Cousin Bazilio by José Maria de Eça de Queirós

First published:O primo Basilio, 1878 (Dragon’s Teeth, 1889; better known as Cousin Bazilio)

Type of work: Satiric realism

Time of work: The 1870’s

Locale: Lisbon

Principal Characters:

• Luiza, a beautiful, sensual, and shallow young wife
• Jorge, her husband, a decent, honest, and self-satisfied mining engineer
• Bazilio de Brito, Luiza’s handsome, arrogant cousin and lover, recently returned from Brazil
• Juliana Conceiro Tavira, Luiza’s ugly, ailing, and malignant maidservant
• Joanna, Luiza’s loyal and good-natured cook
• Leopoldina, Luiza’s unhappily married school friend
• Felicidade de Noronha, ,
• Councilor Accacio, ,
• Sebastian, ,
• Juliao Zuzarte, and
• Ernestinho, regular members of Jorge and Luiza’s Sunday evening circle

The Novel

Jorge and Luiza have a happy but unexciting marriage. Luiza, childless and bored, amuses herself with music, romantic novels, and visits to her dressmaker. Immediately after Jorge leaves on a mining expedition to the south of Portugal, Bazilio returns to Lisbon after a seven-year absence in Brazil and France. Luiza has fond memories of her tall, bronzed, and mustached cousin, with whom she had had a youthful romance. Bazilio’s ruthless character, scorn for social conventions, and seduction and abandonment of Luiza provide a striking contrast to her husband’s circle of bourgeois friends. Only Luiza’s intimate friend Leopoldina, whom Jorge despises because of her immoral life, is sympathetic to Luiza’s love affair.

Bazilio’s seduction slowly progresses from provocative familiarities, tender kisses, and ardent embraces during rides in closed carriages, to its consummation in Luiza’s drawing room. Bazilio then finds a squalid room, which the lovers ironically call their “Paradise,” where they can secretly meet. He completely dominates her, teaching her new sexual sensations, to which she responds deliriously. Yet Luiza’s disillusionment is foreshadowed by her comparison with a yachtsman on a romantic voyage who anchors on the mud banks of the Tagus River and must breathe the surrounding marshy stench. Bazilio soon loses interest in his prey: He abandons his pretense of affection for Luiza, treating her in a brutal manner; humiliates her by openly expressing his boredom; and refuses to run away with her as promised.

This degrading love affair, which echoes Leopoldina’s coarse liaisons with numerous lovers, is contrasted not only with Luiza’s affectionate marriage to Jorge but also with Felicidade’s absurd attempt to arouse the amorous inter-est of Councilor Accacio—she even tries the magic of a fraudulent wise-woman—and with Joanna’s frankly carnal connection with a carpenter. Only Juliana—embittered by poverty, hard work, and bad health—is completely without an emotional life. She consults an “arranger” about how to deal with Luiza (just as Felicidade consults a wisewoman) and vents her sexual frustration on her indolent and egoistic mistress.

The maid steals Luiza and Bazilio’s love letters, using them to blackmail her mistress. While waiting for her money, Juliana seizes control of the household, changes places with Luiza, and degrades her mistress in a lingering martyrdom—as Bazilio did after his passion subsided. Juliana works less and less, goes out whenever she pleases, takes the best food and wine, brutally insults her mistress, and forces her to fire Joanna (who had struck the intolerable Juliana). Luiza meekly submits to her grasping maid and makes excuses for Juliana’s bizarre behavior. Aware of her impending tragedy, and imagining the ruin of her marriage and the loss of her reputation, “she felt that, at the very centre of her being, something had been broken off and was bleeding painfully.”

Faced with Juliana’s blackmail, Bazilio follows the advice of his cynical friend Viscount Reynaldo and offers Luiza money, which she refuses, and then leaves Lisbon as suddenly as he had appeared. Jorge returns from his long trip and, though everything is now changed, on the surface everything is the same. Luiza resumes the role of devoted wife, but Jorge, increasingly suspicious of the maid’s arrogance, finally insists that they dismiss Juliana.

