Faust: Part 1: The Neighbor’s House Summary & Analysis

Margarete’s neighbor, Dame Martha Schwerdtlein, is alone in her house, thinking about her husband. He has left her though she did him no wrong, she says. She always loved him and fears he may be dead. She wishes she had a death certificate to know for sure.

Margarete enters and tells Martha that she has found yet another casket of treasures more splendid than the first. Martha advises Margarete not to tell her mother about this and suggests that, since the girl can’t wear the jewels in public, she come over to her, Martha’s, house to dress up in them privately. Margarete again wonders who on earth could have brought these two caskets. Something, she says, is not quite right.

There is a knock at the door and a gentleman enters. It is Mephistopheles, claiming to have a message for Dame Martha Schwerdtlein. He excuses himself for interrupting, and addresses Margarete as though she were a lady of high social standing (even though she is just a poor girl), induced to do so not only by the girl’s jewels, he says, but also by her noble demeanor and piercing eyes. He then gives his news: Martha’s husband is dead. Martha despairs. Mephistopheles says that the man’s corpse has been buried in Padua, and he instructs her to have three hundred masses sung for him.

Martha is troubled: her husband left her no money? No jewelry? Mephistopheles offers his sympathies, and Margarete promises to pray requiems (masses sung for the dead) for the departed. The devil turns to Margarete and says she deserves a husband right away, or at least a lover. She responds that taking a lover is not the custom in these parts. It’s still a practice, however, the devil replies.

Martha requests that Mephistopheles tell her more of her husband’s death. The devil says he was beside him on his straw deathbed. Her husband, he says, died a Christian, requesting his wife’s forgiveness for going into debt and forsaking her. Martha says that she has long since forgiven her husband. But the devil continues: he claims that the husband blamed his wife more than himself, and he insinuates that the husband acquired a huge treasure only to spend it on his mistress. Martha curses her dead husband as a thief and villain. When the devil advises her to mourn, however, she praises her husband as most lovable, even though he had vicious habits.

Mephistopheles gets in a final dig, by saying that things would have been all right if Martha’s husband had been as tolerant of his wife as she claims to have been of him. He then resolves to leave. Martha requests proof of her husband’s death and burial. Mephistopheles says he’ll bring a friend to her house as a second witness to establish the truth of what he’s said. He then asks Margarete if she’ll be here too, and praises his friend (the one coming to verify the death) as worldly and polite. Margarete says that she will only be able to blush in front of him, but the devil replies that there’s no need to blush before a king. Martha says she’ll expect Mephistopheles and his friend to return this evening.