Until the age of eight, when he was orphaned, he lived in Lisbon; then his sister took him to a remote hamlet in Tras-os-Montes. His life there was erratic. By the age of sixteen he was married, but he soon left his wife, who died in neglect.
He intrigued, quarreled, conducted spectacular love affairs, and suffered imprisonment for his indiscretions. Yet five years before his death he was honored by the king with the title of Viscount Correia-Botelho. In his last years he withdrew to the northern province of Minho where, blind and ill, he took his own life June 1, 1890.
Education
His erratic schooling, continued after marriage, included terms at the polytechnical school and a wild period as a medical student in Oporto.
Achievements
Camillo, as he is affectionately known throughout the Portuguese world, produced a prodigious number of works embracing poetry, drama, criticism, translations, stories, romances, novels, and a voluminous personal correspondence; but it is as a novelist or romancer that he won his chief fame and popularity. His numerous fictional pieces display a variety of moods: passionate, sentimental, or satirical, in settings historical as well as contemporary, regional as well as urban. These fictional writings are imitative of other authors, and show the influence first of Romanticism, and later of literary Realism. Their distinctiveness lies in Camillo's style. As a romancer he is at his best when spinning with lively fancy a tale of loves, persecutions, and capricious changes of fortune, as in Os mysterios de Lisboa ("The Mysteries of Lisbon"). Typical of his creation of sentiment and passion is the novel Amor de perdiçãoperdicao ("Doomed Love"). His many Novelas do Minho ("Stories of the Minho") depict vividly, and without sentimental benevolence, scenes of the life of the northernmost province of Portugal. In Eusebio Macario and Brasileira de Prazim he experimented with novelistic realism. Camillo lacked the creative power of a great novelist; but his gift for literary painting was lively, and he delights the reader with his sentiment and inventiveness. Above all he lives as a master of language, in his hands an instrument rich, varied, and plastic, and solidly rooted in the traditions of Portugal.
