SOURCE: "Love and the 'Causa Secreta' in the Tales of Machado de Assis," in Hispania, Vol. XLIX, No. 4, December, 1966, pp. 778-86.

In the following essay, Virgilio examines Machado's representation of true love in his stories, detecting even in his early "romantic" stories that true love is rarely genuine, and usually motivated by self-interest.

It has been observed that Machado de Assis' fiction reveals the author's preoccupation with the theme of true love versus self-love. One can add, however, that excluding perhaps Memorial de Aires, his last novel, true love generally appears in his works as a device concealing an ulterior motive deeply rooted in self-love. This motive Machado himself has called the "causa secreta," or the ugly side of human beings, which his fictional characters try to conceal behind a mask of selfless humanity. Machado's denial of true love, furthermore, can be observed in his short stories as...