'There is what awaits you'
Read the full text in our reader
Isaura, disse Leoncio com voz aspera apontando para os instrumentos de supplicio, eis ali o que te espera, se persistes em teo louco emperramento.
Isaura, said Leôncio in a harsh voice, pointing to the instruments of torture, there is what awaits you, if you persist in your mad obstinacy.
Leôncio turns Isaura's virtue into a symptom: her refusal is 'louco emperramento' — mad obstinacy, a stubbornness to be cured. Throughout the chapter he has needed her steadfastness to be something other than principle — first romanticism, then madness, now mere mulishness — because to grant it is a moral choice would be to grant that she has a moral life. Pointing at the iron, he offers the crudest of arguments, the syllogism of the whip: agree, or suffer. That he must reach for it is itself a defeat; every honeyed word has failed, and all that remains of the great seducer is a man gesturing at instruments of torture.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open A Escrava Isaura 9.103 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 9.103 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/escravaisaura/9.103/