In 1867 he was decorated by the emperor with the Order of the Rose, and subsequently appointed to a position in the Ministry of Agriculture, Commerce, and Public Works. He went on to become head of a department, serving in that same ministry for over thirty years, until just three months before his death. The job, although demanding, left him ample time to write, and write he did: nine novels, nine plays, more than two hundred stories, five collections of poems, and more than six hundred crônicas, or newspaper columns. He also found time to marry, his wife proving crucial both to his happiness and to the expansion of his literary knowledge. Carolina Augusta Xavier de Novais, the sister of a close friend, was five years older than Machado; they fell in love almost instantly and were soon married, despite her family disapproving of her marrying a mulatto. Carolina was extremely well educated and introduced him to the work of many English-language writers. They remained happily married for thirty-five years, and when she died in 1904, at the age of seventy, Machado fell into a deep depression. He wrote only one novel after her death, Memorial de Aires (1908), and his last collection of stories, Relíquias de Casa Velha (Relics from an Old House), published in 1906, is prefaced by a very tender sonnet dedicated to her. On his death in 1908, he was given a state funeral. And yet his occupation on his death certificate was given as “Civil servant,” and when his final work, Memorial de Aires, was published later that year, it went almost unnoticed.