From Mondego To Sado, Stopping All The While
Paradise Encountered

«On the Ericeira road the traveller finally turned back, after reaching the northernmost point on the bend of the River Cheleiros, and headed south. The roads are rather erratic: they spring up with the firm intention of serving all the tiniest villages in the region, but they never take the shortest route: they meander up and down hills, completely losing their head when they spot the Serra of Sintra in the distance. This wouldn’t be a problem if the sierra had been the traveller’s immediate goal: it is so obviously in front of him that any of them would do. But before that there is a hamlet called Janas, famed for the chapel of San Mamede which has a rare circular layout, and so the traveller made the necessary detour. He did not regret it.
From a distance, the hermitage looks more like a country dwelling than a place of worship. It has long verandah where it is pleasant to linger a while, and behind the entrance (in this case, it is hardly appropriate to speak of a façade) the walls are supported by sturdy buttresses. The door is locked, but inquisitive travellers can take advantage of any of the windows, even if they are covered with a grille and wire netting. Inside, in the centre of the circle, four columns make a kind of sanctuary where an oil lamp is burning. The altar is up against a wall, which must make a celebration of Mass quite difficult. In the empty space are rows of benches, which look right is the continuous stone bench around the walls of the church. It is true that it is interrupted on either side of the high altar, but its disposition suggests a ritual very different from the normal one. Seated on this bench, the faithful look towards the central area defined by the columns, not at the altar. The traveller cannot understand how this can be reconciled with the usual rite which has the celebrant and his congregation face to face for their gestures and responses. This is either a small mystery, or none at all. Be that as it may, the traveller is almost convinced that in earlier times, the chapel of San Mamede must have been used for other cults and rites. It would not be the only church that had once been a mosque. Or some cult to the sun or moon could have been celebrated here, as a circular space is often the symbol of divinity. This hypothesis may be wrong, but at least it is based in something concrete and objective.

All the roads lead to Sintra. The traveller has already chosen his. He will go around by Azenhas do Mar and Praia das Maças, and take a look first at the houses cascading down from the clifftop, then the sandy beach lashed by the ocean waves; but he must admit he did all this without much enthusiasm, as if he could sense the sierra behind him, asking over his shoulder: “What’s keeping you?” The same question must have been heard in that other paradise when the Creator was messing about with the clay before he created Adam.
On this side of the sierra, he first comes to Monserrate. But which Monserrate? The oriental palace, inspired by the moguls, now in a state of ruins, or the park that sweeps down from the road into the valley? The fragility of stucco, or the exuberance of vegetation? The traveller takes the first path he comes to, goes down the uneven steps that penetrate the foliage, the deep-green avenues, and finds himself in the kingdom of silence. It is true that there are birds singing, and every now and then some creatures crawl through the undergrowth, a leaf falls or a bee goes buzzing by, but these are the sounds of silence. Tall trees rise on both sides of the valley, the tree ferns have thick trunks, and at the very bottom of the valley where streams flow, there are plants with huge, spiky leaves under which a fully grown man could stand to protect himself from the sun. Waterlilies abound on small lakes, and every so often a dull thud startles the traveller: it’s a dry pinecone falling from a branch to the forest floor.
Up above stands the palace. From afar, it still has a certain grandeur. The round turrets with their characteristic lintels catch the eye, and the moulding of the arches is softened by distance. Close to, it saddens the traveller: this English folly, paid for by the cloth trade, and Victorian in its inspiration, shows how fleeting all revivals are. The palace is being restored, which is all in the good: Portugal has more than enough ruins. But even when it is fully restored, and open to the public, it will still be what is has always been: a monument to an age that had every taste imaginable, but never really defined any of them. These nineteenth-century architectures are usually imported, and are eclectic to the point of eccentricity. As empires dominated the world economically, they amused themselves with alien cultures. And this was always also the first sign of their decadence.
From the palace verandah, the traveller looks down at the mass of vegetation below. He already knew the land was fertile: he is more than familiar with wheatfields and pine forests, with orchards and olive groves, but it is only here that he realises that this fertility can reveal itself with such serene force, like a pregnant womb nourishing itself on what it is creating. Just by placing his hand in this trunk, or dipping it into a water-tank, or touching a fallen moss-covered statue, or closing his eyes and listening to the subterranean murmuring of roots. And the sun completes all of this. A small push from the trees would lift the entire earth all towards it. The traveller can feed the vertigo of the great cosmic winds. To make sure he will not be cast out of this paradise, he retraces his steps, counts the tree ferns and discovers a new one, and departs thinking that perhaps the earth will not come to an end so soon after all.
The narrow, winding road clings to the sierra as if embracing it. Deep green vaults protect it from the sun, and carefully shield the traveller from the surrounding countryside. Who needs a distant horizon when the one close up is a scintillating screen of trunks and foliage, a ceaseless interplay of greens and the light? The Palace of Seteais looks almost out of place, with its enormous elevated terrace that in the end is little more than a belvedere looking out over the plain and offering a scenic view of the Palácio da Pena, perched in the distance.
To try to explain the Palácio da Pena is something the traveller would rather avoid. It’s enough just to look at it, to withstand the shock of this mishmash of styles, to go within ten paces from the Gothic to the Manueline, from the Moorish to the neoclassical, much of it with little sense to it. What is undeniable is that from a distance the palace has the appearance of a rare architectural unity, which probably owes more to its perfect integration into the landscape than to the relationship between any of its various components. Taken bit by bit, the Pena palace shows the aberrations of the imagination when it does not take into account aesthetic affinities or contradictions. Its mains towers clearly at odds with the tiny octagonal turrets that flank the Porta do Tritão. Unity and grandeur are only to be found in the strong arches which support the upper terraces and galleries. Here the traveller is reminded of Gaudí, although it might be more exact to say that the same exotic sources inspired the great Catalan architect and the German military engineer Von Eschwege, who came to Pena at the command of another German, Don Fernando of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, to embody the romantic fantasies so beloved of that race.
It is nonetheless true to say that without the Palácio da Pena the Serra of Sintra would not be the same. To remove it from the landscape, to erase it as if from a photograph of these heights would be to drastically alter what already seems natural. The palace is like an outcrop of the rocky mass that supports it, and this is without doubt the highest compliment that could be paid to a building whose individual components, as someone once wrote, are characterised by “fantasy, insensibility, bad taste and improvisation”. But where this fantasy, insensibility, lack of taste and improvisation go altogether beyond the pale is inside the palace.
