A Escrava Isaura 10.52 · 10.52

Álvaro's distress is the moral centre of the ballroom scene. He regrets having named her at all, because the men's speculations have 'profaned' her — 'impiamente profanada', impiously profaned, the religious word again, treating gossip about her as a kind of sacrilege. His instinct is exactly right, though for reasons he cannot know: to be spoken of, appraised, turned over in conversation is genuine danger for a fugitive, and his sense that she has been violated by mere talk is truer than his friends' idle cruelty. Guimarády gives the lover the finer conscience: where the others see a diverting mystery, Álvaro feels the wrong done to a real person by being made a subject of rumour. He would rather lose his voice than expose her, and the reader, knowing what exposure would cost Isaura, feels the rightness of the impulse beneath its Romantic excess.

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