To the worm that first gnawed the cold flesh of my dead body I dedicate in remembrance this posthumous memory.

To the reader

That Stendhal had confessed he wrote one of his books to one hundred readers, it is something that wonders and dismays. What will not wonder, nor probably dismay is if this other book won't have the one hundred readers of Stendhal, nor fifty or twenty, but ten for maximum. Ten? Maybe five. In fact, it's a diffuse work, in which I, Brás Cubas, if adopted the free form of a Stern, or of a Xavier de Maistre, possibly I put in some pessimism marks. Possibly. Work of a dead guy. I wrote it with the jest's feather and the melancholy's ink, and it is not hard to foresee what can come out from this marriage. You can add that the grave people won't find the semblance of a pure romance in the book, and the frivolous people wont't find the usual romance in it, which are the two maximum columns of opinion.

But I still hope to gather the appreciation of the opinion, and the first step is to escape from an explicit and long prologue. The best prologue is the one that contains less things as possible, or the one which tells them in an obscure and tightened manner. Therefore, i avoid to tell the extraordinay process used in the composition of this Memories, worked out here in the other world. It would be funny, but overmuch extense, and by the way desnecessary to the understanding of the work. The work in itself is everything: if it pleases you, dear reader, then my job is done; if it does not, I flick you, and good bye.