This novel is one of Machado de Assis’ greatest, as important as Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas or Dom Casmurro — it was published in 1891, midway between the two of them. Its central character is Rubião, a poor schoolmaster who inherits a very large sum, and a dog, from the mad philosopher, Quincas Borba, who appears in the Posthumous Memoirs, and is the author of a philosophy, ‘Humanitism’, a demented mixture of positivism and Darwinism: its main contention is that the world (including the transatlantic slave trade) exists for his own personal benefit. Not surprisingly, when Rubião inherits, he sees the point, and decides to move to Rio de Janeiro, then the capital of Brazil and by far its most important city, to enjoy his wealth. On his way, he encounters an ‘interesting couple’, Cristiano Palha (literally, Christian Straw) and his wife Sofia. They help him set up house in Rio: in the process, Rubião lends money to Palha, and falls for his wife. In a beautifully observed triangular relationship, in which she is the lure who always leads Rubião on, but never actually gives way to him, they gradually fleece him.

Around these central figures are a number of important minor characters: the failed, or rapidly failing politician Camacho, who inveigles Rubião into giving him money to set up a newspaper to promulgate his views, a brilliant parody of pomposity and belief in the sound of words; Rubião’s hangers-on, Freitas and Carlos Maria, the latter a study in intense narcissism, who flirts with Sofia (with her collaboration) and finally marries an innocent girl from a plantation, Maria Benedita, who admires him as much as he does himself. Palha and Sofia are a study in social climbing — he through money, she through her contacts with ‘society’ women like Dona Fernanda, the wife of the plodding politician Teófilo — she herself is an object-lesson in how virtue produces its own rewards, or pleasures.

All this is set against the background of a city and country at a vital moment of its growth, around the end of the 1860s, during Brazil’s war with Paraguay, and at the moment when the inevitable end of slavery begins to make itself felt. We watch Rubião, stripped of his money but with his illusions intact, gradually descending into madness and death, believing that the dog, named after its master Quincas Borba, is in fact the philosopher’s reincarnation.

It was at that time that Rubião astonished all his friends. On the Tuesday following the Sunday of the ride (it was then January, 1870), he asked a barber and hairdresser of Ouvidor Street to send some one to his house to shave him next day at nine o’clock in the morning. A Frenchman, called Lucien, went there, and, according to the orders given to the servant, he was sent to Rubião’s study.

‘Grr—’ growled Quincas Borba, from Rubião’s knees.

Lucien bowed to the master of the house; the latter, however, did not see the courtesy, just as he had not heard Quincas Borba’s signal. He lay on an elongated couch, quite bereft of his mind, which had broken through the ceiling and had become lost away up in the air. How many leagues had it gone? Neither condor nor eagle could say. On its way to the moon — it only saw the perennial felicity that had showered on it from the cradle, where the fairies had rocked it to sleep, to the shore of Botafogo, where they had taken it, resting on a bed of roses and jasmine. No reverse, no failure, no poverty — a peaceful life, made up of joy, and with more than enough income — it was on its way to the moon! 204-205