EÇA AND PARIS

ANTÓNIO COIMBRA MARTINS

In Eça’s own opinion, both the French capital and the French writers are present from the beginning to the end of his work. In an article entitled O Francesismo (‘Francism’) he explains in a manner that is as gracious as it is unbelievable, how, from childhood to adolescence and thence to maturity, the writer he was to become had been progressively and inescapably ‘Frenchied’. The article, which was to become famous, was found among his papers. It is thought to have been written just before he went to live in Paris. However, the truth is that although a great deal of care was taken in its construction and despite the fact that it is very ‘written’ and extremely interesting, the novelist made sure that is was not published in his lifetime.
In general terms, many fundamental French values are apparent in both the complete texts and the fragments that Eça wrote after he had been appointed to Paris: the demand for full freedom of expression; a perception that there was an urgent need to fight poverty, ignorance and exploitation; the opposition to violent ways of maintaining law and order; a feeling or presentiment of the injustice of the colonial relationship; and an awareness of the important role that colonial interests and colonial expansion played in the relationships between the European powers.
At the same time, Eça cannot be accused of having ignored Paris or French politics, although he sometimes made some surprising choices when it came to deciding which aspects of these issues to address and comment on: the Buloz affair, the grand prix, ‘statue-mania’, spiritism... without mentioning his description (or imagined vision) of the idleness of the upper bourgeoisie and of the vacuity of aristocrats – French or otherwise – like the one who appears in A Cidade e as Serras (The City and the Mountains). In the latter novel, the neo-Parisian Eça undertook to describe a world that undoubtedly deserved to be the object of his refined satire (something it received – and in a disturbing form to boot – in Zola’s Paris), but with which he was not familiar. Eça instead knew and frequented – and allowed himself to be frequented by – the wealthy Portuguese and Brazilians who lived in Paris. It seems justified to feel disappointed at the fact that the great European novelist, Eça de Queirós, did not observe the more modern currents of thought of his day and their representatives, which/who certainly deserved chronicling. (The exception was Verlaine, who died in 1896). The physical Paris that appears in Eça’s works is the same as that which he had imagined before he went there – the same city that was evoked by the bourgeoisie whom he was ridiculing at that time, for example at the end of Padre Amaro (Father Amaro’s Crime), or later on, in Tragédia da rua das Flores (The Flores Street Tragedy).