This article aims at discussing Machado de Assis' literary and stylistic procedures while quoting other authors, especially in the short story "O alienista". In this work, the writer makes a small correction to a few lines from canto XXXIII of the Divine Comedy's "Inferno", by Dante Alighieri. Our argument is that this correction is linked to the local belletrist discursive system, which in its turn softens Machado's writing, as it downgrades works of "high" literature in order to allow itself to still be seen as literary.
Divine Comedy; quotation; discourse; belletrism