The city itself is often simply a stage set, almost an outdoor drawing room for his characters—although street names and landmarks are mentioned frequently, there is almost nothing in terms of physical description, and only the most fleeting references to its tropical climate. Machado is, of course, describing the city to its own inhabitants, and so the street names he mentions are signposts indicating social status, and the landmarks are the places familiar to the city’s upper classes: the Passeio Público, which were elegant gardens on the shoreline of the bay between the city center and the well-to-do suburb of Catete; the Jardim Botânico, the magnificent botanical gardens a short ride out of the city on the other side of Corcovado mountain; and, most frequently of all, Rua do Ouvidor, the long, narrow street of fashionable shops, theaters, and cafés, “the Via Dolorosa of long-suffering husbands,” as Machado described. Occasional references are made to the city’s less salubrious quarters—the port area of Gamboa, and the former Valongo slave market.

In some cases, Machado is describing a city that no longer existed, for Rio, with its burgeoning population, was in the midst of an intense transformation from colonial backwater to imperial metropolis, and many of the stories are set several decades earlier. Events are often given a specific date, and geographical signposts are also in some cases historical ones. To a contemporary reader, of course, all of this would have been much clearer than it is to us; reading the stories today, we should simply bear in mind that the Rio the narrator presents as such a concrete and real world is often nothing of the sort.