The supper is interrupted by Donna Elvira, who comes to plead on her knees with Don Giovanni to change his mode of life. He mocks at her solicitude and invites her to sit with him at table. She leaves the room in despair, but sends back a piercing shriek from the corridor. Leporello is sent out to report on the cause of the cry, and returns trembling as with an ague and mumbling that he has seen a ghost--a ghost of stone, whose footsteps, "Ta, ta, ta," sounded like a mighty hammer on the floor. Don Giovanni himself goes to learn the cause of the disturbance, and Leporello hides under the table. The intrepid Don opens the door. There is a clap of thunder, and there enters the ghost of the Commandant in the form of his statue as seen in the churchyard. The music which has been described in connection with the overture accompanies the conversation of the spectre and his amazed host. Don Giovanni's repeated offer of hospitality is rejected, but in turn he is asked if he will return the visit. He will. "Your hand as a pledge," says the spectre. All unabashed, the doomed man places his hand in that of the statue, which closes upon it like a vise. Then an awful fear shakes the body of Don Giovanni, and a cry of horror is forced out of his lips. "Repent, while there is yet time," admonishes the visitor again and again, and still again. Don Giovanni remains unshaken in his wicked fortitude. At length he wrests his hand out of the stony grasp and at the moment hears his doom from the stony lips, "Ah! the time for you is past!" Darkness enwraps him; the earth trembles; supernatural voices proclaim his punishment in chorus; a pit opens before him, from which demons emerge and drag him down to hell. Here the opera ends for us; but originally, after the catastrophe the persons of the play, all but the reprobate whom divine justice has visited, returned to the scene to hear a description of the awful happenings he had witnessed from the buffoon who had hidden under the table, to dispose their plans for the future (for Ottavio and Anna, marriage in a year; for Masetto and Zerlina, a wedding instanter; for Elvira, a nunnery), and platitudinously to moralize that, the perfidious wretch having been carried to the realm of Pluto and Proserpine, naught remained to do save to sing the old song, "Thus do the wicked find their end, dying as they had lived." Footnotes: {1} See my preface to "Don Giovanni" in the Schirmer Collection of Operas. {2} Gounod. {3} "The Life of Mozart," by Otto Jahn, Vol. III, p. 169. {4} "Mozart's Don Giovanni," by Charles Gounod, p. 3. CHAPTER V "FIDELIO"