite's delirium will be re-enacted by Luísa, whose fevered mind will waver between reason and madness, pain and pleasure, the ideal and the sordid, as she relives her past with Basílio (421). Through Acácio's commonplace epitaph, Eça succinctly alludes to the Apotheosis: «Mais um anjo que subiu ao céu!» (441). The conclusion of the novel, however, adheres more closely still to the finale of Meyerbeer's L'Africaine, whose «dezasseis compassos» once lured Luísa into a sweet euphoria of spiritual love and death: Jorge-Nelusko is left to mourn Luísa-Selika after Basílio-Vasco returns to «civilization».

Back home Luísa superstitiously tears up the «Medjé» but, like those who hovered about the corpse of Juliana, reverts to fantasy. Tentatively she essays, for the third time, Paladilhe's «La mandolinata». Her final realization of horror is itself illusory in that not the deed, but the knowledge that it is known, is what destroys her. From Jorge her transgression -flight from the «nest» prepared by Sebastião to the «paradise» promised by Basílio- cannot now be hidden by a veil of decorum. She dons, as it were, the dark veil of Norma, her pulse failing «como a vibração expirante de uma corda» (436) under the fingers of a second medical authority who, «curvando-se, com ironia» (436), exults over the failure of Julião's «English» ministrations. The simile suggests the muting of a lyre, Plato's instrument of divine intuition, Luísa's keyboard. In Faust Valentin curses the remainder of Marguerite's days on earth, but allows for her eventual salvation. Jorge makes life untenable for Luísa, who has learned that the veneer of truth outweighs the truth. Dying, she breaches the walls of a prison, erected with the best intentions, beset by the cant of public opinion. Her death is ironically fantasy come true. Induced by emotional stress, it follows a pattern set by numerous Romantic heroines who similarly expire, but without the benefit of Eça's detailed, clinical analysis. Donizetti's Lucia and Gounod's Marguerite are two pertinent examples. Basílio's epitaph -«Que ferro! Podia ter trazido a Alphonsine!» (451)- is one more irony. Alphonsine Plessis, the girl from the provinces who in Paris styled herself Marie Duplessis, was the real-life model of Dumas's Marguerite and Verdi's Violetta.

Outside Luísa's window, now shuttered, the organ-grinder will continue to purvey his arias on the realejo (the instrument of truth). The little pianist (Luísa the child) will grow up to exchange old dreams for new and be betrayed again and again by a Basílio⁶⁸. Each distortion of the ideal will be accompanied by a coarsening of her sensibilities. In time she might become another Leopoldina, Felicidade, Juliana, or simply shut her window to the music. The barrel organ -Eça's modern equivalent of the medieval hurdy-gurdy, which accompanied the chanting of the chansons de geste- drones beautiful arias uncertainly, underscoring what is real, what is illusory: what is, what is not, and perhaps what could be. This instrument borne by the man with the «sorristo triste» intimates the novel of a man of sensibility who perceives virtue and vice side by side. Eça's delineation of what is ugly, what is sordid, often startles the reader with its penetrating beauty of insight.

Bellini, Vicenzo. Norma. Libretto by Felice Romani. Piano-vocal score. New York: Schrimer, n. d.

Donizetti, Gaetano. Lucia di Lammermoor. Libretto by Salvatore Cammarano. Piano-vocal score. New York: Schirmer, 1898.

Dumas fils, Alexandre. La dame aux camélias-Roman, théâtre, livret. Paris: Flammarion, 1981.

Eça de Queirós, José Maria de. Cousin Bazilio. Roy Campbell, tr. New York: Noonday Press, 1953.

___. O Primo Basílio. Lisbon: Livros do Brasil, 11th ed., n. d. (In our study the spelling has been modified to reflect the current orthographic standard.)

___. Prosas Bárbaras. Porto: Lello & Irmão, n. d.

___. A Relíquia. Porto: Lello & Irmão, 1951.

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Hispania [Publicaciones periódicas]. Volume 73, Number 1, March 1990