Goethe’s Margaret on Mephistopheles:
Mephistopheles is Faust’s demonic companion who manages Faust’s seduction of her. But she is a pure, devout and innocent young woman and who in her “innermost soul” intuits the evil and the danger in Mephistopheles, and she speaks to Faust.
From Goethe’s Faust (Scene XVI: Martha’s Garden) at http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/FaustIScenesXVItoXXV.htm.Margaret:
I’ve long been grieved
To see you in such company.Faust:
Why, who?Margaret:
That man who hangs round you so,
I hate him in my innermost soul:
Nothing in all my life has ever
Given my heart such pain, no, never,
As his repulsive face has done.
Mephistopheles soon manages the poisoning of her mother at her hands, the murder of her brother at Faust’s, and then her drowning of her child in her madness and her execution for her apparent crimes.
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