El Curioso Impertinente

Mignon and Lothario

I was listening to an overture written for the opera Mignon by Ambroise Thomas about the time of the end of our civil war.  It is a fluffy piece with a surface plot resembling the Soap Opera "Another World".

One of the characters is "Lothario", a wandering minstrel type.  I hadn't thought much about the opera since I learned it in grad school but, of course, when trying to do other things important, the mind wanders where it will.....

Ages ago, my brother had a dalliance of sorts while dating "another"....in summary he was engaged to two women at the same time.  My father was not pleased.  My mother called him a "Lothario".  I had no idea what that meant and at that time, there was no Internet to make things easy.  Intrigued, I ambled to the library and consulted real books. Pages. Papers. aha! Found an early one:

"Don Quixote, Part One contains stories that do not directly involve the two main characters, but which are narrated by some of the figures encountered by Quixote and Sancho during their travels. The longest and best known story is El Curioso Impertinente (The Impertinently Curious Man), in Part One, Book Four, chapters 33–35, which is read to a group of travelers at an inn, about a nobleman, Anselmo, who becomes obsessed with testing his wife's fidelity, and talks his close friend Lothario into attempting to seduce her".

This made no sense. Still doesn't.  I get it, what my mom meant, but the name/term always intrigued me.  It is a good one to call someone.  Wonder what the female counterpart is?  Jezebel perhaps.