A gentleman dressed as a diplomat

In 1870, with his friend Ramalho Ortigão, Eça de Queiroz wrote a strange and amusing story, The Mystery of the Cintra Road, featuring for the first time Carlos Fradique Mendes. It was originally published as a feuilleton in the Diario de Noticias, each instalment in the style of a letter to the editor, written by one of the actors or witnesses of a romantic crime, in a pasticcio of popular melodramatic stories. This curious little novel — an experiment in writing that reveals much about the relationship between the two friends — retains, even today, all the qualities of an entertaining mystery book.

In that same year, 1870, José Maria passed the examination for Consular Service, with top marks. But he was bypassed — wrong ideas, wrong family — and the first available posting went to someone else. Pride wounded, he devoted all his energy to political and literary controversy. With a few friends, including Antero de Quental, he launched a cycle of 'Democratic Lectures' at the Casino Lisbonense. His own lecture on 'Realism as the new expression of Art' is a reference paper for his generation and the manifesto of a revolution in Portuguese literature. His thinking had acquired depth and maturity. It came as a surprise to his friends to see him, ascending to the pulpit at the Casino, as ' a gentleman dressed as a diplomat, with a faultless buttoned-up morning-coat, satin waistcoat, patent leather pumps, grey gloves and a hard collar'. To the end, this was to be the customary image of Eça de Queiroz.

As the events of the Commune of Paris were on all minds, the Government forbade the intended successive lectures, provoking the wrath of the young intelligentsia. Eça de Queiroz was suspected of belonging to the Marxist International - and even of being its leader in Portugal. Which was not true. It is not impossible that he might have been tempted into political action. But there was a shift of power and he received, at last, his first appointment as consul in Havana, then the capital of the Spanish West Indies.

He stayed two years at Havana, without any pleasure, in an unfriendly climate and among unfriendly people. He did not take seriously the Planters' struggle for independence-and did not like the planters themselves. Chance gave him a weapon to annoy them: the Chinese coolies. The Cubans would import Chinese workers for the sugar plantations, and exploit them in a scandalous manner. Their existence was worse than slavery. Since the British had closed Hong Kong as a gate of emigration, the coolies embarked from Macao, and so become the responsibility of the Portuguese. Eça de Queiroz made a personal affair of it, harassed the Captain-General of Havana, sent notes to his Ministry which did not care for a conflict with Spain at this time and acted accordingly, calling up to Havana a Chinese Embassy to relieve the Portuguese from any responsibility, and giving the Consul a long holiday, which he spent in a visit to the United States, before appointing him to a new post.