'Some Circe of the brothel'
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Deos queira que não andes embaido por alguma Circe de bordel, por alguma dessas aventureiras, de que ha tantas pelo mundo, e que sabendo que és rico, arma laços ao teo dinheiro!
God grant you are not being duped by some Circe of the brothel, by one of those adventuresses of whom there are so many in the world, who, knowing you are rich, lay snares for your money!
Geraldo's warning is thick with dramatic irony and with the era's ready contempt for unattached women. He fears 'Elvira' is 'alguma Circe de bordel' — some brothel-Circe, the enchantress of the Odyssey who turned men to swine, here a figure for the scheming seductress, or one of the 'aventureiras' who prey on rich young men. Every charge is the precise inverse of the truth: Isaura is not hunting Álvaro's fortune but hiding from a fortune-holder who hunts her; not a seductress but a woman fleeing seduction by force. Guimarães lets the worldly doctor's cynicism be exactly, symmetrically wrong, and in doing so exposes how readily society imagines the worst of a woman it cannot place. The word 'laços', snares, is the same the book used for the marriage-bonds Leôncio called self-interested — the vocabulary of entrapment following Isaura even into the suspicions of strangers.
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