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significant dimension. They are indexes capable of revealing the personality of their owners and, on a
larger scale, they are miniatures of the values, of the marks of a class in a society. 14 Eça does not hide
the fact that he masters and uses this code in the composition of the novel. It is repeatedly worked
into the characterization of each character and, still, in the reading each one makes of the other. The
description Reinaldo makes of Luisa to Basílio clearly reveals this practice:
Because let’s be frank: what did she have? I meant no harm to that poor woman who
was involved in that horror of Pleasures, but the truth is that she was no fancy lover; she
rode around in public carriages: she wore homespun stockings; had married a paltry
individual from the secretariat; lived in a tiny little house; had no relations to speak of;
naturally played the lottery, and walked around in homemade shoes; she had no spirit, no
toilette…What the hell! She was a nuisance! 15
This particular reading of the classes that the 19 th Century devised is brilliantly analyzed by
Richard Sennett in The Decline of the Public Man. To the author,
People took seriously into account one another’s outer appearance on the streets.
They believed they could pry into the character of those they saw, but what they did see
were people dressed in clothes ever more homogenous and monochromatic. Discovering
a person by means of their appearance became, therefore, a question of looking for clues
into the details of their attire. 16
The reading of a person based on the details of their physical appearance rises, thus, from the
belief that objects serve as “signs of the personality” of those who possess them. Eça, like Balzac, was
sensitive to this code, to this network of ciphered emblems where the most intimate secrets were
lodged. To reveal the greatest defects of a society rooted on “false bases,” Eça makes use of a
pantomime of details, so that gestures, objects, dreams, colors speak more than the dialogs
themselves. Gradually, we get to know not only the position of each character, but, mainly, their
most secret passions. This aspect is also developed by Sennett, when stating that,
The two phenomena that the bourgeois personalized in their public outings were their
social class and their gender. Based on a reading of the details in their appearance,
strangers attempted to determine whether or not the person had metamorphosed their
economic position into a more personal position of being a ‘gentleman.” The gender
status becomes personalized in public when strangers tried to determine whether
someone, despite their apparent decorum, furnished small clues in their appearance that
would mark them as “licentious” women. 17
During the entire novel, Luisa is a victim of this invasive reading that makes of the details the
evidence and clues that reveal her privacy. This strange form of deciphering transforms the world of
romance into theater, where the characters are spectators of one another, i.e., one great
“auditorium that wishes to enjoy, though somewhat cynically, the representation and false
appearances of daily life.” 18
Nobody escapes the indiscrete eye of this auditorium that searches through everything, opens up
drawers, examines the position of pillows and reads the letters of others. It is precisely in this
practice that the critical process with which Eça assailed the small group that compose Luisa’s
domestic universe is most evident. It is in the knowledge that “each person is to a certain degree a
chamber of horrors” that the author places them on the scene to act out the “disagreeable secrets of
desire, of greed or of envy.” 19
In his essay “Paris of the Second Empire,” Walter Benjamin quotes an observation of Goethe”s
“that all human beings, both the highest and the lowest, take with them a secret that if known would
make them odious to all the others.” 20 Eça’s criticism in Cousin Basílio will be constructed to a large