By the time Eça wrote The City and the Mountains he was consul in Paris.

Jacinto, an absentee noble from Portugal, revels in joyous extreme in the latest of French sophistications.

Circumstances compel his return to his family estates where he redsicovers the values and pleasures of Portuguese traditional life. However, the mature Eça never à thèse or without subtlety; the ironic narrator, Zé Fernandes, though finally repelled in Paris by an 'advanced' society driven by the 'breathless occupation of wanting', insinuates doubts about the perfeection Jacinto finds in a return to the pastoral. This delightful novel, thogh written at the fin-de-siècle, belongs to our time in its wry and telling interest in simpler life-styles.