'They would live as before'
Read the full text in our reader
Fossem elles innocentes, e bem pouco se importarião com as suspeitas do publico ou da policia, e continuarião a viver como d’antes.
Were they innocent, they would care very little for the suspicions of the public or the police, and would go on living as before.
Geraldo's logic is elegant and wrong: the innocent, he reasons, would ignore suspicion and 'continuarião a viver como d'antes', go on living as before, indifferent to what people think. It sounds like worldly wisdom, and it is precisely the reasoning that condemns the truly hunted. Only someone with nothing to fear can afford to disregard suspicion; the fugitive, whose life depends on managing every appearance, cannot. The doctor mistakes the caution born of real danger for the guilt born of real crime. Guimarády lets the sceptic's plausible syllogism expose its own blindness — it cannot imagine the innocent person who is nonetheless in mortal peril, which is exactly what Isaura is. The whole tragedy of the fugitive slave lies in that unimagined category: innocent, and yet with everything to fear.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open A Escrava Isaura 10.65 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the A Escrava Isaura — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
A Escrava Isaura 10.65 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/escravaisaura/10.65/