"Could the brute have been in the secret?" thought Don Juan,
looking down at the faithful creature.

Don Juan Belvidero was looked upon as a dutiful son. He reared a
white marble monument on his father's tomb, and employed the
greatest sculptors of the time upon it. He did not recover
perfect ease of mind till the day when his father knelt in marble
before Religion, and the heavy weight of the stone had sealed the
mouth of the grave in which he had laid the one feeling of
remorse that sometimes flitted through his soul in moments of
physical weariness.

He had drawn up a list of the wealth heaped up by the old
merchant in the East, and he became a miser: had he not to
provide for a second lifetime? His views of life were the more
profound and penetrating; he grasped its significance, as a
whole, the better, because he saw it across a grave. All men, all
things, he analyzed once and for all; he summed up the Past,
represented by its records; the Present in the law, its
crystallized form; the Future, revealed by religion. He took
spirit and matter, and flung them into his crucible, and found
--Nothing. Thenceforward he became DON JUAN.

At the outset of his life, in the prime of youth and the beauty
of youth, he knew the illusions of life for what they were; he
despised the world, and made the utmost of the world. His
felicity could not have been of the bourgeois kind, rejoicing in
periodically recurrent _bouilli_, in the comforts of a warming-pan,
a lamp of a night, and a new pair of slippers once a quarter.