This statement calls for a clear explanation. It cannot be denied that in the audience chamber, in the apartments fo Queen Amélia, in the state room of Saxe for example, there are many precious items of furniture and objects of considerable worth and artistic merit. Taken one by one and isolated from all that surrounds them, they warrant close attention. But unlike the palace’s structural elements, which achieve harmony in an unexpected unity of conflicting details, inside the palace these decorative ornaments fail to achieve even the simple harmony that comes form an affinity of taste. And when certain antiques were brought here, they were first of all neutralised, then subverted by the general atmosphere: Dona Amélia’s apartments are a case in point. If the traveller were up to making a joke about it, he would say it looks like a suburban villa stuffed inside a palace. To put it plainly: the romantic excess of the exterior did not deserve the bourgeois of the interior. To the artificial sentry walk and the pointless lookout towers at every corner, the arrow loopholes reminiscent of bygone wars, was added the theatrical scenery of a court whose idea of culture was essentially ornamental. When the last Portuguese kings came here to rest from the burdens of government, they entered a theatre: there is little difference between this and a painted backdrop. If he had to choose, the traveller would prefer Von Eschwege’s organised chaos to the noveau-riche splendours of the royal personages.
From these palaces he could see the Castelo dos Mouros, and the traveller felt that was enough. Castles should be seen from the outside, and this one, tiny in the distance, was meant to be seen this way, that is symbolically.
The traveller resumes his journey, and finds himself taking so many turnings because of the wealth of vegetation, and taking in so many impressions, that the journey seems much longer than it really is. Long and happy: one of the rare occasions when those two words can be put together.
As for putting words together, remember how Philip II did so when he boasted that the sun never set on the lands he governed, and then went on to say that his kingdoms contained the richest and poorest convents in the world: the Escorial and the Capuchin one at Sintra? But Philip II had everything: the greatest wealth and the worst poverty, which naturally enough meant he could choose. Kings and the strange privilege of being praise-worthy either way: when they enjoy the wealth that goes with their station, or when they are poor, like all those they never bothered to help. What they sought for the peace of their souls was to be able to go and drop in on poverty whenever they wanted to, by coming to visit the friars. The traveller has no idea whether Philip II ever climbed the Serra of Sintra to visit the Franciscans in the poorest of convents in order to balance the periods he spent in the richest convent of his empire. But before him Dom Sebastian often came to talk with the friars, who must all have been delighted at His Majesty’s visits. These were the rings – the caretaker tells the traveller – to which Dom Sebastian tied his horse, and it was at these tables that he sat to take refreshment and rest after the steep climb. It is astonishing how a simple caretaker knows these wonderful facts, and can speak of them as if he had seen them with his own eyes, describing them with such conviction that the traveller looks at the rings and the tables, and almost expects to hear a horse neigh and the king speak.
Those were still peaceful times. There was as yet no reason to fear Castile; Philip II was happy enough with his Escorial and had no desire to take possession of this poorest of convents built of stone, whose only comfort and protection against the biting cold of the sierra was a lining of cork, some of which can still be seen today. It must have been a sign of true humility to choose to live and die there. These tiny doors, obliging even a child to bend down to pass through, demanded the radical submission of body and soul, and the cells they gave on to must have caused their limbs to shrink. How many men could have put themselves through this, or rather, come in search of this self-denial? In the chapterhouse there is only room for half a dozen people, the refectory is like a toy one, with a stone table taking up nearly all the room, and the constant mortification of benches made from wood with rough bark still on it. The traveller thinks for a moment what it must mean to be a friar. To him, so much a man of this world, there is something mysterious and intriguing about someone who leaves his home and work, goes to knock on the convent door, asks: “Let me in”, and from then on is oblivious to everything; even when the king was no longer Dom Sebastian but another one, it was all the same to the Capuchin friars. Considering their place in heaven secure, they even said that the angels don’t speak Portuguese or Spanish, but tried to improve their Latin, as everyone knew that was the Celestial language. The traveller mutters this to himself, but deep down he is impressed: every act of sacrifice, renunciation of self-denial moves him deeply. Even being as egotistic as they were, the Capuchins of the convent of Santa Cruz paid a high price. This heretical thought will probably mean the traveller is thrown out of paradise. He could take other roads, or try to hide in the vegetation, but then night would fall and he is not brave enough to confront darkness among these crags of the sierra. So instead he descends to the town, which means leaving paradise for the world, leaving behind too the shadows of the friars, whose only sin was the pride of thinking themselves saved.
The Palácio Nacional in Vila is almost as heterogeneous in style as the Palácio da Pena. But it is more like a vast shoreline where the tides of time have bit by bit deposited their flotsam, slowly accumulating, slowly putting one thing in place of another, and so leaving more than a simple souvenir of each one: the Gothic palace of King Dom Dinis, then the additions built by Dom João I, and later Dom Afonso V, Dom João II, and Finally Dom Manuel I, who ordered the construction of the east wing. In the Palácio da Vila you can sense the passage of time. It’s not the petrifies time of the Palácio da Pena, or the lost time of Monserrate, or the great question mark of the Capuchins. When the traveller remembers that the painter Jan van Eyck visited this palace, he thinks to himself that some things in this world do make sense.
For his taste, some of the rooms should be more sparse, as close as possible to their original taste. It is just as well the ceilings are spared the clutter from which the floors cannot protect themselves. This allows the traveller to view the panelled ceiling in the Sala dos Brasões almost as they might have done in the reign of Dom Manuel, even if his interpretation is different, and to verify that the royal coat of arms is shown here as a sin, around which the coats of arms of the royal princes revolve like satellites, and in an outer ring, those of the noble families of the day. Also the ceiling in the Sala dos Cisnes, by Maceira, and in the das Pegas, where the painted magpies all bear the legend “por bem” in their beaks, even when they are saying what is better kept quiet. But it would be churlish not to praise these wonderful tiles, the ones in the Sala da Galé and all the others, made by secret methods probably long since forgotten. And this greatly disturbs the traveller: nothing invented or discovered by man should be lost, everything ought to be passed on. If the traveller does not know how to reproduce this azul-de-fez colour, he is poorer than all the Capuchin friars put together.
