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By the late 1890s Eça de Queirós had certainly read Machado’s two major novels to date, the Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1880-81) and Quincas Borba (1890), after acknowledging Machado’s critiques of Cousin Bazilio, published in O Cruzeiro in April, 1878. A novel form of indirect communication between the two authors can be located in their fiction. In The City and the Mountains (1901) Eça replies indirectly to Machado with a satire of several of Machado’s main themes in the two novels, from the philosophy of “Humanitism” to the useful work of worms.