The Reluctant Emperor

Pedro II of Brazil reigned for fifty-eight years, the longest stretch in Brazilian history. Darwin praised him. The French Academy of Sciences elected him. He read fourteen languages, including Tupi-Guarani and Sanskrit, and published a volume of Hebrew-Provençal liturgical poetry on the side.

He preferred the laboratory.

He wore the same plain black tailcoat almost every day, broke out the imperial regalia twice a year, and refused for nearly five decades to let parliament raise his salary. "Were I not an Emperor," he said, "I would like to be a teacher." In Europe he travelled under the name Pedro de Alcântara and paid his own train fares.

In June 1876 he turned up at the Philadelphia Centennial as a judge. Most visitors swept past the booth of an unknown deaf-school teacher named Alexander Graham Bell. The Emperor stopped. He pressed the receiver to his ear while Bell, hundreds of feet away in Machinery Hall, recited "to be, or not to be." Pedro shouted, "My God, it talks!" and ordered a hundred of them on the spot.

Thirteen years later, when the army deposed him, he was on the train down from Petrópolis reading a science magazine. He sighed that he was tired and would go and rest.