Visconde de Taunay

Alfredo Maria Adriano d'Escragnolle Taunay, Viscount of Taunay (22 February 1843 – 25 January 1899), was a Brazilian writer, musician, professor, military engineer, historian, politician, sociologist and nobleman. He is famous for the regionalist novel Inocência, considered a major forerunner of naturalism in Brazil, and for A Retirada da Laguna (1874; originally written in 1872 in French as Le retraite de Laguna), an account of an episode in the Paraguayan War. The Brazilianist Leslie Bethell has described it as "the one undoubted literary masterpiece produced by the Paraguayan War".

He founded and occupied the 13th chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters from 1897 until his death in 1899.

Life

Taunay was born in Rio de Janeiro, in 1843. His father was Félix Taunay, Baron of Taunay, a painter, professor and headmaster of the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes; his mother, Gabriela Hermínia Robert d'Escragnolle Taunay, was one of the sisters of Gastão d'Escragnolle, the Baron d'Escragnolle; and his grandfather was the French painter Nicolas-Antoine Taunay, Baron of Taunay. Growing up in a cultured environment, Taunay studied Literature and Humanities at the Colégio Pedro II, graduating in 1858. He studied physics and mathematics in what is now the Academia Militar das Agulhas Negras. An Ensign in 1862, bachelor in Mathematics in 1863 and an Artillery Lieutenant in 1864, he was matriculated in the second year of military engineering course, but he did not finish it because of the Paraguayan War. From his experiences at the war, he wrote the memoir Cenas de Viagem in 1868 and the historic account La Retraite de Laguna (French for The Retreat of Laguna) in 1872, translating it to Portuguese two years later.