There can be few things more beautiful and restful than the interior courtyards of the Palácio da Vila, few things more serenely inspiring than its Gothic chapel. When the Christian spirit encountered that of the Arabs, a new art form struggled to emerge. They clipped its wings so it could not fly. Among the birds of paradise, this must be one of the most beautiful. But is cannot fly, it cannot live.

At the Gates of Lisbon
Because of something he heard in the palace of Sintra, he started thinking of the king who was held prisoner there for nine years: Afonso by name, and the sixth of the line. Ordinary people are very touched by the fate of their kings, and the thought of a legitimate monarch stuck between four walls pacing the floor until he wears out the tiles has aroused much displaced indignation. Afonso VI was not only half-witted but had many other failings, among them the minimum of virility needed to at least guarantee succession. There are stories of families with tainted blood, which do not improve even though they are renewed. The Aviz dynasty ended with a degenerate Dom Sebastian and a cachectic Cardinal-Infante. After them, following the death of the brilliant Dom Teodósio, all that the house of Braganza had available to put on the throne was a mentally deficient rogue. The traveller would like to feel sorry for him, but is prevented from doing so by the memory of the dreadful palace intrigues they all indulged in: King, Queen, Infante, the French and Italian favourites, while around them the common people were born, worked and died, and paid the cost. And the traveller thinks: there have been prisoners who deserved better respect. But not all are in the same category.
In Cascais the traveller went to the Museu Castro Guimarães to see Lisbon. This may seem a contradiction, but it’s the truth. This is where the Crónica de Dom Afonso Henriques by Duarte Galvão is kept, the frontispiece of which has a painstaking miniature drawing of the city in its sixteenth-century walls. Ships of every kind and size float on the river in haphazard fashion but without ever colliding. The illustrator either knew nothing about winds, or knew so much he could use them as he pleased. The museum has other things to offer, but the traveller particularly wants to see this ancient image of the lost city, sunk in time, blown away by earthquakes; one which has devoured itself as it has grown.
This coastal region is the tourists’ favourite. The traveller is not a tourist, he’s a traveller. There’s a big difference. To travel is to discover; the rest is simply finding. That is the reason why he did not spend much time on these pleasant beaches, and if he decided to have a brief splash in the calm waves of Estoril, he will no dwell on it here. The traveller likes parks and gardens well enough, but the floral skirt between the casino and the beach is not for strolling on: it’s like a palace carpet, which the visitors pass by with great care. And the quiet streets that crisscross the steep hills are nothing but walls and closed gates, railings and box hedges. This is not Lamego, no tipsy man is going to appear to offer a traveller a room for the night and swap theories on the destiny of mankind. The traveller recalls that close by were found the remains of bones and skulls that had lain hidden for thousands of years, together with stone axes, chisels, adzes and other tools or ritual objects, then he looks again at the luxury hotels, the forbidding gardens, the passers-by and the lungers, and comes to the conclusion that the world is complicated. The idea is so original that the traveller should reward himself with a proper swim or by going into the casino and breaking bank, but he thinks better of it.
So finally, here is Lisbon. But before undertaking this adventure, which he finds somewhat intimidating, the traveller wants to visit the village on the estuary known as Carcavelos, to see something that few people know about, when you think of the million of inhabitants of Lisbon and the thousands who come to this coast, that is, to conclude, the parish church. From the outside it doesn’t’ look much: it has four walls, a door, a cross up above. A Jansenist might say to worship God that is all one needs. Thankfully, whoever built this church did not see things that way. Inside are the most wonderful decorative tiles it has been the traveller’s privilege to set his eyes on. Apart from the dome over the transept, all the walls, arches and window recesses are covered in this inimitable adornment, which nowadays is so crudely employed. Living nearby, the traveller promises himself to return, more than once. There can be no greater praise.
It would probably seem polite not to visit Queluz. So the traveller decides to go, overcoming the dislike he feels for two monarchs who lived there: Dom João VI who, when referring to himself, used to say: “His Majesty has the stomach ache,” or “His Majesty would like pork scratchings,” and Dona Carlota Joaquina, an ungainly, scheming woman who to add insult to injury was as ugly as a stormy night. The conversation between those two must have been amusing, and their love lives nothing short of hilarious. But the traveller is very discreet when it comes to private lives, and he is not on this journey so that he can behave like a vulgar gossip afterwards: so let’s leave the queen to her flunky lovers, and the king to his digestive complaints, and see what the palace itself has to offer us.
From the outside it looks like a barracks, or a giant sweet if viewed from the garden of Neptune. Inside, there is the usual succession of state tooms and private apartments: here is the music room, then the throne room, the tea room, the queen’s dressing room, the chapel, this room, that room, the imperial bed, the Venetian lamps, fine woods from Brazil, marble from Italy. But very little in the way of serious authentic art. Everything is decorative, superficial, to titillate the eyes and leave the brain untroubled. The traveller is lulled to such an extent by the litany of the guide showing the way to his docile flock of tourists that he is almost sleepwalking until suddenly he is jolted awake by an ancient sense of resentment.
He is in the Don Quixote room, where King Pedro IV is said to have born and died. But it is not this beginning or this end which disturbs the traveller: it would be ridiculous for him to shed tears over such a common occurrence. What upsets him is the absurdity of these painted scenes from the life of the poor hildalgo of La Mancha, the guardian of honour and justice, the crazy idealist, the inventor of giants – here in this Palácio de Queluz which interpreted the rocaille Baroque in a Portuguese way, and the neoclassical in a French way, and did neither of them justice. Some things are all wrong. Poor Quixote, who ate but little and seldom, who suffered more than his share of hardships, finds himself displayed in the court of a queen who deprived herself of nothing and a king who always gave in to the temptations offered by pheasant or pig’s trotters. If it is true that Dom Pedro was born here, and if he did actually feel, above and beyond family or dynastic concerns, a real love of freedom, then Don Quixote de la Mancha did his best to take revenge for the insult of finding himself painted on these walls. Beaten black and blue, raising his body in his weary arms, his eyes cloudy from falling into or out of consciousness he hears the infant king making his first sounds and says to him, in the fine Cervantesque language of his here translated by the traveller: “Listen, kid, since I have to be here, just make sure you don’t do anything to make me ashamed of you.” And if it is also true that Dom Pedro came here to die, the same Quixote, now mounted on his horse as if about to ride off again, must have raised his arm in farewell and said to him at the very last moment: “well, you didn’t do so badly”. Out of such a mouth, and addressed to a mere king, no words could me more comforting.

