Following this controversy, de Quental traveled, engaged in political and socialist agitation, and found his way through a series of disappointments, eventually embracing a mild form of pessimism. Paradoxically, this new attitude animated his poetry and gave him new, albeit darker philosophical material. In 1866 he went to live in Lisbon, where he experimented with proletarianism and worked as a typographer at the National Press, a job that he also continued in Paris (where he went to support French workers), between January and February 1867.