Abstract
In September 1840, Balzac wrote a long article for the Revue Parisienne about Stendhal's recently-published La Chartreuse de Parme. Though praising the book's qualities, Balzac is very critical of his fellow writer's work, in a way that leads us to infer that what he criticises in La Chartreuse de Parme is that it is not the novel he would have written himself. In April 1878, Machado de Assis wrote two articles for O Cruzeiro about Eça de Queirós's recently published O primo Basílio (also alluding to his first novel, O crime do padre Amaro). This paper claims that the Brazilian criticism of the Portuguese novel is based on the affinities between Eça and Balzac and between Machado and Stendhal.
Stendhal; Balzac; Eça de Queirós; Machado de Assis; novel; Realism