This novel splits time between nineteenth century Paris and the mountains of Portugal. It is narrated by Ze Fernandes, the close friend of Jacinto, the heir to a fortune with vast estates across the Portugese countryside and a mansion in Lisbon. He was, nonetheless, born and raised in Paris, never having visited his homeland, the grandson of a self-exiled royalist noble. Jacinto spends his time indulging in food and wine, attending the theater and masked balls, perusing books from his 30,000 volume library, and tinkering with the newest mechanical inventions. “Jacinto had come up with an idea, namely, that “a man can only be superlatively happy when he is superlatively civilized.” And by “civilized” my friend meant the kind of man who, by honing his thinking skills on all the philosophy acquired since Aristotle onwards and multiplying the physical strength of his organs using all the mechanisms invented since Theramenes created the wheel, could make of himself a magnificent, near-omnipotent, Adam ready to reap—within a particular society and within the limits of Progress (at least as far as Progress had gotten in 1875)—all the pleasures and all the advantages that spring from Knowledge and Power.” Jacinto was also, as befits a man of his station, a dandy. “He always wore a flower in his buttonhole, not a real flower, but one skillfully concocted by his florist from the petals of several different flowers—carnations, azaleas, orchids, or tulips—all bound together on one stem, along with a sprig of fennel.”
Despite his wealth and position, the city of Paris gradually began to bore Jacinto. “He never openly confessed his feeling to me. Jacinto, elegant and reserved, did not wring his hands and moan: “Oh accursed life!” It was more the look of satiety on his face: a gesture angrily dismissing the importunate nature of things; the way in which he would sometimes sit immobile, as if in protest, on a divan from which he would not stir, as if he wished those moments of repose to be eternal; then there were the yawns, the gaping yawns with which he underlined everything he did.” All his books of political and economic philosophy and the modish salons, where they discussed the newest utopian fads, could not cure him. “Hardened in sin, the bourgeois revels in his strength, and against him all the tears of the Humanitarians, the reasoned arguments of the Logicians and the bombs of the Anarchists are impotent.”
Ever-tired of his routine in Paris, Jacinto spontaneously decides to journey to his family estate, spurred by the news of a ceremony to reinter the bones of his ancestors, displaced when a mudslide destroyed their resting place in the ancient familial chapel. “Those hairy Jacintos who returned to their high lands in Tormes, back from defeating the Moor at Salado or the Spaniard at Valverde, did not even bother taking off their battered armor to tend their fields and to train their vines to the elms, building their kingdom with lance and spade.” In the countryside, Jacinto finally finds himself, his calling, and his home. “Jacinto had put down strong loving roots in his rough mountain home. It was as if he had been planted, like a cutting, in the ancient soil from which his race had sprung and as if the ancient humus were seeping in and penetrating him, transforming him into a rustic, almost vegetable Jacinto, as much a part of the earth and as rooted in the earth as the trees he so loved.”
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