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:

"If it were absolutely necessary to choose, I should rather believe in God
than in the devil; power combined with goodness has always more
possibilities than the spirit of evil."

"Yes; but God wants one to do penance in this world."

"Are you always thinking of your indulgences?" replied Belvidero. "Well, I
have a whole existence in reserve to repent the faults of my first life."

"Oh, if that is your idea of old age," cried the P