Faust

An old scholar sits in his dusty study, surrounded by vials, grimoires, and instruments, none of which have ever opened the slightest door to the mystery of the world. His name is Faust, he has consumed his life studying philosophy, medicine, law, theology, and he now knows, with a certainty that crushes his heart, that he knows nothing. His retorts mock him, his parchments taunt him, nature remains veiled, and all that remains for him, at the end of all this useless science, is an empty skull resting on his books, snickering in silence. He attempted to invoke the Earth Spirit, but the apparition was so gigantic that he felt like a worm crawling in the dust. He then raises a vial of poison to his lips—and it is the sound of Easter bells, the distant singing of choirs celebrating the resurrection, that arrests his hand and casts him back, despite himself, into life.

Outside, the crowd presses at the city gates. The burghers stroll, the peasants dance under the linden trees, spring is bursting forth. Faust walks among them with his pupil Wagner, and a black poodle follows them, a strange dog tracing circles of fire around them. Brought back to his study, the poodle grows, swells, transforms: a gentleman emerges from it, dressed in red, a sword at his side, a rooster's feather in his hat. His name is Mephistopheles, he is the spirit that always negates, the part of that force which eternally wills evil and eternally works good. Up above, in Heaven, the Lord has let him be, for He knows that a good man, even in the dark impulse of his strivings, remains conscious of the right path. Mephisto proposes a pact: he will serve Faust down here, satisfying his every desire; but if ever Faust, fulfilled by a single moment of happiness, tells him that he wishes that moment would linger, then his soul will belong to him. Faust accepts, for he does not believe any pleasure could ever satiate him.

Mephisto first leads him to Auerbach's Cellar in Leipzig, where drunken students sing and bawl. Wine gushes from the table, flames dance, but Faust is bored by this vulgarity. The devil then takes him to a witch's kitchen, where a magic potion restores his youth. Rejuvenated, his blood on fire, Faust spots a young woman in the street leaving church: her name is Marguerite. She is simple, pious, poor; she lives with her mother in a clean and quiet little house. Faust desires her, and Mephisto takes charge of everything. A casket of jewels left in the young girl's room, then a second when the first is confiscated by the priest, and the mediation of an accommodating neighbor, Marthe, accomplish the rest. Faust and Marguerite meet in Marthe's garden, and it is there, amidst the dark pathways, that love seizes them—a love so true, so profound, so heart-rending in Marguerite, that one almost forgets the machinations of the devil snickering in the shadows.

Marguerite gives her mother, upon Faust's advice, a sleeping draught so she can receive him at night. The mother never wakes up. Valentine, Marguerite's brother, a soldier, returns and challenges the seducer in front of the house. Mephisto guides Faust's sword and Valentine falls, cursing his sister before the gathered neighbors. Marguerite is pregnant, abandoned, dishonored. Meanwhile, Faust is swept away by Mephisto into the Walpurgis Night, upon the Brocken, where witches whirl in the tempest, where flames and specters dance around monstrous bonfires. In the midst of this sabbath, Faust glimpses a pale figure, a thin red ribbon around her neck, resembling Marguerite, and remorse strikes him like lightning. He demands that Mephisto take him back to her. But it is too late. Marguerite, driven mad with grief, has drowned the child she bore. She is in prison, in chains, condemned to death. Faust enters the dungeon, begs her to flee with him; the horses are ready, Mephisto waits outside. Marguerite recognizes him, embraces him, then recoils in horror upon seeing the devil on the threshold. She refuses to leave, surrenders herself into the hands of God, and calls upon heavenly judgment. Mephisto growls that she is condemned, but a voice from above answers that she is saved. And Faust is carried off into the air, far from the dungeon, far from the one he has ruined.

The second part opens in another world. Faust, lying in a flowered meadow, is bathed by the breath of aerial spirits who erase the torments of the past from his memory. He awakens before a dazzling waterfall and understands that he cannot look the sun in the face: he will henceforth contemplate its reflection in the rainbow. Mephisto leads him to the court of the Emperor, a frivolous sovereign whose coffers are empty. Thanks to the devil's wiles, paper money is invented, backed by treasures buried in the earth, and the court becomes intoxicated with a fictitious wealth. The Emperor desires a spectacle: he demands to be shown Helen and Paris, the most beautiful figures of Antiquity. Faust then descends to the Mothers, those terrifying goddesses enthroned in the absolute void, outside of time and space, and brings back the phantom of Helen. But when he tries to seize her, an explosion throws him to the ground, unconscious.

Wagner, the old assistant, has meanwhile created in his laboratory an artificial being encased in a glass vial: Homunculus, a little thinking and luminous flame, who yearns to truly exist. Homunculus guides the sleeping Faust to Greece, into the Classical Walpurgis Night, teeming with creatures of ancient mythology—sphinxes, griffons, sirens, lamias, and old Chiron galloping across the plains of Thessaly. Faust searches for Helen among these phantoms, while Homunculus seeks the secret of life in the waters of the Aegean Sea, where he shatters his vial against the chariot of Galatea and disperses into the waves in a phosphorescent glow.

Helen finally appears, no longer a phantom but a living figure torn from Antiquity, before the medieval castle Faust has conjured for her. The union of Faust and Helen, of the Gothic world and the Greek world, brings forth a son, Euphorion, a winged child, poet and flame, who leaps from rock to rock, soaring ever higher, desiring to fly, and falls dead to the ground. His voice calls out to his father from the depths. Helen embraces Faust one last time, then vanishes: only her dress and veil remain in his arms, dissolving into clouds.

Faust is old now. He has obtained from the Emperor a marshy shoreline battered by the waves, and he sets out to reclaim the land from the sea, to drain the swamps, to build dikes so that a free people might live on free soil. But Care, the blind specter, slips through the keyhole and breathes upon his eyes: Faust goes blind. He hears the sound of spades, believes his workers are digging the trenches for his grand project, yet it is his own grave that Mephisto's lemures are digging. However, in this darkness, Faust utters the fatal words: he imagines the free people on the free land, and says that before such a spectacle, he could finally ask the moment to linger. He falls. Mephisto believes he has won, but angels descend scattering roses, drive back the demons, and bear Faust's soul toward the heights. There, among the anchorites, the penitents, and the blessed, Marguerite—she who was once Gretchen—intercedes for him. The Eternal Feminine draws him upward, and it is in this ascension, in this light, that all is fulfilled.