They say it’s a good thing

Here is the collar. The traveller made a promise and now he keeps it as soon as he gets to Lisbon, he will go to the Archaeological Museum and look for the collar worn by the slave owned by the Lafetá family. In it can be read the following words: “This negro belongs to Agostinho Lafetá do Carvalhal do Óbidos”. The traveller is repeating it again here in order to impress it on forgetful memories. If a price were put on this object, it would be worth millions upon millions: as much as the monastery of the Jeronimos next door, as much as the tower of Belém, as the presidential palace, as all the cars out together in one huge traffic jam, probably as much as the entire city of Lisbon. This collar is just that, a collar that hung around the neck of a man, soaked by his sweat, and perhaps also some drops of blood from a lash of the whip aimed at the back but which missed its target. The traveller is truly grateful to whoever picked it up and did not destroy the evidence of such a horrendous crime. Since he has never refrained from speaking his mind, however outlandish his views may have seemed he will now make another judgement: that the collar of Agostinho de Lafetá’s negro slave should be placed in a room all of its own, so that there will be nothing to distract visitors from it, and no-one could say they had not seen it.
The museum has thousands of exhibits that the traveller will not mention. Each of them has its own history, from the palaeolithic age to the nineteenth century, and they will have something to teach us. The traveller can imagine starting with the earliest and going down through history to the most recent. Apart from a few well-known gods and Roman emperors, the rest are unknowns, faceless and nameless. Every object has its description, and the traveller discovers to his astonishment that when it comes down to it, the history of mankind is the history of these objects and the words used to name them, the links between words and objects, their use and subsequent neglect, how, why, where and by whom they were made. Envisaged in this way, history does not become cluttered with names, it is the history of material acts, of the thoughts that shaped them and the way they shaped thoughts. It would be good for example to take one’s time to find out about this bronze goat or that anthropomorphic plate, this frieze or that chariot dug up in Óbidos, so close to Carvalhal. In order to show that it is both possible and necessary to relate one thing to another in order to understand them.
The traveller regains the street and feels lost. Where should he go now? What is he to visit? What shall he leave aside, either on purpose or because if the impossibility of seeing and commenting on everything? And anyway, what does it mean to see everything? It would be just as valid to stroll through the gardens and to go and look at the ships on the river as to visit the Jeronomite monastery. Or to do none of this, but simply sit on the bench or on the grass, enjoying the splendid bright sunshine. It’s said that a ship at anchor is not sailing. That is true, but it is preparing to set sail. So the traveller fills his lungs with fresh air, like someone hoisting sail to catch the sea breeze, and sets course for the monastery.
He is right to use naval imagery. Here on the left of the entrance is a statue to Vasco da Gama, who discovered the route to India, and in the right the reclining figure of Luís de Camões, who found the route to Portugal. Nobody knows where his bones lie; those of Vasco da Gama may or may not be in the monastery. There are genuine bones to be found further back on the right, in a chapel off the transept: here lie the mortal remains (or do they?) of Dom Sebastian, the unhappy sixteenth King of Portugal. But that is enough of tombs: this monastery of the Jeronomites is not a cemetery, but an architectural miracle.
The architects of the Manueline period produced a great deal. They never made anything more perfect than the vault of the nave here, anything more daring than the transept. The traveller feels overwhelmed. He has so often defended the beauty of unadorned stone, but now he surrenders to the decorative detail of what looks like weightless lacework, and before pillars that seem too slender to support any weight. And he recognises the stroke of genius in the decision to leave part of each pillar free of any decoration. The architect, reflects the traveller, wanted to pay homage to the basic simplicity of stone, while at the same time introducing a feature that would give the spectator a jolt, waking him out of his lazy of looking.
But what captivates the traveller most of all is the sight of the vault over the transept. Twenty-five meters high above a floor twenty-nine by nineteen metres. The vaulting soars in a single arch, with no pillar or column to support it. Like the hull of a giant ship turned upside down, this soaring belly shows its ribs, its innermost structure, so amazing the traveller he does not know whether he should kneel on the spot and praise whoever conceived and designed this miracle. He walks down the nave once again, and again is overcome at the sight of the slender of the pillars which, high above him, embrace or sprout the ribs of the vaulting like palm trees. He wanders up and down in the midst of tourists speaking half the world’s languages, while a wedding is taking place, and the priest is saying the usual fine words, and everybody looks happy: let’s hope they do not forget to teach them to enjoy the beauty of these vaults, which their parents have hardly glanced at.
The cloister is very beautiful, but it does not impress the traveller, who has very firm views in these matters. He acknowledges its beauty, but he finds its decorative detail excessive, overloaded; beneath this ornamental surface however, he can sense the harmony of its structure, the balance of the great blocks of stone, strong yet light. Nevertheless, it fails to excite him. His heart has gone out to other cloisters he has seen. This one offers pleasure only for his eyes.
The traveller has not mentioned the portals: the one facing south that gives on to the river; the other to the west on the church’s axis. They are both beautiful, carved like filigree, but although the first is more elaborate because it extends over the front, the traveller prefers the other, possibly due to the magnificent statues of King Dom Manuel and Queen Dona María, by the sculptor Chanterenne, but more probably because of the harmony it achieves between Gothic and Renaissance features, without any Manueline effects. Perhaps in the end it is simply the traveller’s known preference for simpler, more rigorous forms. Other people have other tastes, and so much the better for both.
Between the Maritime Museum and the Carriage Museum, between maritime and land means of transport, the traveller decides first to visit the tower of Belém. At a moment when coining rhymes was easy, and patriotic feeling hard, a poet wrote: “So isto fazemos bem, torres de Belém” (“There’s only one thing we do well, build towers of Belém”) The traveller does not agree. He has seen enough to know there are many other things the Portuguese excel at, like the vaults of the monastery of the Jeronomites he has just come from. Either the poet Carlos Queirós did not see them, or preferred the easier rhyme with Belém than the harder one with monastery. However that may be, the traveller cannot understand what military use this exquisite piece of jewellery could have had, with its wonderful lookout turrets facing the River Tagus, much more suited to watching naval regattas than for positioning cannon to help repel any invader. It should be said that the tower was never used in any battle. Fortunately for us. Imagine what destruction this lacework of stone would have suffered in a sixteenth-century bombardment or assault. As it is, the traveller can visit the rooms on each level, go up to the lookout posts, lean over the battlements facing the river, and feel disappointed he cannot see himself looking out from such a beautiful spot. And finally he can go down to the dungeons where the prisoners were kept. It’s one of mankind’s strange obsessions: he cannot see a dark, dank place without wanting to imprison a fellow human being in it.
