If flesh and blood is not good enough for you you must go without: that's all.
Women have to put up with flesh-and-blood husbands—and little enough of that too, sometimes; and you will have to put up with flesh-and-blood wives.
The Devil looks dubious.
The Statue makes a wry face.
I see you don't like that, any of you; but it's true, for all that; so if you don't like it you can lump it.
DON JUAN.
My dear lady, you have put my whole case against romance into a few sentences.
That is just why I turned my back on the romantic man with the artist nature, as he called his infatuation.
I thanked him for teaching me to use my eyes and ears; but I told him that his beauty worshipping and happiness hunting and woman idealizing was not worth a dump as a philosophy of life; so he called me Philistine and went his way.
ANA.
It seems that Woman taught you something, too, with all her defects.
DON JUAN.
She did more: she interpreted all the other teaching for me.
Ah, my friends, when the barriers were down for the first time, what an astounding illumination!
I had been prepared for infatuation, for intoxication, for all the illusions of love's young dream; and lo! never was my perception clearer, nor my criticism more ruthless.
The most jealous rival of my mistress never saw every blemish in her more keenly than I.
I was not duped: I took her without chloroform.
ANA.
But you did take her.
DON JUAN.
That was the revelation.
Up to that moment I had never lost the sense of being my own master; never consciously taken a single step until my reason had examined and approved it.
I had come to believe that I was a purely rational creature: a thinker!
I said, with the foolish philosopher,
"I think; therefore I am."
It was Woman who taught me to say
"I am; therefore I think."
And also
"I would think more; therefore I must be more."
THE STATUE.
This is extremely abstract and metaphysical, Juan.
If you would stick to the concrete, and put your discoveries in the form of entertaining anecdotes about your adventures with women, your conversation would be easier to follow.
DON JUAN.
Bah! what need I add?
Do you not understand that when I stood face to face with Woman, every fibre in my clear critical brain warned me to spare her and save myself.
My morals said No.
My conscience said No.
My chivalry and pity for her said No.
My prudent regard for myself said No.
My ear, practised on a thousand songs and symphonies; my eye, exercised on a thousand paintings; tore her voice, her features, her color to shreds.
I caught all those tell-tale resemblances to her father and mother by which I knew what she would be like in thirty years time.
I noted the gleam of gold from a dead tooth in the laughing mouth: I made curious observations of the strange odors of the chemistry of the nerves.
The visions of my romantic reveries, in which I had trod the plains of heaven with a deathless, ageless creature of coral and ivory, deserted me in that supreme hour.
I remembered them and desperately strove to recover their illusion; but they now seemed the emptiest of inventions: my judgment was not to be corrupted: my brain still said No on every issue.
And whilst I was in the act of framing my excuse to the lady, Life seized me and threw me into her arms as a sailor throws a scrap of fish into the mouth of a seabird.
THE STATUE.
You might as well have gone without thinking such a lot about it, Juan.
You are like all the clever men: you have more brains than is good for you.
THE DEVIL.
And were you not the happier for the experience, Senor Don Juan?