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Simão Botelho carried from Viseu to Coimbra the arrogant convictions he had formed about his own valour. With boastful pleasure he recalled the defeat of the thirty water carriers, the sound of the blows, one man senseless and another bloodied. He still saw one blow catch three men, another bring down two, the uproar and the final crash of the water jars.
He delighted in it like a stage veteran recounting a hundred battles until he collapses from astonishing or exhausting his listeners. For all his enthusiasms, however, the student was incomparably more harmful than that stage braggart who slaughters imaginary hosts. His memories gave him no rest: they spurred him towards new exploits, and the university of those years offered many occasions to anyone seeking them.
A large part of the student youth sympathised with the still halting theories of liberty, more by intuition than through study. The thunder of the apostles of the French Revolution had not made itself fully heard in that corner of the world, but the books of the Encyclopaedists were not entirely unknown. From those sources the next generation had drunk the doctrine that the narrator calls poison, spilt in blood in the year 1793. Social regeneration by the guillotine had a few timid supporters in Portugal who, as might be expected, belonged to the younger generation.
At the same time, resentment against England was growing among the manufacturing classes. Many Portuguese wished to free the country from foreign treaties regarded as ruinous and treacherous, preferring an alliance with France. These were the reflective thinkers; the university adherents generally expressed more passion for novelty than doctrine founded on reason.
In the previous year, 1800, António de Araújo de Azevedo, the future Count of Barca, had left for Madrid and Paris to negotiate Portuguese neutrality. The allied powers rejected the proposals and dismissed the sixteen million offered by the diplomat to the First Consul. Without delay, Spanish and French armies entered Portuguese territory. The national troops, commanded by the Duke of Lafões, did not even engage in the unequal struggle, because Luís Pinto de Sousa meanwhile negotiated the Peace of Badajoz. The narrator calls that agreement ignominious: it ceded Olivença to Spain, excluded the English from Portuguese ports and imposed the payment of millions to France.
These events inflamed against Napoleon those who already hated the adventurer, while others celebrated the breach with England. In the convulsed and restless university, Simão held considerable influence among the supporters of the second position. The text speaks here of his beardless sixteen years, a local age statement retained despite not agreeing perfectly with other chronological markers. Mirabeau, Danton, Robespierre, Desmoulins and other executioners and martyrs of the great revolutionary slaughterhouse sounded like music to Simão's ears.
To defame them in his presence was to affront him personally, with a certain slap and cocked pistols levelled at the offender's face. The chief magistrate's son maintained that Portugal needed to regenerate itself in a baptism of blood. Only then, he claimed, would the hydra of tyrants cease to raise any of its thousand heads beneath the club of the people's Hercules.
Speeches of this kind, imitating some clandestine invective by Saint-Just, drove away even those fellow students who had previously applauded his more reasonable principles of liberty. His fellow students came to hate him and, saving themselves through infamy, denounced him to the bishop-count, rector of the university. One day, the academic demagogue was speaking in Praça de Sansão to the few listeners who remained faithful, some through fear and others through a similar coarseness. The regicidal idea was reaching its height when an escort of university guards cooled his fervour.
Simão tried to resist and reached for his pistols, but the guards' muscular arms knew perfectly well whom they were dealing with. Disarmed and hemmed in by the rector's guards, the Jacobin was taken to the academic prison. He remained there for six months, emerging only through the persistent efforts of his father's friends and Rita Preciosa's relations.
Having lost the academic year, he returned to Viseu. Domingos threatened to turn him out, but his mother, moved more by duty than affection, interceded and seated him at the family table.
Within three months, Simão's habits changed in an extraordinary manner. He abandoned his former companions, went out rarely, alone or with his youngest sister, and sought recreation in the countryside, among trees and in shadowy, deserted places. On mild summer nights he remained outdoors until dawn appeared, wearing a thoughtful air and a reserve that separated him from ordinary life. At home he shut himself in his room and appeared only when summoned to eat.
Rita Preciosa marvelled at the transformation, and Domingos, convinced by it, allowed his son to speak to him after five months.
Simão Botelho was in love. That single word explained what, at the age the text now presents as seventeen, appeared to others an inexplicable reform. He loved Teresa de Albuquerque, his fifteen-year-old neighbour, a wealthy heiress, well born and reasonably pretty.
