“Shut up, you idiot! Benedita, look there on the left side; don’t you think the seam is a bit crooked? The blue stripe doesn’t go the whole way down; it looks terrible like that. You’ll need to unpick the whole thing and make it exactly the same as—”

“Death to Dr. Bacamarte! Death to the tyrant!” shouted three hundred voices outside. It was the mob emerging into Rua Nova.

The blood drained from Dona Evarista’s face. At first she was too petrified to move. The slave-woman instinctively made for the back door. As for the houseboy whom Dona Evarista had refused to believe, he enjoyed a moment of sudden, imperceptible triumph, a deep-seated sense of moral satisfaction, on seeing that reality had taken his side.

“Death to the alienist!” shouted the voices, closer now.

Dona Evarista may not have found it easy to resist the siren calls of pleasure, but she knew how to confront moments of danger. She did not faint, but instead ran into the next room, where her husband was immersed in his studies. When she entered the room, the illustrious doctor was hunched over a text of Averroes; his eyes, shrouded in meditation, traveled from book to ceiling and from ceiling to book, blind to the outside world, but clear-sighted enough when it came to the innermost workings of his mind. Dona Evarista called to her husband twice without him paying her the slightest attention; the third time, he heard her and asked what was wrong, if she was feeling ill.

“Can’t you hear them shouting?” she asked tearfully.

The alienist listened; the shouts were drawing nearer, terrifying and threatening; he immediately understood the situation. He stood up from his high-backed chair, closed his book, strode calmly and purposefully over to the bookshelf, and put the book back in its place. Inserting it slightly disturbed the alignment of the two volumes on either side, and Simão Bacamarte took care to correct this minor yet interesting imperfection. Then he told his wife to go to her room and stay there, no matter what.

“No, no,” implored the worthy lady, “I want to die by your side . . .”

Simão Bacamarte insisted that it was not a case of life and death, and that even if it were, she must on all accounts stay put. The poor woman tearfully and obediently bowed her head.

“Down with the Casa Verde!” shouted the Canjicas.

The alienist walked over to the balcony at the front of the house, arriving at the same time as the mob, those three hundred faces shining with civic virtue and dark with rage. “Die! Die!” they shouted from all sides the moment the alienist appeared on the balcony. When Simão Bacamarte gestured to them to let him speak, the rebels indignantly shouted him down. Then, waving his hat to silence the crowd, the barber managed to calm his companions, and told the alienist that he could speak, adding that he must not abuse the people’s patience as he had been doing up until then.