Pedro Alcântara Brasileiro is a superb essay subject with which biographers can fall in love. Mary W. Williams did so some four decades ago and now so has Lídia Besouchet. The author, a biographer of the two Rio Brancos and Mauá, is one of the leading authorities on the imperial family and the court nobles. Her most recent work is a fine one-volume biography of Dorn Pedro II that takes the reader on a sentimental journey to the past, the lesser known past of the Brazilian emperor.
The book, in spite of its narrow title, traces thus-far little known aspects of Pedro’s life from his early childhood to his two-year exile in France. Pedro’s romantic and intellectual side of life comes across as vividly as if Besouchet had been there with him. She reports on Pedro’s visit to the United States in 1786, where the New York Herald, in jest, placed his name in candidacy for president with Charles Francis Adams as his vice president, all because “we [the Americans] are tired of the common folks and are ready to change with style” (p. 203). Pedro’s contacts with such intellectual elite as Gobineau, Victor Hugo, and other Europeans are skillfully described with the author’s profound knowledge of French intellectual and political history. Gobineau, above all others, became the emperor’s—and indirectly Besouchet’s—challenge to revise the thinking of the Frenchman, who had prejudged Brazil to be neither civilized, nor Christian, nor barbarian, nor pagan, nor savage, thus perfectly fitting his description of a mongrel nation. Pedro had enormous respect for Gobineau, who in turn reciprocated with his willingness to learn Portuguese, although he never liked Brazil, except the “fils du roi” of the land of nondescript mixed races.
Pedro’s enduring yet tragic affair with the Condessa de Barral occupies much of the book. The Bahian-born and French-educated Luiza Margarida was nine years the emperor’s senior. Raised in France and married to a French nobleman, the Bahiana returned to Brazil in 1848 as tutor to the imperial princesses. The condessa, whose charm, beauty, and grace delighted Pedro, became the other woman in the emperor’s life. Historians have speculated that the relationship was far more than platonic; contemporaries suspected that the condessa’s son, bom in Bahia, was sired by the emperor. In many of Pedro’s letters to the condessa, he often referred to her son as “ours,” although this reference was dropped in later years. Besouchet flatly rejects any conjecture that Pedro was the father. Nevertheless, the condessa became a constant source of pleasure and solace to the emperor, who regularly contributed to her living expenses; she in turn became a faithful pen pal and a loyal traveling companion on Pedro’s European visits in the 1870s and 1880s.
Life in exile was a mixture of private joy and public grief. To be with the condessa was but one pleasure amidst his humble life in a hotel. The deaths of his wife in 1890 and of the condessa the following year were a severe blow that probably robbed Pedro of any desire to live. Yet, Besouchet seems to suggest that the last two years in exile were the happiest years of Pedro’s life, finally becoming a private person, a nineteenth-century savant in the land of Victor Hugo. Pedro’s daily visit to cultural spots and chats with France’s leading intellectuals became his principal work and joy. The tragedy was that Pedro’s triumph was so short-lived, a reality bemoaned by Besouchet.
The most poignant message of the book is that Pedro still remains an enigma. His image as a philosopher-king has been much exaggerated by historians; Pedro was a reluctant monarch at most, caught between his imperial duties that he never willed and his private desires that he so secretly nurtured, eventually succumbing to the harsh reality that he could not succeed in either. Such a conflict destroyed Pedro as an emperor and as a man. At one point, the sympathetic Besouchet wishes that some letters exchanged between the emperor and the condessa had been burned; such a destruction would have preserved Pedro’s image as a calm philosopher-king, instead of revealing the human, fragile sensitivities of Pedro as a man in pursuit of private happiness that never came or that came too late in life. Expertly drawing on the letters of the condessa and Pedro, his personal diary, other private papers of the imperial archives, and most of all, her vivid imagination, Besouchet has produced an interesting biography of Pedro “the man,” yet leaves the unmistakable impression that historians have much to learn about Pedro Alcântara Brasileiro.
