Reading The Maias, then, is rather like watching L'Avventura: you have to keep an eye on the background in order to understand the foreground. In the scene featuring Dâmaso's blue veil, for example, it's clear that he is being ridiculed for his superficiality. ("'You?' came the cry from every side.") What's less obvious is that Eça de Queirós scorns Afonso's hypocrisy as well. For that, one must remember that some 250 pages earlier Eça de Queirós informed us that during the civil war between Pedro and Miguel,

Afonso was to be found at the Epsom races [in England], riding in a gig, wearing a large false nose and uttering fearsome war whoops, utterly indifferent to the fate of his brother masons, who were, at that very moment, being driven along the alleyways of the Bairro Alto in Lisbon by the Infante Dom Miguel mounted on his fine Alter do Chão stallion.

Eça de Queirós also employs descriptions as a kind of foreshadowing, remarking, for example, that a woman's red parasol obscures a man's head "like a large bloodstain" some twenty pages before she provokes him to suicide. (Costa does a marvelous job of rendering these important details--she knows that Eça de Queirós, like Flaubert, employs "a naturalist surface with a symbolic subtext.")

Reading these traces, one finds hints that Eça de Queirós did not entirely escape the snobbery of his society. His Jews all prove greedy, treacherous or fickle. His three most admirable characters turn out to be not only aristocrats but blood relations. Indeed, he seems to suggest that the departure of an educated aristocrat like Carlos constitutes a sort of Portuguese brain drain: there aren't enough men of sense and education to take his place. Even Ega succumbs to Portugal's more vulgar comforts after Carlos leaves the country, gaily mocking the ignorance of a prostitute, for example, before raffling her off among his friends. "Oh," he says, recalling this elegant adventure, "it had been a splendid night!"

Eça de Queirós has a knack for turning the screws on his characters when he wants to, and this talent had led many critics to approach The Maias as a caustic satire--which, at times, it is. But the greatness of Eça de Queirós's masterwork, like the greatness of Jean Renoir's film The Rules of the Game, lies in its ability to blend pointed criticism with genuine pathos and nobility. Indeed, it's here that Eça de Queirós surpasses his essentially misanthropic hero, Flaubert.

Take for example, the tenderness with which Eça de Queirós communicates Carlos's love for Afonso, which may be based on Eça de Queirós's own relationship with his grandparents, who raised him after his unmarried mother started a legitimate family:

Of his mother, he did not possess so much as a daguerreotype, or even a pencil sketch. His grandfather had told him that she was fair-haired. He knew nothing more. He had not known [his parents]; he had not fallen asleep in their arms; he had never received the warmth of their affection. Father and mother were, for him, like the symbols of some conventional religion. Father, mother, and loved ones were all contained in his grandfather.

Or take Carlos's affair with the apparently married Maria Eduarda, which begins as a superficial infatuation with her Parisian wardrobe and her "foreign glamour" (she descends on Lisbon from France) but eventually forces him to confront his snobbery. "What was it you loved in me?" she demands of him. "Was it the fact that I belonged to another man, was it my name, the chic of having an adulterous affair, my clothes perhaps? Or was it me, my body, my soul and my love for you?" It takes Carlos a good night of soul-searching to answer that one.

There's no doubt that The Maias is, as Harold Bloom has said, an account of "the decadence of Portugal in its long decline," but the novel is also an aging man's paean to young love and friendship and misbehavior. The work is, after all, semiautobiographical (Ega being a clever visual pun on Eça), and its ending is not so much angry as melancholy. "How everything passed!" Ega thinks when he and Carlos meet again in the book's final pages. By then, it's 1887. Ega is balding. Carlos has put on weight. Their errand for the day is to visit Casa do Ramalhete and rummage through the detritus of all the things they've lost.

These days Eça de Queirós is best remembered for the way he brought Portuguese literature out of its Romantic doldrums and infused it with the realism of its French and English counterparts. But after his death (in Paris, in 1900) seven more of his novels were found and sent to press--and these were filled with sentimental appreciations for everyday Portuguese life. What they teach us is that Eça de Queirós loved Portugal. Indeed, it's this kind of love that sets all the most moving satires apart. The Rules of the Game, The Corrections, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The Maias--these works manage the difficult task of keeping in balance two contradictory emotions: love for their subjects' virtues and intolerance of their faults.

"There's nothing genuine in this wretched country now," balding Ega complains to Carlos, "not even the bread that we eat!"

In response, Carlos points to the upper hills of Lisbon, where the churches, the convents and the crumbling mansions cling to slopes burned dry by the radiant sun. "There's still that," he says. Eça de Queirós's answer lies in the background, in his portrait of two middle-aged men who have squandered the best opportunities of their country but who have sustained a perfect friendship, never once marred by pettiness, betrayal or rivalry. In them, the flame of hope refuses to die.

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