His very first attempt is a dead failure. He has carried Faust off through the air to Leipzig, and here he brings him into what to the Mephisto-nature doubtless seems highly desirable and entertaining company--to the 'sing-song' (as I believe it is called in England) of tippling brawling students. The scene is Auerbach's Cellar, a well-known Leipzig 'Kneipe'--a kind of Wine taproom or Bodega. Among these brawling comic-songsters Mephistopheles is in his element, and he treats them to a comic ditty:
Of old there lived a king, Who had a great big flea As dear as any thing, Or any son, could be ...
and so on. We need not linger over the repulsive scene--so graphically described.
Finally Mephistopheles bores holes in the table and draws wine from them.
The students come to handicuffs over it; they spill the wine, and it turns into flame.
Amidst their drunken uproar Faust and Mephistopheles disappear.
During the whole of this scene Faust _speaks no single word_, except a curt but polite greeting on entering the Cellar and an appeal to Mephistopheles to take him away from this 'scene of swinish bestiality.' How different from the part that Faust plays in the old story where he himself, not Mephistopheles, joins in the revelry and buffoonery!
Auerbach's Cellar existed till lately, though the house above it had been rebuilt. It was the original 'Keller' that is mentioned in the old legend. In it were to be seen two old pictures (with the date 1525). One represented Faust sitting at table with students; in the other he is flying off through the door astride on a wine cask.
A weird scene now ensues: the Witches' Kitchen.
Faust had asked how it was possible for him, the thought-worn grey-haired professor, to care for, or take part in, what Mephistopheles looked upon as 'life.' Mephistopheles therefore takes him to a witch, from whom he is to receive a magic draught that will 'strip off some thirty years from his body,' so that he becomes a young, man of, say, about twenty-seven. This scene in the Witches' Kitchen is sometimes said to represent allegorically a long course of dissipation through which Mephistopheles takes Faust, and which of course could not be represented otherwise without extending the action of the play beyond all reasonable limits. It is true that, after the draught Faust's character seems considerably changed for the worse. He develops a recklessness and a licentiousness which scandalize even Mephistopheles himself, who tells him that he is 'almost as bad as a Frenchman.'