ABSTRACT
Jose Maria Eça de Queiros was born in 1845 of unmarried parents. His father was a local judge just out of law school, the mother barely nineteen. On the baptismal certificate, she is listed as "mother unknown." At just over forty years of age, Eça de Queiros married a woman of twenty-eight who was his polar opposite—she was relatively uneducated, a severely conservative Catholic, pious and God-fearing in the extreme, just as he was the representative of Voltairean sarcasm and irreverence toward the phenomenon of belief in general. The Nobel Prize for literature was recently awarded to Jose Saramago, the first writer in the Portuguese language to be so honored, Eça de Queiros could never have been a candidate, for the simple reason that he died the year before the first prizes were announced. There is a photograph of the Portuguese novelist Jose Maria Eça de Queiros surrounded by his friends in a Lisbon salon in the late 1880s.