He had first seen her from his bedroom window and, from that window, loved her for ever. Teresa did not emerge unscathed from the wound she had dealt her neighbour's heart: she loved him in return, and with a seriousness unusual at her age.
Poets and novelists try the narrator's patience by calling a girl's love at fifteen dangerous, unique and inflexible. Poets and prose writers are mistaken, he maintains, because love at fifteen is usually a game, the last form of affection for dolls. It is the small bird trying its wings outside the nest, always watching the mother calling from a nearby branch. The young bird knows as little about loving deeply as the mother knows about flying far away.
Teresa de Albuquerque may, perhaps, have been an exception in her love.
Teresa's father, Tadeu de Albuquerque, hated the magistrate and his family because of lawsuits in which Domingos had delivered judgements against his neighbour. In addition, two of Tadeu's servants had been wounded the previous year during the celebrated brawl at the fountain. For the narrator, Teresa's love was true and strong, for she refused to sacrifice herself to her father's bitterness, ironically called ‘just’.
Besides being steadfast, her love was singularly discreet and cautious. For three months, they saw and spoke to one another through the facing windows without alerting the neighbourhood or arousing suspicion in either family. The future they promised one another was entirely honourable: Simão would take his degree so that he could support her if they lacked other resources. Teresa would wait for her elderly father's death and, once mistress of her own affairs, give her husband her great estate together with her heart.
Such prudence is astonishing given Simão's character and Teresa's presumed ignorance of material matters, including property.
On the eve of Simão's departure for Coimbra, the two were taking a sorrowful leave of one another at their respective windows when Teresa was suddenly dragged away. The distraught young man heard the voice that a moment earlier had sobbed with longing now groan, and felt the blood rise to his head. He writhed in his room like a tiger against the bars of its cage and, powerless to help Teresa, even felt the temptation to kill himself. He spent the night amid fury and revenge, but morning cooled his blood and restored hope and calculation.
When the hour of departure came, he rose so altered that his mother, alerted by his feverish face, went to question him and tried to persuade him to remain. Of the many plans, Simão had decided that the most sensible was to go to Coimbra, await news and return secretly to Viseu to speak to Teresa. He reasoned correctly that his remaining in Viseu would worsen the girl's situation.
He went down to the courtyard after embracing his mother and sisters and kissing his father's hand, for his father had reserved a severe admonition for the farewell. Domingos assured him that he would abandon him entirely if he relapsed into further excesses.
As he placed his foot in the stirrup, he saw an old beggar woman hold out a hand with a paper in her palm. Startled, he moved away from the house and read Teresa's message.
‘My father says he is going to shut me in a convent because of you,’ she wrote. ‘I shall endure everything for love of you.’ ‘Do not forget me, and you will find me in the convent or in heaven, always yours at heart and always faithful.’ ‘Leave for Coimbra, for my letters will be delivered to you there.’ ‘In the first I shall tell you the name under which you must reply to your poor Teresa.’
The student's transformation amazed the university, for when he was not in lectures no one could find him anywhere. He kept only the sensible fellow students who advised him and had visited him during his six months in prison, bringing encouragement and material help. His father provided him with nothing, and his mother was able to help him only sparingly.
He studied fervently, already laying through that work the foundations of his future reputation and of the position he believed he deserved, sufficient to support a wife with dignity. He entrusted his secret to no one except the long letters he sent Teresa, in which his mind rested from the weariness of study. Teresa wrote often: the convent had been only a threat, which she no longer feared because her father could not live without her.
The news increased his devotion to study still further. Called upon to answer on the difficult points of the first-year subjects, he gave such proof of ability that teachers and fellow students regarded him as the leading prize-winner.
At about that time, Manoel Botelho, a Bragança cadet stationed in Porto, obtained leave to study Mathematics at the university. Encouraged by the change, Manoel went to live with him and found him quiet, though absorbed in an idea that made him misanthropic.
They lived together only briefly, separated by Manoel's disastrous love for an Azorean woman married to a student. The woman, in love, lost herself in her blind lover's illusions, left her husband and fled with Manoel to Lisbon, afterwards continuing to Spain. The narrator postpones the outcome of that episode until another point in the story.
In February 1803, Simão Botelho received a letter from Teresa. The immediate cause that compelled Tadeu de Albuquerque's daughter to write that letter containing a painful surprise is reserved for the next chapter. Up to that point, love had converted Simão to duty, honour, society and God, without erasing his pride or violence.