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Then, certain that I could never appease Ti-Chin-Fú, I spent the whole night in my room at the Loreto palace, where, as before, the innumerable candles in the sconces gave the damask hangings the hue of fresh blood, contemplating how to cast those supernatural millions from me like an ornament of sin. Perhaps in that way I might free myself from that paunch and that abominable paper kite.
I abandoned the Loreto mansion and the life of a nabob. Wearing a threadbare frock-coat, I rented my room at Madame Marques's house once more and returned to the office, back bent, to beg for my twenty thousand réis a month and my dear copyist's pen.
But a greater suffering came to embitter my days: believing me ruined, all those whom my opulence had humbled covered me with insults, as a fallen prince's toppled statue is covered with refuse. The newspapers, in a triumph of irony, mocked my poverty. The aristocracy, which had babbled flatteries at the nabob's feet, now ordered its coachmen to run down the shrunken body of the ministry scribbler in the streets. The clergy, whom I had enriched, accused me of sorcery, and the people stoned me. When I meekly complained about the granite hardness of the steaks, Madame Marques planted both hands on her hips and shouted: 'Oh, Enguiço! What more do you want, then? Put up with it! Look at the pauper!'
Despite this expiation, old Ti-Chin-Fú remained at my side, obese and ochre-coloured. The millions lay sterile and untouched in the banks, but they were still mine in fact. Mine, to my misfortune!
One day, in indignation, I suddenly stormed back into my mansion and my life of luxury. That night the radiance from my windows once again lit the Loreto district and, through the open gate, the long ranks of decorative footmen could once more be seen darkening the entrance in their black silk uniforms.
At once Lisbon, without hesitation, grovelled at my feet, and Madame Marques tearfully called me her heart's own son. The newspapers bestowed upon me the attributes that, by ancient tradition, belong to the Divinity: I was the Omnipotent, I was the Omniscient! The aristocracy kissed my fingers as though I were a Tyrant, and the clergy offered incense to me as though I were an Idol. And my contempt for Humanity grew so vast that it extended to the God who created it.
Since then, an enervating satiety has kept me for whole weeks on a sofa, silent and sullen, contemplating the happiness of non-existence...
One night, as I was returning alone along a deserted street, I saw before me the black-clad Figure with his umbrella under his arm: the same one who, in my happy room in Travessa da Conceição, had made me heir to so many detestable millions at the tinkle of a little bell. I ran to him, clutched the tails of his bourgeois overcoat and cried: 'Free me from my riches! Resurrect the Mandarin! Restore to me the peace of poverty!' He gravely shifted his 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 abject supplication, but beneath the dim gaslight I saw before me only the thin shape of a dog sniffing at the refuse.
I never encountered that individual again. Now the world seems to me an immense heap of ruins, where my solitary soul groans without cease, like an exile wandering among fallen columns.
The flowers in my rooms wither and no one replaces them; every light seems to me a torch; and when my lovers, white in their dressing gowns, come to lean against my bed, I weep as though I beheld the shrouded legion of my dead joys.
I feel myself dying. I have made my will. In it I bequeath my millions to the Devil: they belong to him; let him claim them and distribute them...
And to you, men, I bequeath only the words that follow, without comment. 'Only the bread our own hands earn day by day truly tastes good: never kill the Mandarin!'
And yet, as I expire, I am prodigiously comforted by this thought: from north to south and west to east, from the Great Wall of Tartary to the waves of the Yellow Sea, not one Mandarin would remain alive anywhere in the vast Chinese Empire if you, as easily as I, could kill him and inherit his millions. O reader, creature improvised by God, an evil work of evil clay, my fellow and my brother!
Angers, June 1880.