Street

Mephistopheles has arranged everything: tomorrow evening Martha will receive them at her house, and Gretchen will be there. The visit is nominally a legal formality — Martha needs Faust's testimony to certify her husband's death so she can deal with the estate — and is in fact the occasion for the first proper meeting of Faust and Gretchen.

There is one problem: to certify the death, Faust must swear to the death of a man he has never met, on a date and in circumstances he has no knowledge of. He protests. He cannot lie under oath to a court, even a local one. This is asking him to commit perjury for the sake of an assignation with a girl he has met once in the street.

Mephistopheles is cheerfully impatient with this scruple. Is Faust being serious? A doctor, a professor, a man of the world — has he never noticed how official proceedings work? What is a legal testimony but a species of organized fiction? What is a deathbed attestation but what the witness can be made to agree to under appropriate circumstances? Faust, burning to see Gretchen again, accepts the argument. They will go tomorrow.