When his inamoratas mounted to the skies in an ecstasy of bliss, Don Juan followed, serious, unreserved, sincere as a German student.  But he said “I” while his lady love, in her folly, said “we.”  He knew admirably how to yield himself to a woman’s influence.  He was always clever enough to make her believe that he trembled like a college youth who asks his first partner at a ball:  “Do you like dancing?” But he could also be terrible when necessary; he could draw his sword and destroy skilled soldiers.  There was banter in his simplicity and laughter in his tears, for he could weep as well as any woman who says to her husband:  “Give me a carriage or I shall pine to death.”

For merchants the world means a bale of goods or a quantity of circulating notes; for most young men it is a woman; for some women it is a man; for certain natures it is society, a set of people, a position, a city; for Don Juan the universe was himself!  Noble, fascinating and a model of grace, he fastened his bark to every bank; but he allowed himself to be carried only where he wished to go.  The more he saw the more skeptical he became.  Probing human nature he soon guessed that courage was rashness; prudence, cowardice; generosity, shrewd calculation; justice, a crime; delicacy, pusillanimity; honesty, policy; and by a singular fatality he perceived that the persons who were really honest, delicate, just, generous, prudent and courageous received no consideration at the hands of their fellows.

“What a cheerless jest!” he cried.  “It does not come from a god!”

And then, renouncing a better world, he showed no mark of respect to holy things and regarded the marble saints in the churches merely as works of art.  He understood the mechanism of human society, and never offended too much against the current prejudices, for the executioners had more power than he; but he bent the social laws to his will with the grace and wit that are so well displayed in his scene with M. Dimanche.  He was, in short, the embodiment of Moliere’s Don Juan, Goethe’s Faust, Byron’s Manfred, and Maturin’s Melmoth—­grand pictures drawn by the greatest geniuses of Europe, and to which neither the harmonies of Mozart nor the lyric strains of Rossini are lacking.  Terrible pictures in which the power of evil existing in man is immortalized, and which are repeated from one century to another, whether the type come to parley with mankind by incarnating itself in Mirabeau, or be content to work in silence, like Bonaparte; or to goad on the universe by sarcasm, like the divine Rabelais; or again, to laugh at men instead of insulting things, like Marechal de Richelieu; or, still better, perhaps, if it mock both men and things, like our most celebrated ambassador.

But the deep genius of Don Juan incorporated in advance all these.  He played with everything.  His life was a mockery, which embraced men, things, institutions, ideas.  As for eternity, he had chatted for half an hour with Pope Julius II., and at the end of the conversation he said, laughing: