A Chapter of Hats

by Machado De Assis

  The Cynosure of All Eyes

  1 Vincenzo Bellini’s last opera (1835).

  A Famous Man

  1 Sinhazinha was a familiar appellation used by slaves to refer to the young women in their owner’s family.

  2 Emperor from 1822 to 1831.

  3 The date, in 1871, of the Law of the Free Womb, which declared that all slaves born after the law was passed would be free at the age of twenty-one.

  4 The Duke of Caxias was the leader of the outgoing conservative government.

  Midnight Mass

  1 See note 1 to p. 66, ‘A Chapter of Hats’.

  Pylades and Orestes

  1 In Sophocles’ Orestes, Pylades is present on stage, but never says anything.

  Father against Mother

  1 The Valongo was the main slave market in Rio, where new slaves from Africa were sold. They were ‘contraband’ after 1831, when the transatlantic trade had been officially abolished, under pressure from Great Britain. It really ended in 1850.

  2 All the names refer to whiteness in one way or another – neves means snow.

  3 This partitioned wooden turntable was set in the convent wall, so that neither the giver nor the receiver could see each other. The baby would then be taken to a foundling hospital.

  A Note on the Translator

  John Gledson is Professor Emeritus of Brazilian Studies at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of books in English and Portuguese on the nineteenth-century novelist and short-story writer Machado de Assis and the twentieth-century poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade. He has translated several works by Brazilian authors, including Don Casmurro by Machado de Assis, The Brothers and Ashes of the Amazon by Milton Hatoum, and Roberto Schwarz’s critical work on Machado de Assis, A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism.

  A Note on the Author

  Joaquim Maria Machado De Assis (1839–1908) was born and lived his whole life in Rio de Janeiro. The son of poor parents, and mulatto, he worked his way up to a successful career as a civil servant and writer. He was revered (though not understood) in his lifetime, and was unanimously elected President of the Brazilian Academy of Letters when it was founded in 1896. He is still universally regarded as the greatest Brazilian writer.

  By the same Author

  Epitaph of a Small Winner

  Philosopher or Dog?

  First published in Great Britain 2008

  This electronic edition published 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Translation and introduction copyright © John Gledson 2008

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

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