Murdering!
What do you mean?
Did I kill you or did you kill me?
DON JUAN.
Which of us was the better fencer?
THE STATUE.
I was.
DON JUAN.
Of course you were.
And yet you, the hero of those scandalous adventures you have just been relating to us, you had the effrontery to pose as the avenger of outraged morality and condemn me to death!
You would have slain me but for an accident.
THE STATUE.
I was expected to, Juan.
That is how things were arranged on earth.
I was not a social reformer; and I always did what it was customary for a gentleman to do.
DON JUAN.
That may account for your attacking me, but not for the revolting hypocrisy of your subsequent proceedings as a statue.
THE STATUE.
That all came of my going to Heaven.
THE DEVIL.
I still fail to see, Senor Don Juan, that these episodes in your earthly career and in that of the Senor Commander in any way discredit my view of life.
Here, I repeat, you have all that you sought without anything that you shrank from.
DON JUAN.
On the contrary, here I have everything that disappointed me without anything that I have not already tried and found wanting.
I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.
That is the law of my life.
That is the working within me of Life's incessant aspiration to higher organization, wider, deeper, intenser self-consciousness, and clearer self-understanding.
It was the supremacy of this purpose that reduced love for me to the mere pleasure of a moment, art for me to the mere schooling of my faculties, religion for me to a mere excuse for laziness, since it had set up a God who looked at the world and saw that it was good, against the instinct in me that looked through my eyes at the world and saw that it could be improved.
I tell you that in the pursuit of my own pleasure, my own health, my own fortune, I have never known happiness.
It was not love for Woman that delivered me into her hands: it was fatigue, exhaustion.
When I was a child, and bruised my head against a stone, I ran to the nearest woman and cried away my pain against her apron.
When I grew up, and bruised my soul against the brutalities and stupidities with which I had to strive, I did again just what I had done as a child.
I have enjoyed, too, my rests, my recuperations, my breathing times, my very prostrations after strife; but rather would I be dragged through all the circles of the foolish Italian's Inferno than through the pleasures of Europe.
That is what has made this place of eternal pleasures so deadly to me.
It is the absence of this instinct in you that makes you that strange monster called a Devil.
It is the success with which you have diverted the attention of men from their real purpose, which in one degree or another is the same as mine, to yours, that has earned you the name of The Tempter.
It is the fact that they are doing your will, or rather drifting with your want of will, instead of doing their own, that makes them the uncomfortable, false, restless, artificial, petulant, wretched creatures they are.
THE DEVIL. [mortified] Senor Don Juan: you are uncivil to my friends.
DON JUAN.
Pooh! why should I be civil to them or to you?
In this Palace of Lies a truth or two will not hurt you.
Your friends are all the dullest dogs I know.
They are not beautiful: they are only decorated.
They are not clean: they are only shaved and starched.
They are not dignified: they are only fashionably dressed.
They are not educated they are only college passmen.
They are not religious: they are only pewrenters.
They are not moral: they are only conventional.
They are not virtuous: they are only cowardly.
They are not even vicious: they are only "frail."