In desperation, Luiza asks Leopoldina to arrange a meeting with old Castro, who has always lusted for Luiza, so that she can get money for Juliana from him. Yet she is repelled by his anticipated advances and, in a grotesquely comic scene, expresses her rage against Bazilio and Jorge by seizing a cane and slashing the flabby flesh of the astonished lecher. In a final attempt to save herself, Luiza confesses to Jorge’s friend Sebastian, who is sympathetic and promises to help her. He brings a policeman to the house to frighten Juliana and provokes her fatal heart attack. Luiza falls into a fever from the shock of happiness but begins to recover.

Unfortunately, Jorge intercepts a letter from Bazilio that reveals the sordid story and becomes frantic. He loves Luiza more than ever, but with a carnal and perverse love. Mad with jealousy, he confronts his wife with Bazilio’s letter. She faints, and he pardons her with a long kiss. Becoming delirious, Luiza moans lascivious words to Bazilio, falls into a coma, and dies. When Bazilio returns to Lisbon and learns of Luiza’s death, he regrets only that he has not brought his French mistress to amuse him.

The Characters

Like most nineteenth century novelists, José Maria de Eça de Queiróz makes moral judgments of his characters, but his tendency to moralize is complemented by his caustic vision of the pretensions and stupidity of mankind. The novel is called Cousin Bazilio, but the seducer is merely a catalyst. Luiza is the main character. Despite her intellectual and emotional limitations, Eça de Queiróz remains sympathetic to the beautiful young lady. As Sebastian observes, “There aren’t any bad women, my dear Senhora, there are only bad men.” The most interesting aspect of Luiza’s character involves the violent conflict between propriety and desire. Her voluptuous response to the dangers of adultery and the rapture she experiences from openly breaking laws and conventions is described as “the soul [seeking] its own discomfiture with sensual appetites and tremblings of desire.” Despite her humiliations and punishments, Luiza never fully abandons her passion for Bazilio.

Bazilio is a callous and predictable stage villain who triumphantly twirls his mustache after sexual conquests: “Adultery appeared in his talk as an aristocratic obligation. After hearing him one would have thought virtue was the defect of mediocre spirits.” Jorge, though a decent man, suffers because of his complacency and his inability to sustain a lasting passion with Luiza. During a theoretical discussion at the beginning of the novel, Jorge exclaims that he would kill his wife if she were unfaithful, and he finally becomes the inadvertent cause of her death. Councilor Accacio is an effective comic caricature, and the scene in which he insists on accompanying Luiza, who is desperate to meet Bazilio at their Paradise, is brilliantly executed. The most interesting and most repulsive character is the sexually starved Juliana. She personifies pure hatred and forces Luiza to pay for her sin.

Critical Context

Cousin Bazilio has been criticized for imitating Madame Bovary, though Eça de Queiróz’s defenders have demonstrated his original treatment of a similar story. In a savage essay, Eça de Queiróz’s contemporary, the Brazilian novelist Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, condemned Cousin Bazilio’s unconvincing plot and sensational sexuality. The book’s portrayal of sexuality and frank expression of a woman’s desires are the best aspects of the novel, but the plot does have two radical weaknesses. Juliana’s theft of the love letters and Jorge’s interception of Bazilio’s letter seem contrived, though people communicated more frequently by letter before the invention of the telephone. The other problem concerns the successive and convenient deaths of Juliana and Luiza. Juliana had been suffering from heart disease, but Luiza, who faints all too frequently during crucial moments of the novel, dies merely from emotional shock and not from any physical cause. Despite these relatively minor defects, Cousin Bazilio is a masterpiece of satiric realism, giving a lively picture of Portuguese society, passionate love, and a vengeful servant. It fully justifies Eça de Queiróz’s reputation as one of the major novelists of the nineteenth century.

Bibliography

Coleman, Alexander. Eça de Queiróz and European Realism, 1980.

Fedorchek, Robert. “Luiza’s Dream Worlds in O primo Basilio,” in Romance Notes. XV (Spring, 1974), pp. 532-535.

Pritchett, V.S. “A Portuguese Diplomat: Eça de Queiróz,” in The Myth Makers, 1979.

Rougle, W.P. “The Role of Food in Five Major Novels by Eça de Queiróz,” in Luso-Brazilian Review. XIII (Winter, 1976), pp. 157-181.

Stevens, James. “Eça and Flaubert,” in Luso-Brazilian Review. III (May, 1966), pp. 47-61.