Dona Benedita reached her forty-second birthday on Sunday the nineteenth of September, 1869. At six o’clock in the evening, friends and relations, some twenty or twenty-five in number, are gathered around the family table. Many of them were also present at her birthday dinners of 1868, 1867, and 1866, and they have always heard their hostess’s age frankly alluded to. Moreover, there at the table, for all to see, are a young lady and a young master, her children; it is true that he, both in size and manners, is still somewhat boyish; on the other hand, the young lady, Eulália, is eighteen, although such is the severity of her manners and features that she looks twenty-one.

The joviality of the guests, the excellence of the dinner, certain matrimonial negotiations entrusted to Canon Roxo (of which more shall be said anon), and the hostess’s generous nature, all these make for an intimate and happy affair. The canon stands up to carve the turkey. Dona Benedita has always abided by the custom in modest households of entrusting the turkey to one of the guests, instead of having it carved away from the table by servants, and the canon was the maestro of such solemn occasions. Nobody knew the bird’s anatomy better than he, nor how to wield the knife so nimbly. Perhaps—and this is a matter for the experts—perhaps his status as a canon gave to the carving knife, in the minds of the guests, a certain prestige, which would be lacking if, for example, he were a mere student of mathematics or an office clerk. On the other hand, would a student or scribe, without the lessons of long practice, have at their disposal the canon’s consummate art? That is another important question.

As for the other guests, they are sitting and chatting; the gurgle of half-sated stomachs reigns, the laughter of nature on its way to repleteness; it is a moment of relaxation.