The traveller did not spend much time in the Maritime Museum, and even less in the Carriage Museum. To see ships out of water makes him sad, to see carriages used for pomp and ceremony annoys him. The ships, thank heaven, can at least be taken back to the river and shown in their element, but what a ridiculous sight it would be if one of the carriages were to set out creaking its way along the streets or motorways, like a clumsy tortoise that would lose its legs and shell along the way.
For several good reasons and one even better one (to clear the cobwebs from his mind) the traveller next went to visit the Museum of Popular Art. It’s a respite from the heat. It also raises any number of questions. The traveller would prefer to divide in the two, each part capable of considerable development: popular art as such, and the art of work. This does not mean making two separate museums, but making the links between art and work more visible, showing the compatibility between the artistic and the useful, between object and sensory pleasure. This is not to deny that the museum offers an extraordinary lesson in the beauty of objects, but museums suffer from the original sin of a simple exhibition of things which have far from simple ideological implications, such as those behind their creation and organisation. The traveller enjoys museums, and would never vote for their abolition in the name of so-called modern ideas, but nor can he accept that they offer simply a neutral catalogue, taking an object, defining it and putting it in among other objects, thereby severing the umbilical cord which connected it to its creator and its users. A popular ex-voto has to be put in its own social, ethical and religious setting: equally, a garden rake does not make sense without reference to the work it was made for. New moral values and technology are pushing these objects into realms of archaeology, and this is just one more instance of the increasing demands made on museums.
The traveller spoke of any number of questions being raised. Here is just one of them: seeing that Portuguese society is undergoing such a crisis of taste (especially with regard to architecture and sculpture, objects in every-day use, and in urban planning) it would be no bad thing if those who are producing and pronouncing judgement over this general aesthetic decline, as well as the few who are still struggling against this suffocating trend, were to come and spend a few afternoons in the Museum of Popular Art, simply to look and think, to try to understand this almost vanished world and discover what part can be rescued to pass on to the future in order to safeguard our cultural survival.
The traveller walks along the river, so different here to the tiny stream in its upper reaches near Almourol, but still almost a trickle compared to the wide estuary it becomes at Sacavém, casts a contented glance at the bridge now named after the 25 April (formerly called by the name of the hypocrite who until the very last moment claimed he had no idea it would be named after him) and climbs the steps of the Rocha do Conde de Óbidos to visit the National Gallery. Before going in, he enjoys looking at the moored ships, the intricate confusion of hulls and masts, funnels and winches, the booms and pennants, and promises himself to return at night to marvel at all their lights and try to discover the meaning of all the metallic sounds that echo sharply over the dark water. The traveller wishes he could have twenty senses, but would still not find them enough, so contents himself with the five he was born with to hear what he sees, see what he hears, to smell what he feels with his fingertips, and taste on his tongue the salt which at this very moment he can hear and see on the wave sweeping in from afar. From the height of the Rocha do Conde de Óbidos, the traveller applauds life.
For him, the most beautiful picture in the world is in Siena in Italy. It’s a tiny landscape by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, scarcely longer than the palm of a hand. But the traveller does not wish to be exclusive in these matters: he knows full well there are other pictures which could claim to be just as beautiful. The Portuguese National Gallery houses one of them: the “Painéis de S. Vicente de Fora”, or also the “Temptations of St. Anthony”. And perhaps also “The Martyrdom of St Sebastian” by Gregório Lopes. Or the “Descimento da Cruz” by Bernardo Martorell. Every visitor has the right to choose, to select his own most beautiful painting in the world, the picture which at a certain time and in a certain place he puts above all others. This museum, which should be called by the more evocative name of the Museum das Janelas Verdes after the street it stands in, is not particularly well known or as well endowed compared to rivals elsewhere in Europe. But if properly exploited, there is more than enough in it to satisfy the aesthetic needs of all Lisbon and its surroundings. Without getting into the adventures into which the rooms devoted to foreign painting could lead the visitor, the traveller found himself delighting in the ways that the sixteenth-century rooms of Portuguese works of art dealt with human and animal figures, the landscapes, still lives, real or imaginary architecture, natural or skilfully altered flora, ordinary or ceremonial dress, and all those pictures which delve into fantasy or copy foreign models.
And, to go back to the panels – whether or not they are by Nuno Gonçalves – they show every feature of what makes up our Portuguese character. Depicted in the background of the portraits, these versions are so powerful they cannot be diminished by the greater emphasis placed on the figured of kings, nobles and clerics, in front of them. It is not hard to match these faces with contemporary ones: in the country outside the museum there is no lack of twins for those shown here. But, beyond the easy exercises in nationalism these juxtapositions offer, here in Portugal we seem incapable of drawing any more meaningful conclusions about our national identity. At a certain point in our history, we Portuguese lost the ability to recognise ourselves in the mirror these panels offer us. Obviously, the traveller is not referring to the cult of the age of discovery for which these panels provided inspiration. Rather, he places these paintings alongside the objects he saw in the Museum of Popular Art, and hopes this will explain his train of thought.
We are not talking about the Louvre in Paris, the National Gallery in London, the Uffizi in Florence, The Vatican, the Prado in Madrid, or the Gallery in Dresden. But this is the museum of the Janelas Verdes: this is what we have, and it is good. The traveller is a regular visitor; he has the healthy habit of visiting one room at a time and then leaving. It’s a method he recommends. A meal of thirty dishes does not nourish thirty times more than a meal of just one dish; looking at a hundred pictures can destroy the benefit and pleasure one of them might give. Apart from the organisation of space, arithmetic has little to do with art.
The weather in Lisbon in fine. The road leads us down to the garden of Santos-o-Velho, where a clumsy statue to Ramalho Ortigão is swallowed up in all the greenery. The river is hidden behind a line of sheds, but its presence can be felt. And beyond Cais do Sodré it spreads out to welcome the open space of the Terreiro do Paçó. This is a beautiful square we have never quite known what to do with. There are few government offices or dependencies left here: these huge blocks from the time of Marquês de Pombal do not fit in with today’s view of a bureaucratic paradise. As for the square itself, at times a vast car park, at others a lunar desert, what it needs is shade, shelters, focal points that could attract people to meet and talk. It is a royal square: one king was assassinated in a corner here, but the people have never taken to it, except in shortlived moments of political passion. The Terreiro do Paçó still belongs to King Dom José. The statue of one of the dullest monarchs ever to reign in Portugal faces out over a river he must never have liked and which is far greater that he ever was.
