A Escrava Isaura 10.94 · 10.94

One lady dissents — the 'signal', the mark, actually lends Isaura 'certa graça particular', a certain particular charm. It is a small fairness amid the malice, and it keeps the beauty-spot circulating in the conversation, examined from every side. Guimarády is doing something quietly deliberate here: he makes the whole female chorus dwell on the mark, praise it and revile it and weigh it, so that by the end of the scene the 'sinal na face direita' has been fixed in the reader's mind as the single most-remarked feature of Isaura's face. He is loading the detail with significance in advance. The ladies think they are merely gossiping about a beauty-spot; the author is quietly ensuring that when a description of the fugitive later hinges on exactly this mark, the reader will remember it has been, all along, the thing everyone noticed.

Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear 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:

• Plato's Phaedrus — complete, ancient Greek
• Heraclitus, the Fragments — complete
• Dante's Inferno — Italian, canto I
• Dom Casmurro — Brazilian Portuguese