Eça de Queirós Statue, Largo do Barão de Quintela
Why is it significant?
On this small sloping square off Rua do Alecrim, a man in a long coat leans over a woman whose drapery has slipped almost entirely away. Passers-by have been raising eyebrows at this sculpture since 1903, and that is exactly the effect the writer would have enjoyed.
Key Facts
| Place | Eça de Queirós Statue, Largo do Barão de Quintela |
|---|---|
| Address | Largo do Barão de Quintela, 1200-008 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.70980, -9.14330 |
| Part of Walk | Pessoa's Lisbon: Poets, Bookshops and Lookouts of Chiado & Bairro Alto |
| Generated | Generated |
On this small sloping square off Rua do Alecrim, a man in a long coat leans over a woman whose drapery has slipped almost entirely away. Passers-by have been raising eyebrows at this sculpture since 1903, and that is exactly the effect the writer would have enjoyed.
The man is José Maria Eça de Queirós, the greatest Portuguese novelist of the nineteenth century, and the woman is Truth. Carved in the base is a line from his novel The Relic: over the strong nakedness of truth, the diaphanous cloak of fantasy. In one sentence, that is his whole programme as a writer. Show the society around you as it really is, and make it beautiful enough that people keep reading.
And Lisbon society did not always enjoy being shown. In The Crime of Father Amaro he wrote about a priest, a young woman and a scandal in a provincial cathedral town. In Cousin Bazilio, adultery in a respectable Lisbon household. And in The Maias, published in 1888, the very year Pessoa was born a few streets away, he drew the whole of upper-class Lisbon, its clubs, its hotels, its idle young men strolling up and down Chiado... People recognised their neighbours, and sometimes themselves.
Eça spent most of his working life far from here, as a diplomat in Havana, Newcastle, Bristol and finally Paris, where he died in 1900. Perhaps that distance is what let him see Lisbon so sharply. The monument, by the sculptor Teixeira Lopes, has suffered from weather and vandalism over the decades and has needed careful restoration... Truth, it turns out, is fragile.
So who is the stronger presence, the novelist or Truth? Decide for yourself, then walk back up Rua do Alecrim to Largo do Chiado, where a café door, a poet in bronze and a sixteenth century friar are waiting.