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The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas · Chapters CXVII to CXXXVI

Humanitism, Nhã-loló and Fifty Years

AmbitionAppearance and RealityDeathSlavery

Chapter CXVII: Humanitism

The Meaning of LifeSlavery

Section summary

Brás Cubas returns to a busy life, pushed by two forces: Sabina, who vigorously pushes the match with Nhã-loló, and Quincas Borba, who sets out for him Humanitism, in which Humanitas is the man divided among all men. Over dinner, between the chicken and the coffee, the philosopher draws from his thesis that love is a priesthood, that war, hunger and crime are necessary functions, that envy is a virtue and pain an illusion; days later he reads Brás the four manuscript volumes of the work.

Analysis

The defunct narrator spares himself nothing: he confesses that he was astonished, that his objections were so feeble that Quincas Borba destroyed them without effort, and shows the philosopher sucking a chicken wing while he defines hunger as a test that Humanitas imposes on its own viscera. Two readings are possible: the system truly seduces Brás, or he transcribes it with the seriousness of one who has already noticed that every doctrine concludes whatever suits the one who expounds it. Humanitism returns in the novel Quincas Borba, which bears the philosopher's name in its title.

Humanitas, said he, the principle of things, is none other than the same man divided among all men
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Chapter CXVIII: The Third Force

Desire

Section summary

Brás Cubas names the third force that called him to the bustle: the taste for shining and the inability to live alone. The plaster did not come, and the desire to stir himself came.

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Chapter CXIX: Parentheses

The Meaning of Life

Section summary

Brás Cubas leaves in parentheses half a dozen of the maxims he wrote at the time, "yawns of boredom" that could serve as epigraphs to speeches without a subject.

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Chapter CXX: "Compelle intrare"

Section summary

Sabina decrees that Brás Cubas must marry, because a childless bachelor has a poor future; the idea of having children startles him, and he accepts even the alliance with Damasceno. Quincas Borba encourages him, says that Humanitas stirs in his breast, and proves that the Gospel parable was a foreshadowing of Humanitism.

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Chapter CXXI: Downhill

Desire

Section summary

Three months later everything pushes Brás Cubas toward marriage, and the memory of Virgília appears in a mirror of black devil, that of Nhã-loló in one of pink devil. Going down the Livramento hill with her after Mass, he loses years along the way and reaches the bottom at twenty. Halfway down the hill a cockfight had absorbed Damasceno; Nhã-loló takes Brás away, and at the foot of the hill they wait for her father, who arrives surrounded by gamblers.

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Chapter CXXII: A Very Subtle Intention

Section summary

Nhã-loló is ashamed of her father and fears that such a father-in-law will seem unworthy to Brás Cubas, and so she strives to mask the family's inferiority. He reads in this the intention to separate her case from her father's, and resolves to pull her out of that environment.

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Chapter CXXIII: The Real Cotrim

Slavery

Section summary

Brás Cubas consults Cotrim before dealing with the marriage to Nhã-loló. The brother-in-law does not give an opinion: praising his niece would look like self-interest and, if she were to consult him, he would say no; still, he finds it essential to marry someone with political ambitions, and he holds back what he was going to say. Afterwards the narrator paints his portrait: fiercely honorable, accused of stinginess and brutality, treasurer of a confraternity, who sends the newspapers notice of his good deeds.

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Chapter CXXIV: Go-Between

Section summary

Brás Cubas justifies the chapter: between life and death there is a short bridge, and without it the reader would suffer a jolt in leaping from a portrait to an epitaph. He says that the thought about the reader who takes refuge in the book to escape life is not his own.

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Chapter CXXV: Epitaph

Section summary

The chapter is only an epitaph, bearing the name of Dona Eulália Damascena de Brito, who died at nineteen, and a plea for prayers.

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Chapter CXXVI: Desolation

Death

Section summary

Nhã-loló dies at the first onset of yellow fever, and Brás Cubas, who accompanies her to the tomb without tears, concludes that perhaps he did not truly love her. Quincas Borba explains that epidemics serve the species and asks whether he does not secretly feel a charm in having escaped; Brás does not answer. Damasceno, inconsolable, complains that of eighty invitations only twelve people came to the burial, and Cotrim says that those who truly care did come.

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Chapter CXXVII: Formality

Appearance and Reality

Section summary

Brás Cubas boasts of his gift for finding relations between things: Damasceno's "But let them come!" returns to him before an engraving of six ladies of Constantinople, under a veil so fine that it uncovers the whole face. From the ladies to the grieving father goes the same Formality, to whom Brás offers praise: the catchphrase of life, which dries a father's tears and wins the indulgence of a Prophet.

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Chapter CXXVIII: In the Chamber

Section summary

Two years later, Brás Cubas sees the Turkish engraving in the Chamber, where he is a deputy and where the orator is Lobo Neves. Life has brought the two of them to the same shore: he was to restrain remorse, and what he restrained was the ambition to become minister.

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Chapter CXXIX: No Remorse

Ambition

Section summary

Brás Cubas says he has no remorse: with chemical apparatus he would decompose remorse to understand why Achilles drags his enemy's corpse around and why Lady Macbeth rubs her stain; he has only the desire to be minister. He would prefer to be Achilles, who hears the pleas of Priam; he hears the speech of Lobo Neves.

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Chapter CXXX: To Be Inserted in Chapter CXXIX

Section summary

In 1855, at a ball, Brás Cubas speaks to Virgília for the first time since the presidency: she, in blue gros-grain, still lovely with an autumnal loveliness; they talk a great deal without alluding to the past. On seeing her come down the staircase, he murmurs "Magnificent!" The narrator tells us to read this chapter between the first and second sentences of CXXIX.

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Chapter CXXXI: Of a Slander

Section summary

Soon after, an old companion, a naval officer, provokes Brás Cubas with "Memories of the past, eh?", and Brás's reply is an indiscretion. He confesses it and argues that women's indiscretion is a trick invented by men: a woman gives herself out of love and dissembles, while a man adds vanity to the other feeling.

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Chapter CXXXII: Not Serious

Section summary

Brás Cubas recalls that people ask whoever they see sulking "Folks, who killed your little dogs?", and warns that the chapter is not serious.

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Chapter CXXXIII: Helvétius's Principle

Section summary

Brás Cubas explains why he confessed to the naval officer, against the interest of keeping quiet: before the reflective interest of safety, there was the spontaneous interest of self-satisfaction. Helvetius's principle holds in his case, but with the hidden interest, not the apparent one.

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Chapter CXXXIV: Fifty Years

Appearance and Reality

Section summary

Brás Cubas reveals that, when Virgília was coming down the staircase and the officer touched her on the shoulder, he was fifty years old: the best part of life, in common parlance, was going down with her. He is rejuvenated at the ball, but at four in the morning he finds his fifty years at the bottom of the carriage and imagines a bat saying that the rejuvenation was in the others.

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Chapter CXXXV: "Oblivion"

The Meaning of Life

Section summary

Brás Cubas predicts that the reader will close the book, because the interest of his life, love, has ceased; at fifty there is no freshness left, and soon forgetfulness will come, OBLIVION. The lady who shone, if she has any philosophy, does not envy those who took her carriage: they too will be set down.

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Chapter CXXXVI: Uselessness

Section summary

Brás Cubas closes the meditation on oblivion from the previous chapter in a single line: he says that, unless he is very mistaken, he has just written a useless chapter.

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Reading of the chapter block

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