INTRODUCTORY NOTE

by José Maria d’Eça de Queirós

As I deliver this volume into the hands of readers and critics, I acknowledge disconsolately that I have nothing to say: this novel has no history, it cannot be explained. It is not known whence it came, nor at what date. It is not even known what title the author intended for it. It is anonymous and unknown. The author never referred to it in any letter, any conversation, any article; he never offered it to his publisher, never even mentioned it!

So what can I say in carrying out my task as ‘writer of prologues’? Only what I know. It is very little.

Having cut down the normal pompous ‘Introduction’ to the more modest proportions of a ‘Note’, I have decided to confine myself to what is necessary to introduce the little volume and to reproduce here—for those who have not read it—what I have already said in the introduction to Capital.

It came to light one evening at the beginning of the year 1924, in the now famous trunk in which my father’s unpublished manuscripts had been lying for more than a quarter of a century. There were 115 loose sheets, untitled and undated, covered with his usual rapid handwriting, and, as usual, without any polishing up, any correction. From the make-up of the paper, the handwriting, its compactness, especially its subject, I was at first inclined to think that the manuscript had formed part of the broad initial plan for the ‘Scenes from Portuguese Life’ which would have dated the novel between 1877 and 1889. That, however, was a mere conjecture. Certainly, none of the dozen titles intended for the twelve social—or, more simply, human—studies which were to make up the ‘Scenes from Portuguese Life’ could reasonably be applied to it.

On the other hand, certain of the novel’s characteristics made my conjecture a reasonable one. My father, in a letter to Chardron quoted in the introduction to Capital, gave the essential features of the future work, to which he referred as ‘A collection of short novels, of no more than 180 to 200 pages, which would be a reflection of contemporary life in Portugal: Lisbon, Oporto, the provinces, politicians, men of affairs, aristocrats, lawyers, doctors, all classes, all manners, would enter into this picture gallery’. And he later added: ‘The attraction of these tales is that there are no digressions, no rhetoric, no philosophising: everything is interesting and dramatic, and quickly narrated.’ These, in fact, are the features which characterise this novel, which is indeed a brief social study of 200 pages, a picture of the petty bourgeoisie of Lisbon, a short novel in which ‘there are no digressions, no rhetoric’, and in which ‘everything is interesting and dramatic and quickly narrated’.

Later, however, I discovered in another letter, to Luis de Magalhaes, a phrase which left me puzzled. Luis de Magalhaes, then deputy director of the Portuguese Review, had sought an unpublished novel by my father for the Review; to which my father replied: ‘As to the novel, even you cannot realise how long it takes me to work. I have nothing in a drawer ready-made—except a short study which, on account of its rather coarse nature would not suit the Review’. The letter was dated from Paris, in 1891.

Could this study of ‘a rather coarse nature’ that my father did not wish to see published in the Portuguese Review be this short novel of such delicate irony, the banal drama which for a while so deeply disturbed the petty lives of Alves and his friend? Did the letter actually refer to the manuscript with which we are now concerned? It is quite possible, the more so in that we hear no more of this study of a ‘rather coarse nature’, nor is there anything else among my father’s papers which can be taken to correspond in any way to this description. And so, as the little study did not suit the Review, it doubtless went back into the drawer, where we found it waiting resignedly. However, that too is no more than a conjecture.

But what is the point of piling up hypotheses which no one will ever be able to verify, or arguments which are merely conjectural?

In the end, there are only two points in the confused history of the manuscript which can be asserted with safety and precision: that my father wrote it, and that I have brought it to the light of day.

The first of these points is not open to discussion. It is a fact: it has the indestructibility of a monument from remote Egyptian antiquity.

As for the second, why add comments to justify it here? The book now enters upon its career; at my hands, it comes into the hurly-burly of publication and faces the verdict of criticism. A work of impulse, put on paper with masterly improvisation, it certainly suffers from the deficiencies of a layman’s editing—and yet it is with confidence that I place this little book in the hands of the public, certain that the truthfulness of its characters, the intense Lisbon flavour, the charm of its dialogues, the balance of its composition, the irony of its situations—in a word, the consummate art which the manuscript reveals—are the surest guarantee of its success and the best justification for the publicity which I now give it. Granja, 1925.