'An angel fallen from heaven'
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Creião, que são demasiado injustos para com aquella pobre moça, meos amigos. Eu a julgaria antes uma princeza desthronizada, se não soubesse que é um anjo cahido do céo.
Believe me, you are too unjust toward that poor girl, my friends. I would take her rather for a dethroned princess, did I not know she is an angel fallen from heaven.
Álvaro reaches, unknowingly, for the truest image in the chapter: 'uma princeza desthronizada', a dethroned princess. It is exactly what Isaura is — a woman of natural nobility cast down from the station her soul deserves, dispossessed not by fortune but by the law of slavery. His hyperbole, meant as gallant flattery, brushes the literal truth: she was raised like a daughter of the house, cultivated as a lady, and then thrust down to chattel; a queen made property. The alternative he offers, 'um anjo cahido do céo', an angel fallen from heaven, is the Romantic cliché, but 'the dethroned princess' is inspired accuracy. Guimarády keeps letting Álvaro's loving eye see past the disguise to something real, as if love were a kind of second sight that reads the person the law has hidden.
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A Escrava Isaura 10.53 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/escravaisaura/10.53/