Public and private ideas
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de ideias publicas e especificas.
of public and specific ideas.
The extinguished ardor is glossed as ideas of two kinds.
The clause ends by relabeling Cosme's two vanished ardors as 'ideias publicas e especificas' — public ideas being his politics, specific ones his amours. The mock-taxonomic phrasing is pure Machado: the language of a naturalist or a bureaucrat pressed into service to describe a fat man's lost enthusiasms.
The faint pomp of 'publicas e especificas' is the joke. By dressing love and party in categorical dignity, the narrator makes their extinction sound almost like a scientific finding, which flatters and deflates Cosme at once. It is the same trick the book plays everywhere — using elevated diction for modest human material, so that the gap between word and thing becomes the wit. Cosme's whole inner life is filed under two adjectives and closed, and we move on to what the emptied man does with his cooled and orderly days.
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