Devoid of soul and avid in the flesh, Don Juan prepared himself from earliest adolescence for the vocation that would make his name legendary. His cunning foresight had revealed to him the shape of things to come, and he entered upon his career armed and armoured by the motto: To please yourself, you must take what you please from she who pleases you.
From one of his fair-haired conquests he took a deft gesture of the hand, which echoed the painful beating of an empty heart;
From another he took an ironic fall of the eyelid, which conveyed an illusion of impertinence and which was certainly no mere reflex of a feeble eye before the light;
From another, he took the petulant stamp of her pretty and impatient foot;
From another, soft and pure, he took a smile in which he had previously seen, as if in a magical mirror, the contentment of satisfaction; and afterwards, the pleased renewal of desire;
From another, not so pure and without softness, but ever vibrantly alive and as nervous as a kitten, he took a very different smile: the kind of smile which remembered kisses strong enough to stir the heart of a virgin;
From another, he took a sigh: a deep, tremulous and timid sigh; a sigh like the hectically fluttering wings of a frightened bird in flight;
From another he took the slow and unsteady gait of one overwhelmed by an excess of love;
From another, he took the loving voice whose whispered endearments were like the weeping of angels.
From all of them he took the expressions which showed upon their faces: the gentle, the imperious, the docile, the astonished, the combative, the envious, the lovely, the trusting, the devouring, the thunderous, and all the rest; and he built these one by one into a great garland of fascinating appearances. But the most beautiful of all expressions to Don Juan – a precious stone among countless beads of glass – was the expression of a ravished girl, hunted and caught and mortified by love and despair. That look he found so poignant that it became the motive force of his eternal search for more and more of the same wild gratification; it was the secret inspiration of his great carnal quest.
Time and time again, Don Juan triumphed over the female heart. He won hearts ingenuous and trusting, hearts tender and righteous, hearts which did not know their own secrets, hearts empty of innate desire, hearts deliciously naive; gentle seductresses and ardent seductresses all came alike to him, and were likewise beguiled.
The pattern of his seductions was always the same: his gentle touch, excused by a hint of laughter in the eye and a pleasant smile; her slow entrancement by his steady gaze; the first deep and fractured sigh wrung from his breast, accompanied by a subtly impatient tap of his foot, as if to say: “You have wounded my heart; that will not prevent me from loving you, but I am angry.” Then, he would see the precious look of the hunted beast upon her face; then, he would touch her playfully with his little finger.
After a pause, he would whisper, lovingly: “How beautiful it is tonight!” – and the young lady would instantly respond: “It is my heart and soul that you want, Don Juan! So be it! Take them, I give them to you freely.”
Don Juan would accept the delicious offering, and would savour all the feminine charms of the new lover: her skin; her hair; her teeth; all of her beauty and all the perfumes of her secret places – and, having enjoyed to the full the fruits of her newly-awakened love, would then depart.
Around his own heart he built an inviolable shell, in which it was as comfortably encased as if it had been enshrouded in white velvet – and with that armour to protect him, bolder than any giant-killer, more revered than the holiest of relics, he increased the number of his conquests vastly.
He took all of them: all those who might provide a new hint of pleasure, a delicate nuance of joy; he took all that he was allowed to take by those whose sisters had already given him all that he desired. His reputation went before him, and as it increased the women became all the more ready to bow down before him and kiss his hands submissively, overcome by the mere approach of their conqueror.
In the end, women competed with one another to be the first to submit to him, or to be the one who would surrender most; intoxicated by the mere thought of their impending enslavement, they would begin to die for love of him before they had even tasted his love.
Through all the towns and all the châteaux, to the remotest parts of the land, there spread the cry of the fatally enamoured: “O my love! O desire of my flesh! He is irresistible.”
But the time came, as it had to do, when Don Juan grew old. His strength was sapped by his luxurious indulgence and his appetites dried up. As is the inevitable way of things, he became a shadow of his former self.
To the last flowers of summer, Don Juan had given up the last grain of his pollen; there was not a drop of sap left in him. He had loved, but now would love no more – and he lay down on his bed to await the arrival of the one who was destined to claim him.
But when that one arrived, Don Juan – still unready to accept his fate – offered to him anything that he cared to take, out of all that had been so carefully stolen from those with whom the great lover had taken his pleasure.
“I offer to you the rewards of all my seductions,” said Don Juan. “To you, O Ugly One, I offer all my gestures, all my looks, all my smiles, all my divers sights – all of that, and the armour which encases my soul: take it and go! I wish to relive my life in memory, knowing as I do now that memory is the true life.”
“Relive your life if you wish,” said Death. “I will see you again.”
And Death departed, but left behind him a host of phantoms which he had raised from the shadows.
These phantoms wore the forms of young and beautiful women, all of them naked and all incapable of speech, moving restlessly as though there were something which they were desperate to obtain. They arranged themselves in a great spiral around Don Juan’s bed, and although the first of them was close enough to take his hand and place it on her breast, the last was so far away that she seemed as distant as the stars.
She who had placed his hand on her breast took back from him a deft gesture of the hand which echoed the anguish of an empty heart;
Another took back from him the ironic fall of a white eyelid;
Another took back from him the petulant stamp of her foot;
Another took back from him the subtle smile which spoke of satisfaction obtained and the renewal of desire;
Another took back from him a different smile, which reflected the pleasure of secret delights;
Another took back from him a sigh like the flutter of a frightened bird;
And then there approached another, who moved with the slow and unsteady gait of one overwhelmed by an excess of love; and another whose sad and loving whispers were like the weeping of angels; and the great garland of the expressions which he had gathered one by one – the imperious and the thunderous, the astonished and the trusting, the gentle and beguiled – all were retaken from him; and every one of those whom he had carefully violated came in her turn to take back from him her illimitably precious and fugitive expression of love and despair.
Another, finally, took from him his own heart, whose delicious innocence he had so carefully preserved within its cloak of white velvet; and then he was no longer the great Don Juan, but only a senseless phantom.
Like a rich man robbed of his wealth, or a flyer without wings, he was the merest echo of a human being, reduced to elementary truth, without his inspiration, without his secret!