A Escrava Isaura 10.31 · 10.31

The word 'coquetterie', left in French, is a marker of the affected drawing-room sophistication of these young men, for whom a fashionable foreign term dresses up an ordinary cynicism. To them, a beautiful woman's every gesture is a performance in the theatre of seduction. Guimarães, who has just shown us Isaura on her knees before shackles and rising to vow her own death, sets that reality against the ballroom's frivolous vocabulary of 'romantismo' and 'coquetterie' — and the gap is vast. These men are playing at love as a genteel game; the woman they discuss has fled a man who played at love as ownership and violence. The chapter keeps measuring the lightness of the salon against the weight of what Isaura carries into it unseen.

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