Two months after the flight
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Já são passados mais de dous mezes depois da fuga de Isaura, e agora, leitores, em quanto Leoncio emprega diligencias extraordinarias e meios extremos, e desatando os cordões da bolsa, põe em actividade a policia e uma multidão de agentes particulares para empolgar de novo a presa, que tão sorrateiramente lhe escapára,
More than two months have passed since Isaura's flight, and now, readers, while Leôncio spends extraordinary efforts to set police and a crowd of private agents hunting the prey that so stealthily escaped him,
The chapter opens with the narrator seizing the reader by the sleeve — 'agora, leitores' — a direct address that abruptly changes the book's whole altitude. After the airless intimacy of Cap IX, we pull back to a bird's-eye view and skip two months and a thousand kilometres. The crucial word is 'presa', prey: Isaura has become, in Leôncio's ledger, a hunted animal, and he has 'loosed the strings of his purse' — the very savings-and-ransom motif inverted, money now spent not to free her but to recapture her. The machinery of the manhunt, 'a policia e uma multidão de agentes particulares', shows how the private cruelty of one master extends into a public apparatus; a whole province's institutions bend to help a rich man reclaim his property. The novel of flight has become a novel of pursuit.
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