The traveller walks down one of the commercial streets which has a shop in every doorway and banks which are shops as well. He tries to imagine what Lisbon would have been like here without the earthquake. What was lost from an urban point of view? What was gained? A historic town centre was lost, and another gained, which with the passage of time has also become historical. There is no point arguing with earthquakes, or trying to discover the colour of the cow whose milk was split, but as the traveller ruminates, he comes to the conclusion that the reconstruction of the city ordered by the Marquês de Pombal did represent a huge cultural break from which the city has not yet recovered, and which continued in the confused waves of architecture that have washed over the urban space since then. The traveller is not nostalgic for mediaeval houses or Manueline revivals. He simply notes that these and other reconstructions were made possible only due to the cultural bond between the city and its inhabitants was also broken.
Rossio square has fared rather better. It’s an important thoroughfare, and has a lot of traffic, but for this very it detains the passer-by. The traveller buys a carnation from one of the florists by the fountain, turns his back on the theatre they refused to name after Almeida Garrett, then follows the ups and downs of the Rua da Madalena to reach the Cathedral. On the way he is frightened by the cyclopean equestrian statue to King João I in the Plaza da Figueira. This is a perfect example of the sculptural problem we have only rarely been capable of solving: there is usually too much horse and too little man. Back in the Terreiro do Paçó, the sculptor Machado de Castro showed how it should be done, but few others understood him.
The Cathedral almost succumbed to the changes made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, after the earthquake, all of which were thoughtless and in bad taste. Luckily the front was restored and now looks dignified in its military-style crenellations. It is not by any means the most beautiful church in Portugal, but that adjective can be applied without hesitation to the magnificent combination of the ambulatory and the chapels of the apse, whose equal would be hard to find. The French Gothic-style chapel by Bartholomeu Joanes is also noteworthy. We should also mention the harmonious arches of the triforium, on which the eye lingers. And if the visitor has a romantic soul, there is also the tomb of the unknown princess, which will guarantee a tear. The sarcophagi of Lopes Fernandes Pacheco and his second wife, María Villalobos, are also fine works of art.
Until now the traveller has not mentioned the fortress named after St George. From here below, it is almost hidden by vegetation. A fortress during so many and such distant battles, from the time of the Romans, the Visigoths and the Moors, it now looks more like a public park. The traveller doubts whether this is an improvement. He remembers the grandeur of the impressive ruins at Marialva and Monsanto, and cannot help feeling that here, despite the restorations which were intended to strengthen the sense of the fortress’s military heritage, the strutting white peacock or the swan on the lake make more of an impression. The terrace makes one forget the fortress. It does not seem possible that the knight Martim Moniz should have been crushed to death keeping this gate open during the recapture of Lisbon. That’s how it always is: one man’s death is another man’s garden.
The traveller has not shown any great affection for eighteenth-century Portuguese art, whose chief manifestation is the so-called Joanine style, rich in carvings and Italian imports, as displayed at Mafra. Unless it is some obscure form of flattery, it seems somewhat lacking in imagination to call these styles after kings and queens who never so much as lifted a finger to help: the British have their Elizabethan or their Victorian styles, we have our Manueline and Joanine. This just shows that the people, or those who claim to speak on their behalf, still cannot do without a father or mother, however dubious the paternity may be in cases like these. But then the monarchs had the authority and the power to dispense the people’s money, and it is thanks to this obsession with paternity that we have to congratulate Dom João V for building the church of Menino-Deus in gratitude for the birth of an heir to the throne. The floor plan of the church is attributed to the architect João Antunes, who was no slouch if this magnificent building is anything to go by. The Italianate style could not be avoided, but it does not manage to obscure the flavour of our native soil, as can be seen from the use of tiles. With its octagonal nave, the church forms a perfect balance. When he has time, the traveller must find out why the church was given the unusual name of the Child Jesus: he suspects this was decided by His Majesty, who subliminally linked the dedication of the church to the son and heir born to him. That is just the kind of thing that Dom João V would do, given his well-known folie de grandeur.
It is not yet time for the traveller to go down to the Alfama. First he will visit the church and monastery of San Vicente de Fora which, tradition has it, were built on the site of the camp the German and Flemish crusaders put up when they gave the first Portuguese king, Dom Afonso Henriques, a necessary hand in the taking of Lisbon. Nothing remains of the monastery the king had built on this spot: it was demolished at the time of Philip II and replaced by the one still standing. It is an impressive architectonic machine, characterised by a certain frigidity of design that is typical of Mannerism. The façade, however, shows a distinct if subdued personality of its own. The interior is vast, rich in mosaics and marble, and with an imposing altar commissioned by Dom João V that has heavy pillars and large saintly images.
What must not be missed in San Vicente de Fora are the tiled panels in the entrance, especially those which represent the conquest of Lisbon and of Santarém, conventional in their distribution of figures, but full of movement. Other tiled panels decorate the cloisters. In its entirety, the church gives a cold impression, monastic in the sense given by the eighteenth century and which has defined it ever since. The traveller does not deny that there is merit in San Vicente de Fora, yet he does not feel a single fibre of his body or soul truly moved by it. This may be his fault, or simply perhaps because he is moved by other, stronger sensations.
Now it’s time for the traveller to visit the Alfama, accepting he will be lost at the second corner, and determined not to ask for directions. This is the best way to get to know the neighbourhood. There is a risk of missing some of the famous places (the house in the Rua dos Cegos, the house of the Menino de Deus, or the one in the Largo Rodrigues de Freitas, or the Calçadinha de São Miguel or the Rua da Regueira, the Beco das Cruzes, etc) but if he walks far enough, he will eventually see them all, and in the mean-time he will have discovered a thousand and one surprises.
