Page:Poet Lore, volume 34, 1923.djvu/301

 with Durendal.” The gallantry of it, the sheer gallantry, that sent him to meet Molière and give him his choice of weapons!

The poem begins just where the play left off. As the drama progresses the characters in Molière's Don Juan reappear. The devil and Don Juan, in reminiscent mood, recall past episodes, on the lake shore and in the forest.

As the curtain falls on Molière's play, the Statue of the Knight Commander is leading Don Juan into the abyss where the Devil waits for him. The last cue is Sgnarelle’s lament for his lost wages. In Don Juan's Last Night, the prologue takes up the very cry of Sgnarelle. Don Juan goes back to pay him "the kick he richly earned," and then negotiates with the Devil for ten years more of life, in which he is to be the very Vicar of the Evil One.

In the Prologue, too, Rostand disposes of Faust and "the Faust theme" with Don Juan’s lines!

In the old play, Don Juan and the Statue sup together. In the opening scene of the poem, Don Juan’s bravado has so increased in the time that has intervened, that he asks the Devil to dinner. The interest throughout is in the contrast between Rostand's analysis of Don Juan's character and Molière's conception of it. Molière has made him a villain indeed, a monster of wickedness, but one akin to Milton's Satan, a darkly majestic figure, that has cast a huge shadow across the pages of literature and the boards of every stage for two hundred and fifty years. His legend began when Don Juan’s servant Sgnarelle said: "Ay! A great gentleman a wicked man,—that’s something terrible."

"I'm forced to applaud that which my soul detests."

Don Juan is sure of his own grandeur. Repentance and such weaknesses are not for him. In the play, as Don Juan goes down quick into the pit, "the thunder rolls with awful peals: and lightnings play about Don Juan. The earth opens and engulfs him, and great flames. leap from the abyss into which he is hurled." In Rostand's poem, the libertine is stripped of his dis uisesdisguises [sic], one by one, and disclosed, not as a superman, but as a