This short story, published in 1791 is a fascinating tale which, upon completion leaves no important character alive with all, bar one, dying of unnatural causes.
The complexity if the plot containing major gothic themes such as violence, betrayal, apparent incest and torture moves through three main stages of realisation helped by the interference of the law. However, it is the case that this realisation is too late because then ‘innocent’ character, Don Juan has been murdered as an extent of the torture.
The story opens with an account of the trial of Don Juan for “poisoning his half-sister by the same father”, the half-sister in question we later learn goes by the name Josepha, son of the Lisbon Merchant. Don Juan insists he has done no wrong, aside from fathering her unborn child, stating that they were happy and engaged to be married. As the court hearing it unfolds through the first realisation mainly from the witnesses that Don Juan is in fact not the son of The Lisbon Merchant, but instead son of a “gentleman of considerable fortune in the Brasils”. The focus of the judges then moved to the poison, after being questioned at length who administered the poison, the judges conclude that Don Juan is ‘’trifling with the court’’ and give ‘’orders for the rack’’.
During his extreme torture of a ‘’severe stretch by ligatures fixed to his extremities’’, a monk rushes into the chamber calling to the judges to “desist from torturing the innocent man’’ and instead take a ‘’confession of murder form his own lips’’. The judges shocked, give the command to release Don Juan who faints from exhaustion and the monk relates the honesty tale of corruption and murder and betrayal. It becomes quickly apparent that the monk is in fact the Lisbon merchant who, having administered the poison, intended for Don Juan to his “only child”. He confesses his reason for attempting to murder Don Juan that a great sum pf money had been left in Don Juan’s fathers will to be bequeathed to the Lisbon merchant “in failure of his son and heir” and the Lisbon merchant, being already “advanced so far in guilt” became determined to “remove this bar to my ambition” and killing Don Juan. On her death, the Lisbon merchant threw himself into a convent of Mendicants and her mother “survived her death but a few days” leaving Don Juan the rightful heir of his real fathers fortune.
It later transpires that Don Juan did indeed know exactly who had administered the poison and his reasons for it but had been sworn to secrecy by his late wife Josepha, to not ‘’expose her parents to a public execution by disclosing what has passed’’.