Faust drinks the rejuvenating potion in the Witch’s Kitchen at a moment of sharp resistance: he distrusts witchcraft and asks whether Nature or a noble mind can offer a better remedy than an old woman’s concoction. Mephistopheles presses the Witch to make the drink, then persuades Faust to take it. The ritual ends with Faust leaving the circle and asking to look in a mirror at a beautiful woman’s form. The episode makes bodily rejuvenation the hinge between Faust’s frustration and a renewed, desire-driven movement into the world.

Resistance and the promise of another remedy

In the Witch’s Kitchen, a great cauldron stands over a fire, vapors rise into shifting figures, and apes attend the hearth amid a room crowded with fantastic implements. Against this deliberately disordered setting, Faust voices a pointed objection to the treatment proposed for him. Its signs repel him; he doubts that an old hag’s brew could recover his lost years, and laments that no potent balm has been invented by Nature or a noble mind. His response is not simple assent to the supernatural: he measures the proposed cure against a more dignified, natural remedy and finds it wanting.

Mephistopheles answers that Faust is speaking sensibly, but redirects the question. A simpler and more suitable way to make him young exists, he says, in another and eccentric chapter. The assurance does not resolve Faust’s doubts by explaining the treatment. Instead, it frames rejuvenation as something available through the strange practices of the kitchen, with Mephistopheles acting as the advocate who moves the encounter forward.

The Witch’s preparation

When the Witch asks how she can help, Mephistopheles requests a goblet of her familiar drink and specifies that it should come from the oldest brew, whose years produce double strength. The Witch agrees to pour from a bottle she herself sometimes drinks from, while warning that anyone who drinks it without due preparation will die within an hour. That warning establishes a concrete danger before Faust takes the potion; the episode does not present the drink as an ordinary or harmless remedy.

Mephistopheles dismisses the risk on Faust’s behalf, calling him a friend with whom the drink will agree and claiming that he deserves the best the kitchen can offer. He instructs the Witch to draw her circle, speak her adjuration, and fill the goblet. The preparation is staged as a ritual: the Witch draws a circle, places mysterious objects within it, and brings out a large book. The apes are made to serve as a reading desk and hold torches as she beckons Faust into the circle. The comic improvised apparatus and the solemn gestures coexist, making the cure at once theatrical and unsettling.

Incantation and the moment of drinking

The Witch declaims a formula that rearranges numbers through a series of absurd instructions, ending by presenting the result as her rule for counting. Faust reacts with alarm and confusion, saying that the speech sounds to him like a hundred thousand fools in chorus and that his head is nearly splitting. His objection gives the incantation an immediate effect in the scene: rather than convincing him of the ritual’s authority, it intensifies his unease.

Mephistopheles cuts short the recitation and again asks the Witch for the drink. He assures her that it will not harm Faust, describing him as a man of many degrees and many experiences of drinking. The Witch pours the potion with ceremony. As Faust lifts it to his lips, a light flame arises; Mephistopheles urges him to drink quickly, arguing that he should not fear fire when he is already allied with the Devil. The Witch then breaks the circle, and Faust steps out. The sequence places the risk, the ritual, the flame, and Mephistopheles’ pressure directly around Faust’s act of drinking, while leaving the precise preparation that makes the potion safe unexplained.

Rejuvenation, desire, and the translator’s form

After the drink, Mephistopheles tells Faust to walk at once so that rapid movement will bring perspiration and carry the liquor’s power through his body. He promises that Faust will then learn to value indolence and soon feel Cupid stirring with fresh energy. The cure is thus connected not just with restored youth but with a renewed capacity for erotic desire. Faust’s first response is to ask for a quick look in the mirror, where he wants to see a beautiful woman’s form. The scene turns swiftly from skepticism about the brew to attention fixed on beauty, marking the potion as the threshold to a more desirous phase of Faust’s action.

The translator’s introduction makes the episode’s verse form part of how this kind of scene should be read. It argues that poetic form contributes essentially to meaning and that translating poetry into prose resembles translating music into speech. The translator describes this English version as an attempt to reproduce Faust’s original metres, preserving rhythm closely while giving meaning priority when the two cannot be reconciled. In that account, the Witch’s comic formula, the quick exchanges, and Mephistopheles’ urging are not merely a sequence of plot information: their rhythmic character belongs to the dramatic expression. The introduction also cautions that Faust is not technically perfect and explains that occasional changes in metre or rhyme do not, in the translator’s view, invalidate the larger metrical plan.