International Short Stories: French | Page 9

poor spaniel, who
died with a howl.
"Could he have been in the secret?" Don Juan wondered, surveying the
faithful animal.
Don Juan was considered a dutiful son. He raised a monument of white
marble over his father's tomb, and employed the most prominent artists
of the time to carve the figures. He was not altogether at ease until the
statue of his father, kneeling before Religion, imposed its enormous
weight on the grave, in which he had buried the only regret that had
ever touched his heart, and that only in moments of physical
depression.
On making an inventory of the immense wealth amassed by the old
Orientalist, Don Juan became avaricious. Had he not two human lives
in which he should need money? His deep, searching gaze penetrated
the principles of social life, and he understood the world all the better
because he viewed it across a tomb. He analyzed men and things that
he might have done at once with the past, represented by history, with
the present, expressed by the law, and with the future revealed by
religion. He took soul and matter, threw them into a crucible, and found
nothing there, and from that time forth he became Don Juan.
Master of the illusions of life he threw himself--young and
beautiful--into life; despising the world, but seizing the world. His
happiness could never be of that bourgeois type which is satisfied by
boiled beef, by a welcome warming-pan in winter, a lamp at night and
new slippers at each quarter. He grasped existence as a monkey seizes a
nut, peeling off the coarse shell to enjoy the savory kernel. The poetry
and sublime transports of human passion touched no higher than his

instep. He never made the mistake of those strong men who, imagining
that little Souls believe in the great, venture to exchange noble thoughts
of the future for the small coin of our ideas of life. He might, like them,
have walked with his feet on earth and his head among the clouds, but
he preferred to sit at his ease and sear with his kisses the lips of more
than one tender, fresh and sweet woman. Like Death, wherever he
passed, he devoured all without scruple, demanding a passionate,
Oriental love and easily won pleasure. Loving only woman in women,
his soul found its natural trend in irony.
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 Molière'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