Memorial de Aires is Machado’s final novel and was published the same year as the author’s death in 1908. The novel is organized as a series of diary entries written by a retired diplomat, Counselor Ayres, the same figure who appears as a character and the narrator of Esaú e Jacó, and in fact some critics view the novel as a continuation of Esaú e Jacó. The novel was written against the back drop of the first years of the Brazilian republic, proclaimed in 1889, and exhibits a kind of nostalgia for the period of the empire and ambivalence towards the new political order of the day. Characterized by a tone of melancholy, the novel also explores questions of love and loneliness old age.