Eça de Queiroz… and some scissors!

On the 16th of this month, 125 years passed since the untimely death of José Maria Eça de Queiroz, who was only 54 years old. On this occasion, it is fitting to commemorate, in memoriam, his amusing letter to the director of the Lisbon Water Company.

Eça de Queiroz complains about the Company's failure to fulfill its contractual obligation to supply the writer and his family with the precious liquid, despite his scrupulous fulfillment of his contractual obligations. A complaint for such a prosaic reason was doomed to the irrelevance of the banal, but Eça de Queiroz seized the opportunity to express, in a hilarious text, his immense imagination and no less exuberant irony, not lacking in a touch of mischief, which the more scrupulous, or sensitive, will be kind enough to forgive.

It is important to remember that José Maria Eça de Queiroz, the recent tenant of the National Pantheon, not only held a law degree from the University of Coimbra, the only university offering that degree at the time, but was also the son and grandson of distinguished jurists. However, despite his legal training, he errs in appealing to distributive justice—which governs the relationship between the State and its citizens, rewarding merit and sanctioning offenses—when, on the contrary, the breached contract falls within the scope of commutative justice, typical of legal relationships established between equals. Even when dealing with, on the one hand, a corporate entity, such as the Water Company, and, on the other, a private individual, two individuals with legal personality enter into a contract based on the equivalence of their respective services. In other words, the service provided by the Company must correspond to the payment to be made by the beneficiary, failure to pay which will, obviously, result in the cessation of the service and the supply of water by the Company.

If Eça de Queiroz needs no introduction, the same cannot be said of the recipient of his letter, Carlos Pinto Coelho, in his capacity as director of the Lisbon Water Company.

Carlos Zeferino de Carvalho Pinto Coelho de Castro, his full name, was born in Beja on 26 August 1819 and died in Lisbon on 24 February 1893. He was the son of Francisco de Castro Pinto Coelho de Magalhães and his wife, D. Maria Teresa Rodrigues de Carvalho. His first marriage, on 26 August 1849, was to D. Rosalina Angélica de Sá Viana, with whom he had seven children; and on 1 January 1873, he married D. Maria do Rosário de Carvalho, with whom he had no issue. Despite the homonym, the director of the Water Company did not belong to the family of Professor Doctor José Gabriel Pinto Coelho, Attorney and President of the Corporate Chamber, Professor of the Faculty of Law, Vice-Rector and Rector of the University of Lisbon, etc., who had an abundant and illustrious generation .

The aforementioned Carlos Pinto Coelho, like Eça de Queiroz, also held a law degree from the University of Coimbra and distinguished himself as a distinguished tribune—he was a member of parliament from 1857 to 1866—and a legal expert. He was a judge at the Lisbon Court of Appeal and, in 1855, founded the Water Company, of which he served as president.

He was also a prominent member of the Legitimist Party, which he presided over, and was also a regular contributor to A Nação, the newspaper devoted to supporters of the exiled King, who was King Miguel I de jure and de facto . Professing such a political ideology, he sympathized with Carlism , which, in Spain, defended the same absolutist principles.

As is well known, in Portugal, with the death of King Manuel II without issue, the eldest branch of the Braganza family was extinguished. For this reason, after the banishment law was revoked, the head of the Royal House was succeeded by the representative of the Miguelist branch, the current Duke of Braganza, who, through his mother's line, is also descended from Pedro IV. Interestingly, in Spain, the opposite occurred: due to the extinction of the Carlist branch, its representation reverted to the eldest line, and thus the monarch emeritus is named Juan , after his father, and Carlos, because the leadership of the Carlist branch fell to him.

The legitimist militancy of the director of the Water Company explains the relationship that the writer establishes, not without amusing irony, between his lack of water and the advance of the Carlists in Spain.

Without further preamble and in homage to its brilliant author, the aforementioned letter is transcribed here in full:

“Ilmo. and Hon. Mr. Pinto Coelho,

worthy director of the Lisbon Water Company

and worthy member of the Legitimist Party.

Two equally important factors lead me to address these humble rules to Your Excellency: the first is the capture of Cuenca and the recent victories of the Carlist forces over the Republican troops in Spain; the second is the lack of water in my kitchen and bathroom. The Carlists were abundant and the water was scarce—this is a historical coincidence that should doubly move a soul weighed down, like Your Excellency, by the responsibility of plumbing and divine right.

If I should be so fortunate as to exacerbate Your Excellency's just emotion to the point of tears, may I interpose my accountant, Your Excellency, may I interpose him in the relations of Your Excellency's sensitivity with the outside world! And may those blessed tears, of an industrialist and a politician, fall into my bathtub! And, having paid this tribute to our affections, let us speak a little, if Your Excellency will permit, of our contracts.

By virtue of a document duly signed by Your Excellency and myself, we—to each other—have a certain number of rights and obligations. I obligated myself to Your Excellency to pay for the cost of a plumbing system, the rental of a meter, and the price of the water I consumed. You, for your part, obligated yourself to me to supply my water. You would supply, I would pay. We clearly breach the faith in this contract: if I don't pay, Your Excellency doesn't supply. If I don't pay, Your Excellency will do this: cut off my pipes. When Your Excellency doesn't supply, what am I to do, Your Excellency? Clearly, for our contract not to be entirely unfair, I need to cut off something to Your Excellency in a situation analogous to that in which Your Excellency would cut off my pipes... Oh! And I will cut it off!... I'm not asking for compensation for the loss I'm suffering, I'm not asking for accounts, I'm not asking for explanations, I'm not even asking for water! I don't want to put the Company in trouble, I don't want to cause it any distress or losses! I only want this small, very simple and very reasonable affront to the law and distributive justice: I want to cut something off from Your Excellency! I beg you, Your Excellency, to be so kind as to tell me immediately, peremptorily, without evasion or prevarication, what it is that, in the most holy exercise of my full right, I can cut off from Your Excellency.

I have the honor to be, Your Excellency, with much consideration and with a few scissors, Eça de Queiroz.”