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Certain that I could never appease Ti-Chin-Fú, I spent the night in my Loreto room thinking of casting off those supernatural millions as one might discard an ornament of sin. Around me, the countless candles in the candelabra gave the damask the colour of fresh blood; without the money, perhaps I would be rid of that belly and that abominable paper kite.
I abandoned the Loreto palace and my life as a nabob. I put on a worn frock coat and rented my old room in Madame Marques's house again. I returned to the government office, back bent, to beg for my twenty thousand réis a month and my dear copyist's pen.
Yet an even greater suffering embittered my days: everyone who had felt humiliated by my wealth thought me ruined and covered me with insults, like rubbish strewn over the fallen statue of a prince. The newspapers celebrated my misery with triumphant irony. The aristocracy, which had once murmured praise at the nabob's feet, now ordered its coachmen to run down the shrunken civil servant in the streets. The clergy, which I had enriched, accused me of witchcraft, and the people threw stones at me. When I humbly complained about the toughness of the steaks, Madame Marques put her hands on her hips and shouted: 'Oh, Enguiço! What more do you want? Put up with it, you pauper!'
Despite this expiation, old Ti-Chin-Fú remained at my side, obese and ochre-coloured. His millions lay idle and untouched in the banks, but in fact they still belonged to me: unhappily mine!
Indignant, one day I returned noisily to the palace and to my life of luxury. That night, my windows lit up Loreto once more and, through the open gate, long lines of decorative footmen could be seen in their black silk uniforms.
At once, without hesitation, Lisbon grovelled at my feet again. In tears, Madame Marques called me her own dear son, and the newspapers gave me the titles that tradition reserves for the Divinity: Omnipotent and Omniscient. The aristocracy kissed my fingers as if I were a tyrant, and the clergy burnt incense before me as if before an idol. My contempt for Humanity then became so vast that it extended to the God who had created it.
From then on, a deadening satiety kept me on a sofa for weeks at a time, silent and gloomy, thinking about the happiness of not existing.
One night, as I returned alone along a deserted street, I saw before me the black-clad figure with his umbrella under his arm. He was the same visitor who, in my old room in Travessa da Conceição, had caused me to inherit so many hateful millions with a single ring of a bell. I ran to him, seized the tails of his bourgeois frock coat and cried: 'Free me from my riches! Bring the Mandarin back to life! Give me back the peace of poverty!' He gravely shifted the umbrella to his other arm and replied kindly. 'It cannot be done, my dear sir, it cannot be done.' I threw myself at his feet in an abject plea, but beneath the dim gaslight I saw only the thin shape of a dog sniffing at the rubbish.
I never met that individual again; now the world seems to me an immense heap of ruins, where my solitary soul groans like an exile among fallen columns.
The flowers in my rooms wither and no one replaces them, while every light looks to me like a funeral torch. When my lovers approach the bed in their white dressing gowns, I weep as though I were seeing the shrouded host of my dead joys. I feel myself dying, and I have already made my will. In it I leave my millions to the Devil: they belong to him; let him claim them and distribute them.
To you, humankind, I leave only these words, without comment: 'Only the bread our own hands earn day after day tastes good: never kill the Mandarin!'
And yet, as I die, I am deeply comforted by a thought about the vast Chinese Empire, from the Great Wall of Tartary to the Yellow Sea. From north to south and west to east, no Mandarin would remain alive if you could kill him and inherit his millions as easily as I did. O reader, creature improvised by God, a bad creation fashioned from bad clay, my fellow and my brother!
Angers, June 1880.