Dom Casmurro 21.47 · 21.47

Justina itemizes the content of the speeches: 'os elogios da egreja,' José Dias's glowing tributes to the Church and the clerical life. She lists them as one might list a salesman's talking points, flattening praise into technique.

The irony she is building toward is that these devout-sounding encomiums come from a man of no real piety. Machado sets up the puncture two passages ahead, when Justina declares him as religious as a lamp. For now the 'elogios' hang there, apparently sincere, and part of the pleasure of the scene is watching a plain-spoken woman treat holy praise as mere sales patter. The Church, for José Dias, is not a faith but an instrument — a lever to move Dona Glória — and Justina hears the hollowness in every tribute.

Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.

You are reading a page of the Dom Casmurro — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.

The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.

Also on our shelves:

• Plato's Phaedrus — complete, ancient Greek
• Heraclitus, the Fragments — complete
• Dante's Inferno — Italian, canto I