Two monuments to love have long meant a great deal to Dr. Manuel, and he made a point of bringing their stories to his daughters, Maria Teresa and Rosa Caterina. The first is the Taj Mahal in Agra, which the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan built in memory of his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, and which Dr. Manuel saw in January 1986. The second is the Mosteiro de Santa Maria de Alcobaça, where King Pedro I and Inês de Castro lie in tombs placed foot to foot so that, by tradition, the two will rise to face each other at the Last Judgment.
Shah Jahan married Arjumand Banu Begum in 1612 and gave her the title Mumtaz Mahal. For nineteen years she was his constant companion and closest confidante, travelling with him even on military campaigns, and she bore him fourteen children. In 1631, while accompanying him on campaign at Burhanpur in the Deccan, she died giving birth to their last child. The emperor was heartbroken. Court accounts describe him withdrawing into a long period of mourning, setting aside music and fine dress, his hair and beard turning white within months, and resolving to build her a tomb unlike any other on earth. Some twenty thousand artisans and laborers worked on the Taj Mahal for more than two decades. His grief followed him to the end: deposed in 1658 by his son Aurangzeb, Shah Jahan spent his last years confined in the Agra Fort, where, by tradition, he looked out across the Yamuna River at her tomb, and when he died in 1666 he was laid to rest beside her.
Inês was put to death in 1355 on the orders of Pedro’s father, Afonso IV. When Pedro became king, he had her body brought to Alcobaça, and legend holds that he had her crowned queen and made the nobles of the court kiss the hand of the dead woman. Dr. Manuel has always been moved by this story of a deep and committed love, tragic in its outcome and yet stronger than death, and he brought his daughters to Alcobaça to show them that true love survives, endures and overcomes.
The lesson Dr. Manuel has wanted his daughters to take from both places concerns what is genuine. They are coming of age in a time of artificial intelligence and constant technology, when clickbait and polished images compete for attention and a great deal that seems true turns out not to be. The Taj Mahal and Alcobaça stand for something that cannot be manufactured or imitated — a love that was authentic and complete, given without calculation and carried through to the end. Shah Jahan and Mumtaz, and Pedro and Inês, each found in the other a sense of belonging and of purpose, and through that love a connection with something larger than themselves, one that has outlasted the centuries and still draws people from across the world to stand before the tombs.
The story of Pedro and Inês moved Victor Hugo as well. As a young man he wrote a play about it, Inez de Castro, and he kept a painting of the scene of the nobles kissing her hand in his apartment on the Place des Vosges in Paris, now the Maison de Victor Hugo. Dr. Manuel came upon the painting while visiting the house with his daughters and showed it to them, and in that moment he understood how the writer who would give the world Les Misérables could have been inspired by so tragic, so painful and yet so beautiful a moment. What Hugo understood, and what Dr. Manuel hopes his daughters will carry with them, is that the measure of a life lies less in how it ends than in whether it has been lived well — honestly, and in love for others. In the closing pages of Les Misérables, the dying Jean Valjean tells Cosette and Marius to love each other always, for there is hardly anything else in the world but that, and in the same final scene he says:
Ce n’est rien de mourir ; c’est affreux de ne pas vivre.
It is nothing to die; it is dreadful not to live.
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Part V, Book 9, Chapter 5
