orld 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