Dom Casmurro 25.112 · 25.112

The comparison lands on its chosen ground: 'nobreza de sentimentos,' nobility of feeling. José Dias is careful to praise not rank or wealth — the Santiagos are comfortable but not grand — but the interior nobility of the heart, a distinction that cannot be checked against any ledger. It is the safest superlative, since no one can measure it and no one will contest it.

There is a delicate accuracy in his instinct. By locating the family's supremacy in sentiment, he flatters exactly the quality Dona Glória prizes in herself, the pious, tender widow devoted to her son. The compliment is tailored to its true audience, who is not really Bento but the mother whose favor keeps José Dias housed. Machado shows the flatterer's art at its finest: choosing the one form of praise that is both unfalsifiable and perfectly aimed at the person who matters most to the flatterer's own survival.

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