This article uses the myth of the Grand Siècle as called upon by a handful of writers during the reign of the Emperor Pedro II to study the relationships of dependency and loyalty organising the mode of literary production at the time of the establishment in Brazil of a national literature. These writers hoped to share in the advantages of an economy of sponsorship and of the distribution of honorific titles in order to consolidate their position within public and literary space. However, such an ambition also kept a number of frustrations alive within an increasingly populated literary world, because of the rarity of imperial favours and their small size, the precariousness of the sponsorship system, and the growth of capitalist publishing, which opened up, from the 1860s onwards, new avenues to literary glory.