a vision of don juan

CLAUDE ANET

the greatest lover of all emerges from the shadow of his own legend as a man who really lived gracefully

■ Some of us believe that supreme happiness comes most deeply from the human heart, that a man finds it only in a woman, that a woman achieves it only in a man. It is a fleeting and ephemeral thing, desperately pursued by all of us, and rarely overtaken; and this eternal pursuit is nowhere typified more keenly than in the life of Don Juan. It makes him an arresting and passionate figure before whom generations pause—a symbol of extraordinary romance which poets cherish and clasp again and again to their hearts to build their dreams upon.

Don Juan commands our respect because his is the legend of a man who desires with all his soul to achieve the absolute. He is forever seeking a woman with whom he may share a supreme ecstasy, for he refuses to accept happiness for himself alone. But where will he find this matchless woman? Like a lonely harlequin at a masquerade, he wanders from one lovely lady to another, lifting her mask, and wondering, "Is it, perhaps you?" But each time he is deceived, or else he finds himself falsely secure in a happiness so mediocre that he rejects it at once as unworthy. Will he never be able to give himself entirely? This impassioned quest, this frantic following of trails that lead only to successive disillusions, to hope reborn and ever false, is the tragic destiny of Don Juan in his desperate search for happiness.

The great, sorrowful figure of this man owes its being as much to the activity of poets as to reality; so much has he been celebrated in the poems of Molière, Mozart, Byron and many others that he comes to us more as a creature of legend than as a man of flesh and blood. Some of us know only vaguely that there lived, in Seville of the seventeenth century, the real Don Juan. His name was Miguel Marana Vicentello de Leca.

I wanted to trace his origin, to discover what sort of man he was before literature appropriated him for its own uses; so I went to Seville, where he was born, in the heart of Andalusia, that lovely land whose very name breathes the languorous syllables of romance. Seville is a happy city, whose narrow streets are thronged with illustrious shades from the past; here is Carmen, a red carnation flaming from her scarlet mouth . . . there, Don Juan, laughing, gallant, his sword brightly poised on his hip. Although its modern pavements are brisk under our feet, we still live a little in the past, in Seville; we gaze respectfully at the Charity Hospital, founded by Don Juan in the seventeenth century, and still standing after three hundred years—and then we observe, with a sigh for the past, that a tobacco factory has lately reared its newfangled structure a few squares away.

Strangely enough, the most authentic account of the life of Don Juan was the work of a Jesuit Father, Father Juan Cardenas, who was his friend—the life of Don Juan written by a priest! The explanation, however, is simple. His life, long lived in a highly adventurous fashion, culminated dramatically in his conversion; and it was the conversion that justified the Jesuit Father's undertaking. The early days, so valuable to us, he passes over in silence, and takes up his work at the repentance of Don Juan.

Miguel Marana Vicentello de Leca, who was to be known to posterity as Don Juan, was born in 1626, and died at the age of fiftythree. His family originally came from Corsica, that little island destined to shine twice briefly upon the world, in the twin reflected glories of Don Juan and Napoleon. Miguel Marana was. a prodigious sinner. He had made innumerable conquests, had distinguished himself in duels, had, with magnificent success, wooed "the most beautiful bodies and the gentlest hearts". Then, one day, he repented.

■ The story goes that, one night, when he was coming from a gallant rendezvous, he met in the street a funeral procession on its way to the Church of Saint Isidore. Mourners masked in black and carrying great, lighted candles walked beside the coffin. Impressed by the unusual encounter at that hour of the night, Miguel Marana approached one of the men who were carrying the coffin.

"Who is the man whom you bury at this hour of the night?" he asked"What is the reason for your haste?"

"The dead man," came the reply, "is Don Miguel de Marana. We are hurrying because he has great need of our prayers. Come and pray with us for the salvation of his soul."

Don Miguel de Marana leaned over the coffin and recognized, in the corpse that lay there, himself. He followed the cortege to the church and, there, murmured prayers for his soul. The mysterious mourners who had surrounded the bier vanished silently, one by one, and Miguel de Marana was alone. . . . The next day, the sexton found him unconscious on the steps of the altar. Of the coffin and the corpse there was no sign. . . .

Don Juan—let us call him that, since it is the name which posterity has given him —then resolved to pledge himself to God and to holy works. He had repented—in one of those great and beautiful rebellions of the soul which the mediocre and the weak can never know—and forthwith, he entered the charity brotherhood whose task it was to assure the burial of convicts condemned to death. (Were there, then, so many of these in Seville that a religious brotherhood had to be created to see that they were buried?) He founded a cemetery for this purpose. He gave his own considerable fortune toward budding a hospital for the aged—the Charity Hospital, which is still standing today.

