Literature, mathematics and Latin poured into him as easily as sunlight through a window. In the playground, whenever he raised his tin sword and bellowed out a command to his schoolmates, he was always the victor, the adored king, to whom the booty of afternoon tea was always surrendered. At an age when most boys are reading Balzac and Musset, he was never troubled by the torments of the over-sensitive; on hot evenings, he never lingered alone at a window, tortured by formless, nameless desires. His friends (there were three of us, including his old black valet, Cricket) always felt for him a pure and genuine friendship, unsullied by thoughts of acquiring a share of his wealth or dampened by signs that there was also a more selfish side to his nature. Lacking sufficient heart to feel any very strong passion, and quite content with this liberating incapacity, he only ever tasted love’s honey – the honey that love reserves for those who gather it as lightly and quickly as bees buzzing by. He was rich and robust, indifferent to both the State and the Government of Men, and his sole ambition, as far as we knew, was to gain a thorough grasp of General Ideas; and his intelligence, in those jolly days of controversies and schools of thought, slipped in and out of the most complex philosophies like a lustrous eel through the clear waters of a pond. His very real, 24-carat value never went unrecognised or unappreciated; and his every opinion or merest facetious remark was immediately met with a wave of sympathy and agreement that lifted him up to the heights and held him there, cosseted and resplendent. Even inanimate objects served him with docility and affection; I cannot recall a single one of his shirt buttons popping off, or some vital piece of paper mischievously hiding from his eyes, or a drawer treacherously sticking when confronted by his haste and vivacity. When, one day, laughing sceptically at Fortune and her Wheel, he bought a lottery ticket from a Spanish sacristan, Fortune, sitting brisk and smiling at her Wheel, immediately ran to him in a flash and presented him with four hundred thousand pesetas. And if, in the heavens, the slow, heavy-laden clouds espied Jacinto out and about without his umbrella, they would hold back their waters until he had passed. Ah, yes, Senhora Dona Angelina’s fennel and amber had triumphantly and forever banished bad luck from his destiny! His adorable grandmother (who, by the time I knew her, had a beard and was extremely fat) often used to quote a birthday sonnet composed by Judge Nunes Velho with the salutary line:

Remember, Madam, that Life is a river … 

And a summer river, gentle and translucent, flowing harmoniously over soft, white sand, past happy villages and fragrant groves of trees, could not have offered more security or more sweetness to someone stepping down into a cedar boat – a well-shaded and well-cushioned boat, with fruit to eat and champagne on ice, with an angel at the helm and other angels keeping firm hold of the tow-rope – than that which Life offered to my friend Jacinto.

It was for this reason that we named him ‘the Prince of Great Good Fortune’.

Jacinto and myself – Zé Fernandes – met and became friends in Paris, at the Grandes écoles in the Latin Quarter, where I had been sent by my good uncle Afonso Fernandes Lorena de Noronha e Sande, when the miserable wretches at Coimbra University expelled me for having slapped the vile face of Dr Pais Pita during an afternoon procession down Rua da Sofia.

Around this time, Jacinto had come up with an idea, namely, that ‘a man can only be superlatively happy when he is superlatively civilised’. And by ‘civilised’ my friend meant the kind of man who, through honing his thinking skills on all the philosophy acquired from Aristotle onwards and multiplying the physical strength of his organs by using all the mechanisms invented since Theramenes created the wheel, could make of himself a magnificent, near-omnipotent, near-omniscient Adam ready to reap – within a particular society and within the limits of Progress (at least as far as Progress had got in 1875) – all the pleasures and all the advantages that spring from Knowledge and Power. That was how Jacinto spoke, at length, about his Idea, when we discussed human aims and destinies, sipping our somewhat grubby glasses of beer beneath the awning of some philosophical café-bar on the Boulevard St-Michel.

Jacinto’s ‘Idea’ greatly impressed the other members of our ‘clan’, who – having emerged into intellectual life between 1866 and 1870, that is, between the battle of Sadowa and the battle of Sedan, and having been told constantly ever since by technicians and philosophers that the needle musket had won at Sadowa and the schoolmaster at Sedan – were more than prepared to believe that the happiness of individuals, like the happiness of nations, could be achieved by the unfettered development of Mechanics and Erudition. And in order to condense the brilliance of Jacinto’s idea and to spread it more widely, one of these young men, our inventive friend Jorge Carlande, boiled it down into an algebraic formula:

Absolute Knowledge × Absolute Power =
Absolute Happiness

And for days afterwards, from the Odéon to the Sorbonne, the positivist youth of the time praised Jacinto’s metaphysical equation to the skies.

For Jacinto, however, his concept was not merely metaphysical – created for the sheer elegant pleasure of exercising his speculative reasoning powers – it constituted a very real and useful rule, one that could determine one’s conduct and mould one’s life. And so, in accord with his Idea, he purchased the Shorter Encyclopaedia of World Knowledge in sixty-five volumes and installed a telescope in a glass observatory built on the roof of No. 202. Indeed, one hot sleepy August night, it was the telescope that first made his Idea real to me. In the distance, lightning flashed languidly across the sky. Fiacres – slow, open, indolent, and filled to overflowing with pale dresses – were rolling along the Champs-Elysées towards the coolness of the Bois.

‘Here, Zé Fernandes,’ Jacinto said, leaning at the observatory window, ‘you will find conclusive proof of the theory that rules my life. For with these keen, quick eyes of ours, received from Mother Nature herself, we can barely see the lit window in that shop over there, on the other side of the avenue. Nothing more. However, if I add to my eyes the two simple lenses of a pair of horse-racing binoculars, I can see through the glass to the hams, cheeses, jars of jam and boxes of prunes. I conclude, therefore, that it is a grocer’s shop. This, I believe, gives me a positive advantage over you who, with your naked eye, can see only the lit window.