The Man moves ruthlessly from conquest to conquest, ingenuously confessing that his sexual adventures take on reality only when he recounts them to his Friend.
Seduced and abandoned by the Man are Alberte, who becomes a prostitute and dies of disease; Laure, who goes mad after an abortion; and the foolish Hysterical Woman, who angers him when she avenges herself by sleeping with his Friend. Consumed by spiritual unrest, the Man begins to languish from an unidentifiable ailment. Luc De Bronte, a psychoanalyst who also appears in The Dream Doctor, suggests to him that Don Juans are always anguished and dissatisfied because their bodies are male and their souls female and that in their souls they hope to find in women what their bodies are repelled by.
The Man rejects this explanation, but thereafter he avoids his Friend. At a seance the Man receives a threatening spirit message from Alberte, and he vainly attempts to bribe the medium into confessing to trickery. He refuses to accept the psychoanalyst's explanation that, now that his physical powers are failing, his own memories and fears have summoned up this phantom. In a final scene, the Man is tormented by the hostile phantoms of the women he has destroyed. As the ghost of his dead mother soothes him, he dies pleading for the key to his real nature and for reassurance that his love for his Friend was not an unnatural one.
(Joseph E. Garreau)