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Amor de Perdição presents itself as a novel with the subtitle Memories of a Family. The edition, bearing the name of Camilo Castelo Branco, was published in Porto in 1862 by N. Moré, a publisher in Praça de D. Pedro. The same firm advertised a presence in Coimbra, in Rua da Calçada, and a commission house in Paris, in Rue d'Arcole.
At the very threshold, a question attributed to D. Francisco Manuel in Epanáfora Amorosa yields love to its omen: who has ever seen a life of love that did not end drowned in the tears of disaster or repentance?
The author dedicates this book to the Most Illustrious and Excellent António Maria de Fontes Pereira de Melo. Many people will suppose, Your Excellency, that you will attach no value to a work offered by my gratitude, for those same people are convinced that ministers of state do not read novels. They are mistaken.
I once heard one of Your Excellency's colleagues discourse in Parliament on railways, a dry subject which he coloured with such wit and so many flowers that listening to him delighted me. That very evening, I found the eloquent politician reading Fanny, that Fanny who knew as much about railways as I did.
I therefore take it as certain that there are novels in Your Excellency's library. I also believe that some have remained unread because you lack the time, and others because they do not deserve the time they would require. Give this book, I beg you, a place in the second group. You will thus show that you receive and value it, not for merits declared with immodest candour, but because it bears the name of your most grateful and respectful servant.
The dedication is dated from the Relação prison in Porto on 26 September 1861 and signed by Camilo Castelo Branco.
While leafing through old registers in the record office of the Relação prison in Porto, I came upon folio 232 in the volume recording prisoners admitted from 1803 to 1805. There Simão António Botelho was recorded, on his own declaration, as unmarried, a student at the University of Coimbra, born in Lisbon and residing in Viseu at the time of his arrest. The entry gave his age as eighteen and named his parents, Domingos José Correia Botelho and Rita Preciosa Caldeirão Castelo Branco.
It described him as a man of ordinary height, with a round face, brown eyes, black hair and beard, wearing a blue baize jacket, a printed fustian waistcoat and mottled cloth trousers. Filipe Moreira Dias declared that he had written and signed the record. In the left margin, a laconic note anticipated an entire ruin: ‘He went to India on 17 March 1807.’
Surely it is not placing excessive trust in the reader's sensibility to imagine that the banishment of an eighteen-year-old youth would inspire pity. Eighteen years old, the golden and scarlet dawn of life, when the heart does not yet dream of fruit and is wholly steeped in the perfume of flowers! It is the age when a young man leaves the bosom of his family, his mother's arms and his sisters' kisses to receive the sweeter caresses of the girl opening beside him like a flower of the same season.
And at eighteen, behold him banished from his country, his love and his family. Never again the sky of Portugal, nor freedom, nor siblings, nor mother, nor rehabilitation, nor dignity, nor even a friend! It is sad.
The male reader would surely be moved; and the female reader, if told the story of those eighteen years in less than a line, would weep. Would she not? Could a woman hear it dry-eyed, a creature so disposed to the tenderness of pity and so often bearing a reflection of divine mercy? Would my female reader, the affectionate friend of all the unfortunate, not weep to learn that the poor youth had lost honour, rehabilitation, country, freedom, sisters, mother and everything else for loving the first woman to awaken his still innocent desires?
She would weep, she would weep! If only I can convey to her the painful shock caused in me by those lines, deliberately sought out and read with bitterness, respect and, at the same time, hatred. Hatred, yes.
In due course you will see whether that hatred is pardonable, or whether it would have been wiser for me to abandon at once a story capable of earning me the disgust of the cold judges of the heart. Those judges may reject the sentences I shall pronounce here against the false virtue of men made barbarous in the name of their honour.