Tale of Thousand and Two Nights

There was once in Seville a gentleman called Don Juan Tenorio. One night he killed Commander Ulloa whose daughter he had kidnapped. The Franciscan monks, after they had buried the Commander in their convent chapel, trapped Don Juan in the same chapel and killed him in his turn. They let afterwards run a rumour according to which Don Juan had come to the Chapel to insult the Commander’s memory and that the statue which stood above his tomb had swallowed Don Juan and taken him to Hell. This happened in the XVth or perhaps XVIth century. Actually, nobody knows exactly when these sinister events took place.

The fact remains that Don Juan must not have liked very much Lucifer’s den where he had been thrown against his own free will. It is not so much the burning flames he feared or the lack of women as everybody knows that the prettiest ladies go down there sooner or later, no, he was just thinking that he had not had time enough to live his own life on earth and that he would love to go back there from time to time if the master of the house gave him leave to.

We all know that Lucifer likes unexpected events or requests and after having thought it over for a while, he let Don Juan go on the condition that he would come from time to time to tell his tales. Our man had always loved to travel all the more as he was often compelled to do so when a deceived husband threatened to kill him or when he was himself tired of a lady. This is how he found his way to France, England, Spain where, driven by the demon (!) inside him, he looked for writers, poets, composers, painters, who gave in his honour thematic feasts: Stone, Statue, Boat... so famous that they are still remembered nowadays. Nobody wanted to be left behind, Tirso de Molina, Molière, Thomas Corneille, Sadwell, Antonio de Zamora, Goldoni, Glück, Righini, Mozart, Gounod, Byron, Delacroix...Year after year, century after century, Don Juan was sought for by all the brainy heads of the world.

In the meantime, he always kept his promise to come back and tell Lucifer about the feasts, some of which did end badly when too many young ladies were around or when the Commander’s shadow appeared too menacing. The Devil loved the stories and he felt a kind of affection for that man, a proud (although sometimes a coward), bright, Epicurean, sceptical seducer, making fun of God and of Lucifer as much as he could without loosing face, laughing at everything, able to do sometimes the best but most of all the worst things, kidnapping the daughters, killing the fathers or the husbands without a second thought... in a word a man according to his Devil’s heart (if He ever had one!).

It is during one of his earthly trips that he made the acquaintance of Jean-Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, at Lorenzo da Ponte’s if my memory does not fail me. Casanova lived then in Venice or close by, not far from the Austrian border in any case. Don Juan was still young and dashing at that time while Casanova was tired and aging, following his many years in jail. His time under the Venice Plombs of the Doge’s palace in particular had exhausted him and made him quite vulnerable physically if not psychologically. He had so often been in disguise to escape the French, European, Turkish mounted police that he had been mistaken for a spy more than once. He, who had been the friends of people like Voltaire, Rousseau, Frederic the Great, Catherine II of Russia... had spent most of his life trying to escape kings, princes and the Sultan’s henchmen or to forget about the ladies who had succeeded in sending him to dark and sinister jails, either because they were tired of him or because they were jealous one from the other or from all the others. Yes he had suffered so much that he had come to a point when he would have liked to hide and be forgotten by all his persecutors and he had become, as the writer Giorgio Manganelli would say one day, Casanova’s shadow.

Its has been said and I am ready to believe it that the meeting and the conversation between Don Juan and Casanova was disappointing. Firstly, Don Juan did not like very much his fellow men company and Casanova, fed up with women and their enterprises, had become too serious, too busy with books to please his rival’s mind. Casanova had just met Count of Waldstein, Prince of Ligne’s nephew, who had offered him to be his librarian in his Dux castle and he was quite ready to take the offer and settle at last to write his memoirs. Until then he had only written “Une Réfutation du Gouvernement de Venise” (A Refutation of Venice Government) while he was in jail in Barcelona dungeon, only malicious people had said that the book had been actually written by Amelot de la Houssaye. This is why he tried and succedeed in avoiding Don Juan’s questions which always seemed to turn around ladies. He was himself tired of them for ever and to such a point that Don Juan appeared to be coming from another planet he was himself unaware of.

In fact, Casanova left Don Juan to go straight to the Count of Waldestein’s castle and was at last able to write the authentic “Mémoires de Jacques Casanova de Seingalt” (Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt). Don Juan happened to read them the next time he came to this earth for a new trip around: they were full of risqué tales, so curious as far as moral habits were concerned that he should have appreciate them. However, in the memory of our seducer, the man did not physically and sexually measure up to his writings. This is of course what Don Juan thought but which may not be, according to Casanova’s admirers, the fundamental truth.

In any case Don Juan resumed very quickly his travels and his encounters: Alexandre Dumas, Prosper Mérimée, Edmond Rostand, Henry Bataille and so many german writers and playwrights, Scheible, Braun de Braunthal, Wiese, Hauch, Nicolas Lenau, Holtei, Grabbe...that I can’t remember all their names. In fact, I think that Don Juan carried on being convinced that he would remain without a true rival until Last Judgment. That day though, God or Lucifer will have the final word and then “watch out, Don Juan!”