utmost of the world. His felicity could not
have been of the bourgeois kind, rejoicing in periodically recurrent
_bouilli_, in the comforts of a warming-pan, a lamp of a night, and
a new pair of slippers once a quarter. Nay, rather he seized upon
existence as a monkey snatches a nut, and after no long toying with it,
proceeds deftly to strip off the mere husks to reach the savory kernel
within.

Poetry and the sublime transports of passion scarcely reached
ankle-depth with him now. He in nowise fell into the error of strong
natures who flatter themselves now and again that little souls will
believe in a great soul, and are willing to barter their own lofty
thoughts of the future for the small change of our life-annuity ideas.
He, even as they, had he chosen, might well have walked with his feet
on the earth and his head in the skies; but he liked better to sit on
earth, to wither the soft, fresh, fragrant lips of a woman with kisses,
for like Death, he devoured everything without scruple as he passed; he
would have full fruition; he was an Oriental lover, seeking prolonged
pleasures easily obtained. He sought nothing but a woman in women, and
cultivated cynicism, until it became with him a habit of mind. When
his mistress, from the couch on which she lay, soared and was lost in
regions of ecstatic bliss, Don Juan followed suit, earnest, expansive,
serious as any German student. But he said I, while she, in the
transports of intoxication, said We. He understood to admiration the art
of abandoning himself to the influence of a woman; he was always clever
enough to make her believe that he trembled like some boy fresh from
college before his first partner at a dance, when he asks her, "Do
you like dancing?" But, no less, he could be terrible at need, could
unsheathe a formidable sword and make short work of Commandants. Banter
lurked beneath his simplicity, mocking laughter behind his tears--for
he had tears at need, like any woman nowadays who says to her husband,
"Give me a carriage, or I shall go into a consumption."

For the merchant the world is a bale of goods or a mass of circulating
bills; for most young men it is a woman, and for a woman here and there
it is a man; for a certain order of mind it is a salon, a coterie, a
quarter of the town, or some single city; but Don Juan found his world
in himself.

This model of grace and dignity, this captivating wit, moored his bark
by every shore; but wherever he was le