Paper presented at the conference of Eastern and Central European Lusitanists corroborates a Czech inspiration in Eça de Queirós' Correspondence of Fradique Mendes (1900) and situates the protagonist's Slav sympathies in a broader context - from Iberian and Slav mystifications of Prosper Mérimée to the biography of Honoré Balzac -, explaining them by a more general complicity of "outsiders" on the contemporary European culture map.