The Demon of Gold

A fortune earned through hardship becomes an inheritance of ruin. Manuel Vieira rises from poverty through courage, intelligence, loyalty, and an almost providential sequence of encounters. From Portugal to England and Brazil, his labor produces a vast fortune-a treasure that seems to reward virtue itself. Yet when that gold passes into the hands of later generations, it no longer serves discipline or gratitude. It awakens vanity, resentment, appetite, political ambition, betrayal, and bloodshed. Spanning the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, The Demon of Gold combines family saga, historical adventure, social satire, and moral tragedy. Against a background of colonial commerce, the French invasions of Portugal, and the Liberal Wars, Camilo Castelo Branco traces the strange migrations of wealth and asks whether riches merely reveal human character-or corrupt it. Presented here in a complete English translation, this powerful novel by one of Portugal's great nineteenth-century writers preserves Camilo's dramatic pace, dark humor, narrative irony, and penetrating vision of family and society.