The Alfama is a mythical beast. It is a pretext for all kinds of sentimentalism, something everyone lays claim to for their own advantage. It does not shut itself off from any visitor, but the traveller can feel the ironic glances shot at him. These are not the serious, closed face of Barredo. The Alfama is more accustomed to cosmopolitan life, it plays along if it thinks it can get something out of it, but in the secret of its houses there must be a lot of mirth at the expense of anyone who thinks he can know it after spending an evening there for the St Anthony celebrations, or for its special rice dishes. The traveller follows the winding alleys, almost brushing his shoulders against the house on either side while, up above, the sky is a chink of blue between overhanging roofs barely a foot apart; he crosses sloping squares where the different levels are accommodated by two or three flights of steps: he can see there is no shortage of flowers in the windows, or canaries in their cages, but the stench from the open gutters in the streets must be even stronger inside the houses, some of which have never seen the sun, and others at street level whose only window is the open front door. The traveller has seen much of the world and of life, and has never felt comfortable in the role of a tourist who goes somewhere, takes a look at it, thinks he understands it, takes photos of it and returns to his own country boasting that he knows the Alfama. This traveller must be honest. He went to the Alfama, but he does not know what it is. All the same, he walks and walks, and when he finally comes out at the Largo de Chafariz de Dentro – after being lost more than once as he knew he would be – he wants to immerse himself once more in the dark alleys, the twisting dead-end streets, the slippery steps, until he feels he has learnt the first few words of the immense dialogue going on between houses, inhabitants, personal histories, laughter and the inevitable tears. Turned into a mythological beast by outsiders, the Alfama lives its own difficult story. At times it is a healthy beast; at others it cowers in a corner licking the wounds that centuries of poverty have cut into flesh and which do not heal. Even so, these houses have roofs, unlike other slums where the travellers’ eyes could discover no roofs and so doubted whether to call them houses at all.
Beyond it is the Military Museum, with its bounty of glory, flags and cannon. It is a place to look at with a clear mind, a sharp awareness, in order to try to detect the civilian spirit that seeps into everything, the polished bronze, the steel of the bayonets, the silk of the standards, the stiff cloth of the uniforms. The traveller has another of his very original ideas: that anything civilian can become military, but it is very hard for anything military to become civilian. Many misunderstandings are rooted in this lack of reversibility. And they are dangerous roots.
This part of the city is not beautiful by any means. The traveller does not include the river in this judgement, because however much it is obscured by ugly sheds, it always finds a ray of sunshine to catch and return to the sky. But the buildings, the old ones like walls perforated by windows, and the new ones like something out of a neurotic dream, are horrendous. The traveller takes heart in the promise of the convent of Madre de Deus.
Seen from outside, it is a huge wall with a Manueline portal at the top of half a dozen steps. It helps to know that this doorway is false. It is a curious case of art imitating art in an attempt to recover reality, none too concerned whether it was reality that the imitated art has imitated. This sounds like a puzzle or a tongue-twister, but it’s true. When in 1872 it was decided to reconstruct the old Manueline façade of the convent, the architect studied the “Retábulo de Santa Auta” in the National Gallery and copied line for line form the painting – only extending them a little – the details of the portal through which the procession carrying the relic entered. João María Nepomuceno considered this idea as brilliant as that of Columbus and his egg, and perhaps it was. After all, in order to rebuild Warsaw after the devastation of the Second World War, they used the eighteenth-century paintings by the Venetian artist Bernardo Bellotto, who spent some time in the city. Nepomuceno came before him, and he would have been silly if it transpired that the original portal was not like the present one at all.
Despite the fact that the decorative elements of the church, the choir and the sacristy date from different periods (from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries), the impression given is one of a great unity of style. This unity probably derives in part from the golden splendour everything is coated with, but it would be more honest and preferable to say it is the result of the high artistic value of the entire building. The brightness of the light, which leaves no relief untouched, nor any colour dull, is part and parcel of the feeling of euphoria the visitor experiences. The traveller, who has always protested so strongly at excesses of gilt carving that can stifle the architecture, finds himself overwhelmed by the rocaille of the sacristy, one of the most perfect examples of a certain kind of religious sentiment, precisely the kind known in Portuguese as “a spirit of the sacristy”. No matter how many pious images cover the walls, it is the sensual appeal of the world that shines out from the mouldings and the alterpieces, with all their shells, feathers, palms, scrolls, garlands, and festoons of flowers. To express the divine, all this is covered in gold, but it is life outside that swells through all this decoration.
The main choir is a jewel casket, a reliquary. To express the inexpressible, the sculptor used very stylistic resource. The visitor loses himself in the profusion of forms; he renounces using his eyes as an analytical tool and contents himself with the overall impression, which is not so much a synthesis as a bewilderment of the senses. The traveller wants to sit in the stalls to recover the simple sensation of plain food, something that has survived all the carver’s modelling.
The cloisters and the adjacent rooms house the Museu do Azulejo. It is worth mentioning that the exhibits are only a very small part of all of those kept in store awaiting the space and the money to display them. Even so, this museum is a precious place that the visitor regrets is so little visited, or if it is visited, is so poorly made use of by those responsible for design in our own day. As far as Portuguese decorative tiles go, there is a lot to be done, not in the sense of rehabilitation, but of understanding. Understanding what it means to be Portuguese. Because, whereas for a long time this century they were an undervalued art form, now tiles have made a strong comeback for the external facing of buildings. To unfortunate effect, in most cases. Those who design these modern tiles do not know anything about them. And to judge by the evidence, those who teach about tiles or write them are pretty ignorant too.
The traveller retraces his steps, discovering another fountain called El-Rei, although no-one can be sure which king is meant because some of it was built during the reign of Dom Afonso II, and in the reign of Dom João V it acquired its nine spouts, all of which are now dry. It is most likely that its name comes from Dom João V, o Magnânimo, who was a great one for naming things. There is little else left of the old city in these parts: there is only the Casa dos Bicos, a poor cousin of the Palace of Diamonds in Ferrara, and further on the beautiful Manueline portico of the church of Conceição Velha, which the earthquake did not succeed in toppling.
Walking under the arcades of the Terreiro do Paçó, the traveller thinks how easy it would be to breathe life into these archways by organising on certain days each week or month small fairs for the sale or exchange of stamps or coins, or exhibitions of paintings and drawings, or to set up flowerstalls; with a bit of thought there are plenty of things it could be used for. Then this sandless and duneless desert would be repeopled. The people who rebuilt Lisbon bequeathed us this square. Either they knew in advance we would need it as a car park, or they were trusting to our imagination. Which, as is plain for all to see, is negligible. Perhaps the fact is that the motorcar has taken the place reserved for the imagination.
