Don Juan draws also a new and more moral lesson from this final vision of his dream.  “Inconstancy is not justified by natural law, for it means unripeness of soul.  The ripe soul evolves the Infinite from a fixed point.  It finds the many in the one.  Elvire is the one who includes the many.  Elvire is the ocean:  while Fifine is but the foam-flake which the ocean can multiply at pleasure.  Elvire shall henceforth suffice to him.”

But here, as elsewhere, he makes a great mistake:  that of confusing nature with the individual man.  Her instability supplied him with no excuse for being inconstant, and her permanence gives him no motive for constancy; and he proves this in another moment by breaking bounds no longer in word only, but in deed.  It turns out that he had put gold as well as silver into Fifine’s tambourine.  The result, intended or not, has been a letter slipped into his hand.  He claims five minutes to go and “clear the matter up;” exceeds the time, and on returning finds his punishment in an empty home.

This at least, we seem intended to infer.  For Elvire has already startled him by assuming the likeness of a phantom, and he gives her leave, in case he breaks his word, to vanish away altogether.  The story ends here; but its epilogue “The Householder” depicts a widowed husband, grotesquely miserable, fetched home by his departed wife; and his identity with Don Juan seems unmistakable.  This scene is more humorous than pathetic, as befits the dramatic spirit of the poem; but the most serious purport and most comprehensive meaning of “Fifine at the Fair” are summed up in its closing words.  The “householder” is composing his epitaph, and his wife thus concludes it:  “Love is all, and Death is nought.”

“PRINCE HOHENSTIEL-SCHWANGAU, SAVIOUR OF SOCIETY.”

“Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau” is a defence of the doctrine of expediency:  and the monologue is supposed to be carried on by the late Emperor of the French, under this feigned name.  Louis Napoleon is musing over past and present, and blending them with each other in a waking dream.  He seems in exile again.  But the events of his reign are all, or for the most part behind him, and they have earned for him the title of “inscrutable.”  A young lady of an adventurous type has crossed his path, in the appropriate region of Leicester Square.  Some adroit flattery on her side has disposed him to confidence, and he is proving to her, over tea and cigars, that he is not so “inscrutable” after all; or, if he be, that the key to the enigma is a simple one.  “This wearer of crinoline seems destined to play Oedipus to the Sphinx he is supposed to be;” or better still, as he gallantly adds, the “Lais” for whose sake he will unveil the mystery unasked.  The situation he thus assumes is not dignified; but as Mr. Browning probably felt, his choice of a confidante suits the nature of what he has to tell, as well as the circumstances in which he tells it.  Politically, he has lived from hand to mouth.  So in a different way has she.  A very trifling incident enables him to illustrate his confession, which will proceed without interruption on the listener’s part.