After my death, the stylists will naturally concern themselves with my life and my artistic riches.

I have lived for 27 years in a rustic house in the place known as S. Miguel de Seide, between S. Tirso and Vila Nova de Famalicão. Here I have written the majority of my books, here I have grown old completely withdrawn from the world that I abandoned in the vigour of youth, and here it was my intention to die. However, the ultimate misfortune came here to wound the most sensitive part of my soul, killing off one of my granddaughters and driving one of my sons insane – and they were the only support that I had to rely on in my old age.

I am sending you today the new façade for your house. Malbário is already quarrying the stone, and he is going to open up the foundations.

If I did not happen to prefer loving the quiet of the tomb, I would love the whispering of the trees, the murmuring of the stream where I go every afternoon to watch a dry little leaf drifting in the clear water; I would love the poor parish church that for three hundred years has welcomed into the bosom of its crude stone the peaceful, cheerful, and uneducated among these happy savages who have loved and served their Creator with such enlightenment. I would love everything; but I love death much more.

I am a man who knows everything and much else besides. I do not observe my neighbour’s life, nor do I go to the salons chasing an idea that I might stretch out to a volume of some three hundred pages, which, afterwards, like a base spy, I come and sell to you for 480 réis. Not that, never. All that I know, and much more that I hope to know, is recounted to me by a respectable lady.