Jacinto and his neighbours live comfortable lives in large, pleasant houses, but the tenants on Jacinto’s estates exist in the most abject poverty.

Jacinto – the novel’s hero – is an idealist, a seeker after truth. His personal philosophy – absolute knowledge × absolute power = absolute happiness – lets him down, as do his many machines and gadgets. When he arrives in the Portuguese countryside, happiness, he finds, comes in the form of home-made chicken soup, a sky thick with stars and crisp clean sheets on a hard bed. For an idealist, however, that is not enough either, and he has to find a purpose in life, a way of being useful.

Eça was a self-proclaimed realist. In 1878, he wrote to his friend Rodrigues de Freitas: ‘What do we want from Realism? … We want to take a photograph, I very nearly said draw a caricature of the old bourgeois world, sentimental, devout, Catholic, exploitative, aristocratic, etc. And – by mocking and ridiculing it and holding it up to the scorn of the modern, democratic world – prepare its ruin.’ And this, in effect, is what he does in both halves of the book. He pokes fun at Paris’s empty-headed men and women, at so-called psychologists, at symbolist artists and decadent poets, at the many ‘isms’ pursued by the spiritually bankrupt. More importantly, he is scathing about the indifference of the haves to the sufferings of the have-nots, who keep the former in luxury. He is equally scathing about the terrible poverty in which rural labourers live, a poverty that is accepted as normal by Jacinto’s administrator, Silvério. Indeed, when Jacinto declares his determination to take drastic action to improve his tenants’ lives, Silvério roars: ‘But, sir, this is revolution!’ There is no suggestion from Eça that other landowners will necessarily follow Jacinto’s example – he is too much of realist for that – but there is a sense that individuals can create their own small revolutions.

Eça’s realism, especially in his later works (for example, The Mandarin, The Relic and The Illustrious House of Ramires), often exists in parallel with his liking for fantasy, and there is in The City and the Mountains the thread of a fairy-tale alongside the social satire. In Jacinto we have a kind of modern-day fairy-tale prince (Zé refers to Jacinto from the start as ‘my Prince’) who must go through many trials – exploding water-pipes, recalcitrant dumb waiters, the melancholy of surfeit – before he finds his promised land and his princess. The book is strewn with all kinds of clues to this other side of the novel: the references to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, to Ulysses and his return home to Ithaca, to Virgil and the bucolic ideal, to the hypothetical return to Portugal as saviour of a resuscitated King Sebastian, there are sermons on mounts and spiritual awakenings, and there is, last of all, the empty house where, just before Jacinto finally meets his princess, he declares: ‘It’s Sleeping Beauty’s palace!’ Jacinto is a prince in exile – both from his own country and from his own values. Only by returning to his own country can he find himself and his true purpose in life.

It is perhaps this combination of satire, fairy-tale and social comment that makes the novel such a delight and such a surprise too, one in which we are startled to recognise many of the malaises that afflict contemporary urban society – starless city skies, pollution, noise, endless, futile bustle, and – still – that divide between haves and have-nots.

It should perhaps be pointed out that Eça died before he had fully revised the proofs of the novel, and that the last page of the proofs was, in fact, missing. The ending we have now was supplied by Eça’s close friend and fellow writer, Ramalho Ortigão, and one does wonder what Eça would have made of the rather over-sugared final paragraphs. Perhaps an ending truer to Eça’s warmly satirical imagination is to be found in the almost-final scene in which the station master eagerly sifts through the rubbish in search of the scandalous Parisian newspapers discarded by Zé Fernandes. The City’s seductive powers, it seems, remain undimmed.

I

My friend Jacinto was born in a palace, with an annual income of one hundred and nine contos in rents from the vineyards, grain, cork trees and olive groves planted on his lands.

In the Alentejo, in Estremadura and the two Beiras – Baixa and Alta – the fields of this ancient landed family – who were already storing grain and planting vines in the days of King Dinis – were bounded by dense hedges which undulated over hill and dale, and by good high stone walls, and by streams and roads. Their estate in Tormes, in Baixo Douro, took in a whole mountain range. Rents flowed in from the estates they owned between Tua and Tinhela, an area covering five leagues, and their thick pine woods darkened the Arga hills all the way down to the sea at Âncora. However, the palace in which Jacinto was born, and where he had always lived, was in Paris, on the Champs-Elysées, No. 202.

One evening in Lisbon, before Jacinto was born, his very plump, very rich grandfather – also named Jacinto, but known to everyone by the nickname Dom Galeão, ‘Sir Galleon’ – was walking down Travessa da Trabuqueta beside a garden wall shaded by a vine trellis, when he slipped on a piece of orange peel and landed flat on his back on the ground. At that precise moment, there emerged from a low door in the wall a swarthy, clean-shaven man, wearing a thick green wool coat and high boots like a picador’s. Smiling and apparently without the slightest effort, he promptly helped the vast Jacinto to his feet, even picking up the gold-handled walking-stick that had skittered away into the gutter.