The traveller has heard that somewhere down this street there is a Museum of Contemporary Art. As a man of good faith, he believed what he heard, but as someone who also believes in objective truth, he has to confess he does not think he saw it. It is not that the museum lacks merit, because some of the pieces are quite interesting, but the promised contemporaneity must have been from another age, before even the traveller’s time. The paintings by Columbano are excellent, and if other names do not immediately spring to mind, it is not to belittle them, but to indicate that either the museum does what it says it is meant to, or merely adds to the confusion over our national artistic heritage. The traveller is not worried about critics and artists in general, because they obviously know who and what they are, but about the general public, who must come in here at a loss, and leave completely lost.
In order to rest and recuperate from the museum, the traveller climbs up to the Bairro Alto. Anyone with nothing better to do stirs up rivalries between this district and the Alfama. That is a waste of time. Even at the risk of exaggeration, which always accompanies making any peremptory judgement, the traveller considers them radically different. It is nor a question of saying that the one or the other is better, which would only lead to the problem of what is meant by better in this kind of comparison, but simply that the Alfama and the Bairro Alto are diametrically opposed, in their appearance, their language, in their ways of being in the street or leaning out of the window, in a certain highhandedness of the Alfama which in the Bairro Alto becomes insolence. And my apologies to anyone living there who is not in the least bit insolent.
The church of San Roque is close by. To judge by its appearance, we wouldn’t rate it very highly. Inside it is a sumptuous hall where in the traveller’s modest opinion it must be hard to talk to God of poverty. Look for example at the St John the Baptist chapel which the inevitable Dom João V commissioned from Italy. It is a jewel of jasper and bronze, mosaics and marble, totally inappropriate for the passionate forerunner of Christ who preached in the desert, ate locusts and baptised Jesus with water from the river. But after all, times passes, tastes change, and Dom João V had a lot of money to spend, as we can tell from the reply he gave when told that a carillon of bells for Mafra would cost the astronomical sum of four hundred thousand reis: “I didn’t think it was so cheap, I’ll have two of them.” The church of San Roque is a place where one can find a saint for all occasions: it is crammed with relics, and has images of almost the entire celestial host in the two exuberant reliquaries flanking the high altar. But the saints did not smile down on the traveller. Perhaps in their time such things were seen as heresy. They are wrong: nowadays looking kindly on someone else is a way of trying to understand.
Lisbon never liked ruins. They have always been either rebuilt or pulled down altogether to make room for more lucrative buildings. The church of the Carmo is an exception. In its essence, the church is as the earthquake left it. There was a talk at one time of either restoring or rebuilding it. Queen Dona María I was keen that it should be rebuilt, but her plans came to nothing, either due to lack of money or lack of real interest. So much the better. But the church dedicated by Nuno Álvares Pereira to Our Lady of Victories, had to suffer numerous indignities after the earthquake: first it was a cemetery, then a public rubbish dump, and finally stables for the City Guard. Even though he himself was a horseman, Nuno Álvares must have turned in his grave as he heard the horses neighing and kicking, let alone when they took care of more animal needs.
Today finally the ruins are an archaeological museum. It does not have many exhibits, but they are of considerable historical and artistic interest. The traveller admires the Visigoth pilaster, the Renaissance tomb of Rui de Meneses, and other objects he will not detail. It’s a museum that pleases for many reasons, to which the traveller will merely add one other of his own: he enjoyed it because it showed how the stone was worked on, the trace of a man’s hand. There are others who obviously think the same way, and this gives the traveller the pleasant feeling of being accompanied: in two engravings from 1745 by Guilherme Debrie, one of the façade of the convent, and the other a side view, the figure of Nuno Álvares Pereira appears of course, conversing in courtly fashion with nobles and clergy, but so too does that of the stonemason, cutting the stone blocks, with the rule and square he used to help build this and other convents.
The traveller’s trip around Lisbon is coming to an end. He saw a lot, but hardly saw anything. He wanted to take a good long look, but perhaps hasn’t succeeded. That is the risk one always takes on a journey. He walks up the Avenida da Liberdade, a fine name that should be preserved and defended, walks around the gigantic pedestal supporting the statue to the Marquês de Pombal and a lion, symbol of power and strength, although there is more than one malicious tongue which suggests that this is a case of taming the beast of popular power, so that it lies at the feet of the strong man, and roars to order. The traveller likes the Parque Eduardo VII (although here is a place name which, meaning no disrespect to Great Britian, we could surely change to something closer to our own interests) but regrets it is like the Terreiro do Paçó, an abandoned empty space scorched by a hot wind. He visits the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, which without doubt represents a prime example of how to use the science of museums to present a non-specialised collection that offers a documented view of the evolution of the history of art.
The traveller is leaving Lisbon by the bridge over the Tagus. He is heading south. He sees the tall columns, the giant arches of the Aqueduto das Águas Livres over the River Alcântara, and reflects on how long and desperate the thirsts in Lisbon must have been. Their need for water was assuaged by Claudio Gorgel do Amaral, the administrator of the city who started the project, and the architects Manuel da Maia and Custódio José Vieira. Probably to satisfy Dom João V’s Italianate taste, the first person in charge, although only for a short time, was António Canevari. But those who really built the aqueduct and paid for it with their own money were the people of Lisbon. This was recognised in the Latin inscription on a plaque on the arch in the Rua das Amoreiras, which read: “In 1748, in the region of the pious and magnanimous King João V, the senate and people of Lisbon, at the people’s expense and to their great satisfaction, brought the Águas Livres into the city after a wait of two hundred years, thanks to twenty years’ hard work in drilling and transporting blocks of stone up to a distance of nine thousand yards.” This was nothing more than the truth, and even the proud Dom João V could not deny it.
Nevertheless, only twenty-five years later, by order of the Marquês de Pombal, the inscription was deliberately altered “in order to remove the existence of the previous inscription”. And in place of the truth, the hand of authority imposed deceit and lies, robbing the people of all their effort. The new plaque, approved by the Marquês, falsified history in the following way: “ in the reign of Dom João V, the best of kings, the benefactor of Portugal, safe and healthy water supplies were brought to the city of Lisbon along aqueducts strong enough to last forever, and measuring nine thousand yards in length, the work being carried out at reasonable public expense and with the sincere gratitude of everyone. In the year of our lord 1748.” Everything was falsified, even the date. The traveller is convinced it was the weight of this plaque which finally precipitated Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo into hell.»