The story of Don Juan, the archetypal libertine, varies from version to version, with these basic elements: Don Juan seduces a girl of noble family (wilefully, of course), and is violently confronted by the girl's father, whom he kills. He later comes upon a statue of the father and mockingly invites it to his home for dinner. The father's statue or ghost duly appears, and drags Don Juan down to hell.

The first version of the Don Juan story was told by Tirso de Molina in El Burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de Piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest), published in about 1615. Don Juan is based on the figure of a legendary 17th century Spanish nobleman, Don Juan Tenorio, whose real identity is arguable although, in his hometown, Seville, it is generally accepted that he was Miguel Mañara y Vicentelo de Leca (1627-1679), a wealthy, influential citizen and, paradoxically, candidate for saint, or at least beatification. So how can a fictional character be created before its model is born, and how does literature's most dastardly cad come to approach saintly status?

Miguel Mañara was the youngest of ten children, but his two elder brothers had died when he was 13, leaving him as the heir to the considerable family fortune. It is reasonable to suppose then, that he was not especially prepared for the responsibility entailed and could well, for example, have preferred leisure to work. His parents married him off to a rich heiress, Doña Jerónima, when he was 21 and she 18 (or 20, according to the source), and it seems to have been a happy marriage, the couple growing closer over the years. But she died of a fever in her early thirties, without having had children, and he was heartbroken. He was a powerful, much respected man, a Knight of the Order of Calatrava, a nobleman with a reputation for haughtiness and vanity, not to say bouts of cholera, but the stuffing had been knocked out of him. His depression led him to apply to enter the Hermandad de la Santa Caridad, and around about this time, he wrote a testamento (I am not sure if it was a will as such or had another purpose) in which he roundly sounds off at his former self:

“I, Don Miguel Mañara, ashes and dust, wretched sinner, as almost every day of my life I have offended the Lord God on High, my father, whose creature and vile slave I own to be. I served Babylon and the devil, her prince, with thousands of abominations, conceipts, adulteries, oaths, scandals and larcenies, the sins and evil deeds of which are countless and which only God's great wisdom can number and his infinite patience suffer, and his infinite pity forgive.”

"And I who write this (I confess with pain in my heart and tears in my eyes) left the holy mountain of Jesus Christ for over thirty years and served Babylon and her vices blindly and madly. I drank from the dirty chalice of her pleasures, ungrateful to my Lord her enemy, tirelessly drinking from the filthy pools of her abominations."

Hot stuff, eh? And even juicier when you realise that the "Babylon" he mentions is not the city, but the Whore of Babylon, one of the New Testament's more entertaining figures, the Fallen Angel who "sitteth upon many waters: with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication" (not content with that, she rode the seven-headed Beast, the one with that 666 codename).

It is unlikely that Don Miguel had really been as bad as he made himself out to be, but in any case he was determined to earn redemption by throwing himself into the work of the brotherhood, and was made the Hermano Mayor. He had a new church built for them, next to a hospital for the poor and helpless where aged invalids are still attended to. He is buried in a crypt under a slab outside the entrance to the church he built. The slab has the inscription, "Aquí yacen los huesos y cenizas del peor hombre que ha habido en el mundo. Rueguen a Dios por él (Here lie the bones and ashes of the worst man ever in the world. Pray to God for him)" (personally, I think what Miguel Mañara really needed was an hour a week with Miss Sadie Severa, who could at least have helped him to learn to enjoy feeling despicable). His name was put forward for beatification the year after his death.

Meanwhile and subsequently, new versions of the Don Juan story were written (I have taken the following list from the Wikipedia entry for "Don Juan"):

1665: Molière's comic play Dom Juan
1787: Mozart's opera Don Giovanni
1821: Byron's epic poem Don Juan
1831: Alexandre Dumas, père's play Don Juan de Marana
1841: Franz Liszt's Réminiscences de Don Juan on themes from the Mozart opera
1844: José Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio
1878: The Finding of Don Juan by Haidee, painting by Ford Madox Brown
1889: Richard Strauss' symphonic poem Don Juan
1903: George Bernard Shaws play Man and Superman
Innumerable movies (http://www.imdb.com/), perhaps the most famous of which is the 1995 film "Don Juan deMarco (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112883/)" starring Johnny Depp in the role of Don Juan, and also starring Marlon Brando.
Max Frisch's Don Juan oder die Liebe zur Geometrie

Outside Seville, where it was taken for granted that Don Miguel had been a great womanizer and it was really considered a point in his favour, hardly anyone made the Don Juan-Miguel Mañara connection until the nineteenth century, and one of the crucial players may have been Próspero Mérimée, the author of the original Carmen, who seems to have been something of a snotrag. At the time, Spain-bashing was quite the fashion in Europe, particularly France, Mérimée was always quick to form moral judgements, and what he heard in Seville as historical gossip may have seemed much more reprehensible to his bourgeois mentality than to the religious but tolerant folk of the city. According to this theory, the Don Juan-Miguel Mañara link consequently became incorporated into Spain's "black legend."

But let's not forget that the Zorilla version of Don Juan Tenorio appeared around about this time, as well. The great attraction of the Don Juan figure is its complexity and contradictions, not least being the majestic integrity of his refusal to repent. For example, in the Mozart opera, when Don Giovanni is dragged to hell insisting "Ch'io non mi pento," the result is to make him more sympathetic: he may be an out-and-out bastard but he is at least a consistent bastard, and there is nobility in his willingness to accept damnation rather than compromise. But Zorilla stages his repentance, and it is generally accepted that his Don Juan, at least, is definitely based on Miguel Mañara.

Both Don Juan and Miguel Mañara are present in Seville. A statue of Don Juan Tenorio stands in the Plaza de los Refinadores in the former Jewish quarter, the Barrio Santa Cruz. Miguel Mañara has his own street (next to the Alcázares Reales) and at least two statues, one outside the Palacio San Telmo (currently the Parliament of Andalusia, the other in a tiny park opposite the Santa Caridad Hospital. The latter is my favourite: it is a larger-than-lifesize figure of a seventeenth-century gentleman with cape, floppy broad-rimmed hat and sword at his belt, carrying in his arms a semi-clothed, barefoot person evidently representing the helpless. I have to go back to the photos to remember that the face of this statue of Miguel Mañara really has an annoyingly sanctimonious look to it, because in my memory it is intelligent, jaunty and arrogant, the face of a man you would be flattered to talk to and pleased to drink with, but one who you would not let your wife within a mile of, much less your daughter.