But not only Carlos represents the decadence of Portugal. Also Eusébio, victim of education, “smothered in blankets”, hostage to Titi and his mother, mirrors certain aspects of our psychology. Almeida Moura writes: “The caricature of Eusebiozinho may mirror that which the writer makes of the school education of which he was a victim (…)” (p.12). It’s worth transcribing Eça’s excerpt: “For 40 years, since Patuleia, Portugal has been bent over the school desk, very diligent, with the tip of its tongue out, making its civilization, like a laborious theme, which it is pouring out from a wide open translation in front of it – which is France. Who hung the translation there for Portugal to copy, thick and thin? Maybe the men of 1820; maybe the romantics of Regeneration.” (in Letters and Other Writingsp. 323.). It is also José de Almeida Moura who, in the same 1984 study, republished in 2000 by the extinct publishing house, Lisboa Editora, draws attention to the anagnosis and its process: “We found that the identifying character of Maria Eduarda in the country is confused by the name, the toponym of the cradle of nationality.” In fact, Guimarães is the bearer of a “safe”, a kind of “cigar box”
(…). In this “box”, Maria Monforte would have deposited her daughter’s identification. Now, as we know, in The Mayans the cigar is a bourgeois attribute. After smoking the cigars, the strange safe is used to solve a very serious case. The safe is only delivered to Pelourinho! Maria Monforte, daughter of a slaver, was kidnapped by an Italian. The person who brings the prostituted Maria Eduarda to Carlos’ presence is a native of Brazil, independent since 22, more or less the year Maria Eduarda’s father was born. Historically, what diverted the Portuguese from knowledge and from proceeding from experience, would have been the bookish nature of the Italian Renaissance, creator of the “dominated men” whom Camões ironizes, a factor that must be associated with the Jesuit determinant of the Council of Trent: “Dom João II was born Italianized with the vices and virtues of the Renaissance culture (…). Jesuitism, speciously introducing itself into humanist culture, rationalist, from the Latin Renaissance, perverted it in Portugal and abroad, gnawing at it”, citing Oliveira Martins.
The analytical coordinates that we read in this essay by the professor who taught both in Secondary and Higher Education are essential for anyone who wants to understand this realism novel, based on Taine and Greek tragedy – Sophocles, to begin with. What do we learn from reading the same professor in another essential essay about Portugal – because about Garrett and his Travels in My Land (content excluded from Education in one of the curricular reforms, in the 1990s…) – is that, in the wake of other great scholars of our Culture and Literature, the greatest interpreters in this country have been the writers, the poets. Looking at the work of Eça de Queirós, The Mayans and other books from this project of reading “contemporary Portugal”, created since the beginning of the 1870s, what we conclude is that Queiroz’s thesis remains unchanged: “Carlos fails in life not because of, but despite, his education”. In 2026, looking around us, it is important to highlight the obvious: eliminating this novel from the new curricular reform would be a betrayal of the younger generations who, more than ever, must know the ideas of this disciple of Zola and the “experimental novel”, by Eça confrade de Antero de Quental, and which he shaped into The Mayans the previous theses of the Causes of the Decline of the Peninsular Peoples. For the record.
Professor, poet and literary critic
Write without applying the new Orthographic Agreement.
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