This desperate situation is relieved by the entrance of Carmen's father in the black of etiquette, strictly solemn as befits a Spanish father offering his daughter in marriage to his old chum. He says reprovingly: 'Do not embrace me. Don't you see that I am all in black—in the garb of etiquette? It is a very solemn occasion. Call everybody except Lázaro—him later. Solemnity above all.' The afflicted parents have decided to conceal Lázaro's calamity from the world, and make a heart-broken effort to welcome the betrothal with delight, and the gloom of the situation is deepened by the young man's miserable behaviour when called to his beloved.
Lázaro. Carmen! Mine, mine! I may take her, clasp her in my arms! inflame her with my breath! drink her with my eyes! I may if I like!
Don Juan. Yes, yes, but enough.
Lázaro. What infamy! What treason! Carmen!
Carmen. [Running to him.] Lázaro!
Lázaro. Go, away! Why do you come to me? You cannot be mine. Never, never, never.
Carmen. Do you give me up? Ah, I have already felt it. Mother! [Takes refuge in his mother's arms.]
Nobody understands. Carmen's father is indignant. Lázaro's confidential friend asks if he has gone mad, and Lázaro, bewildered, turns despairingly to Don Juan: 'Father, father. You are my father. Save me.' 'With my life, my son.' 'You gave me life, but it is not enough. Give me life to live, to love, to be happy. Give me life for Carmen's sake. Give me more life, or cursed be that which you have given me.'
The third act is rendered more sombre if possible from the shabby chatter and airs of aged rake on the part of Carmen's father, with which it starts. We are introduced to the Tarifa girl, Don Juan's old mistress, now pensioned and respectably established on his estate on the banks of the Guadalquivir. Deeper and deeper are we forced to wade through unrelenting shadow. Now it is the frivolous Don Timoteo, sipping his manzanilla, and sneering at the young generation as personated by his daughter Carmen, Lázaro, and Lázaro's friend, the girl with her affected lungs, Lázaro with his dementia, and his friend formal and headachy. 'Ah, in my day we were other,' he sighs. 'Perhaps,' retorts the friend, 'it is because you were—other then that we are so now.' Then it is Lázaro, rough, distrustful, and sly, completely altered, afraid to sleep because he does not know how it might be upon his awakening or if he should ever awake, with swift leaps from childish drivel into the Don's plumed phrases, forgetful of modern raiment, and swaggering through imagery and sonorous syllables as if a sword clanked by his side and he carried the spurs of chivalry. And then the poor victim falls to drinking with his father's old mistress, and when half-drunk and wholly mad, plots with her to carry off Carmen. When she cries out that 'farewell' means tears, he exclaims inconsequently: 'Then you, too, will cry. We will all cry ... Laughing fatigues, crying rests.'
Quite gay and reckless, he faces Carmen to propose elopement to her. He laments the former coldness of his words and moods, the insufficiency of the vulgar tongue to express passion so burning and impetuous as his, and terrifies her by his wild and flowery volubility. There is night all around him except for the ray of intense light that encircles her face. On that he concentrates all that remains to him of life, of manhood, of feeling, thought and love. He descends from this into weak complaining. Her happiness is threatened by inimical conspiracies, and yet how is he to defend her? He fancies he is in a desert full of sand, plagued with unquenchable thirst and menaced by a falling heaven. He mixes up in the dreariest way the sands of the desert and the old applause that greeted his genius, wonders if either will have an end, then doubts the end of anything, and implores Carmen to save him. 'Help me. Look at me, speak, laugh, cry, do something, Carmen, to keep me from wandering into the desert.' But already his look is vague, and he has ceased to see her. In vain she cries to him that she is near, weeps over him, holds him to her. 'I am Carmen, look at me. The little head you were wont to love so is close to your lips. I am smiling at you. Laugh, Lázaro, answer me. Wake up! Surely you hear me, you see me!' When his mother comes in response to the girl's agonised cry, a glimmer of intelligence gives a sort of dignity to his incoherent words. He wants his mother to console him, for he has to say 'a long, a sad, and solemn farewell to Carmen.' The girl protests she will not leave him, when he irritably orders her away—a great way off. He loved her much, but now it is adieu eternally. He only wishes now to be alone with his parents, until memory suddenly carries him back into the time of quarrel, reproaches, and jealousies of those two in his childhood. 'Don't contradict me, father; you used to quarrel and make me afraid.' He passionately orders him away, too, with Carmen, and turns for comfort to his mother. Then he remembers his school troubles, how his mother coldly parted with him, and to guard against complete loneliness, calls for Paca, his father's old mistress. 'Come, I am young and wish to live,' he cries, and when we find Don Juan aroused to indignation and threatening to fling the Tarifa girl over the balcony into the river if she does not instantly retire, we are ready to hail the mercifulness of Ibsen. This is to carry a sermon to an intolerable length, and drive us so out of love with both philosophy and science as to paint unreason with a double allurement. A father kneeling to his mad son to let an old mistress go, and the son, struggling out of the gathering torpor of intelligence to stare at the rising sun:—