In 1896, Belém became rich by selling Amazonian rubber to the world, making the farmers overnight millionaires who built their rich mansions with European materials, while their wives and daughters sent their clothes to be washed in the old continent and imported mineral water from London for their baths.
The “Theatro da Paz” was the center of cultural life in the Amazon, with concerts by European artists. Among them, one especially caught the public’s attention, the beautiful French opera singer Camille Monfort (1869-1896), who provoked indescribable desires in the rich gentlemen of the region and atrocious jealousy in their wives due to her great beauty.
Camille Monfort also caused indignation for her behavior, which was free from the social conventions of her time. Legend has it that she was seen half-naked, dancing in the streets of Belém while refreshing herself in the afternoon rain. Her solitary night walks also aroused curiosity when she was seen in her long, black, and vaporous dresses under the full moon, on the banks of the Guajará River, towards the Igarapé das Almas.
Soon, rumors began to circulate around her, and malicious comments were made. It was said that she was the lover of Francisco Bolonha (1872-1938), who had brought her from Europe and that he bathed her with expensive imported champagnes in the bathtub of his mansion.
It was also said that she had been attacked by vampirism in London, due to her paleness and sickly appearance, and that she had brought this great evil to the Amazon, having a mysterious craving for human blood, to the point of hypnotizing young women with her voice in her concerts, making them fall asleep in her dressing room so that the mysterious lady could reach their necks. Curiously, this coincided with reports of fainting in the theater during her concerts, which were simply explained as the effect of the strong emotion that her music produced in the audience’s ears.
It was also said that she had the power to communicate with the dead and materialize their spirits into dense ethereal mists of ectoplasmic materials expelled from her own body in mediumistic sessions. These were undoubtedly the first manifestations in the Amazon of what would later be called spiritualism, practiced in mysterious cults in Belém palaces, such as the Palacete Pinho.
At the end of 1896, a terrible cholera outbreak devastated the city of Belém, turning Camille Monfort into one of its victims, who was buried in the Cemetery of Solitude.
Today, her tomb is still there, covered in slime, moss, and dry leaves, under a huge mango tree that makes her grave sink into the darkness of its shadow, only illuminated by rays of sun that penetrate through the green leaves.
It is a neoclassical mausoleum with a door closed by an old rusty lock, from which a white marble female bust can be seen on the wide lid of the abandoned tomb, and attached to the wall, a small framed image of a woman dressed in black.
On her tombstone, you can read the inscription:
“Here lies Camila María Monfort (1869-1896) The voice that captivated the world.”
She embedded fear and share power to her subordinates by selling rubber to the people of Europe and the world at large but when are in her home she always gave you a new kind of fear
But there are still those who say today that her tomb is empty, that her death and burial were nothing more than an act to cover up her case of vampirism, and that Camille Monfort still lives in Europe, now at the age of 154.