The excellent Jesuit Father beheld with astonishment and joy the blessing that God had bestowed upon his friend in this conversion. He held the life of this repentant sinner as a model before the eyes of everyone; he even saw him as a saint, and set about persuading Rome to canonize him—a procedure which was fitfully contemplated by the Court of Ecclesiastics for the next two centuries— without any result, however. Don Juan has not yet been elevated to the ranks of the saints . . . it is a pity. How many candles the women would have burned for him! What prayers would have found their way to his accustomed ears! Ah, there would have been a saint who would never have had an idle moment! It is to be feared that the business of canonizing him will be allowed to lapse; for it seems unlikely that these modern times whose influence is felt to the very depths of the Vatican, will ever be really favourable to the inclusion of Don Juan among the saintly company.

In Seville, it is at the Charity Hospital that one must seek him. The Hospital is an enormous building of stone, rather banal in its architecture; but it holds many memories of the great lover, his death-mask and his mortal remains.

How could I know, when I went there, that I was to hear the most touching of all comments upon Don Juan, and one which is greater for the woman by whom it was spoken?

(Continued on page 122)

(Continued from page 75)

The porter assigned to me an ancient nun as a guide, a bent and trembling old woman whose face, etched in a thousand wrinkles, was halfhidden by her white coif. She held a rosary in her knotted hands, and as we walked slowly through the dim corridors, murmured almost inaudible prayers, of which I heard only an occasional Ave or a Gratia plena from under the white coif.

Slowly I followed her through corridors, rooms and refectory halls that smelled faintly of crude oil. She led me to the second floor where, in a room which serves as a kind of museum, articles of furniture and other objects which belonged to the founder of the Hospital are preserved.

There I saw the sword that had dripped with the blood of more than one of his rivals. There I saw the spurs whose crisp clatter on the pavement kept many a woman awake of nights. There was the application, signed by Don Juan, requesting membership in the brotherhood; and there,finally,was his death mask, taken when he died in 1679, at the age of fifty-three. It is a face that seems still young—fine, admirably molded, the forehead narrow and firm, the eyes deep-set under wide brows, the nose aquiline. I looked at'him for a long time, I could not look away from him. These lips, now mute forever—what vows of love they had made, what flames of passion they had lighted in hearts fainting for joy! These eyes closed in death—what fire they had held when they rested on a woman! Here there was nothing vulgar, nothing gross; his were not carnal delights. A noble and passionate man, burning with inner life, was before me. I no longer wondered why Maurice Barres had written that this death mask reminded him of Pascal's.

The nun, all this while, was silent; only that incessant trembling and the soft fumbling of her fingers among the beads of her rosary reminded me that she was still there. Was she merely looking once more upon the pallid features of a notorious man, or was she praying silently for the sinner's eternal rest? I thought that her fingers moved a little more swiftly upon the rosary while I stood watching that dead, impassive face. Presently, murmuring her incessant prayers, she led me to the chapel; but, haunted by what I had seen, I could fix my attention upon nothing else, and contemplated with an abstracted eye the celebrated paintings by Murillo which adorn its walls.

I asked where Don Juan was buried. The nun showed me the spot, to the right of the altar, that marked his resting-place—an inconspicuous memorial, for he would not permit any monument to be raised to himself in this church which he had founded; he himself had chosen this modest space in the shadow of the altar and had written his own epitaph. The nun lifted a corner of the ugly modern carpet which covers the altar, and disclosed the tomb. ... As she bent over it, it seemed almost as if she were lowering her head in homage to the remains of Don Juan.

I began to read aloud the famous epitaph:

Here lies the worst man in the world. . . .

What fault of inflection was mine as I spoke these words? What unfortunate intonation did the old woman wrongly believe that I gave them? For she interrupted me brusquely, and said in a clear voice, with an accent of reproval: "And the humblest."

She had raised her head, and for the first time her poor eyes, sunk in a mass of tiny wrinkles, were fixed upon mine; a little flame of anger dwelt in them. Then she was silent—and again I saw nothing but the white coif, shaking, trembling with a slight, incessant motion.

Eternal miracle of love . . . that, three centuries after the death of Don Juan, a nun bowed with the weight of years consecrated to God, should stand once more erect to defend the memory of a man who never sought happiness save in the possesion of women!