Paul Valéry (1871–1945), the great French poet and essayist, did not finished his last work Mon Faust, however it was published after his death. It is poetic and philosophical drama in two parts. The story of the eponymous hero takes place in our times. Unlike in Johann Wolfgang Goethe,s Faust, the devil, not a man, is here tempted. It is obvious, because for Valéry the devil is not attractive enough to be the tempter par excellence. The unknown God is probably absent in the modern world, whereas man is lonely, tormented uncertainty. Mon Faust has not been translated into Polish, however, it is performed in theaters around the world from time to time.

This article is a critical reappraisal of Juliusz Słowacki’s translation of Calderón’s El príncipe constant (1843), which acquired a place of its own in Słowacki’s oeuvre and continued to attract a lot of interest throughout the 20th century. Its lasting appeal is due to its extraordinary unity of tone, dramatic construction and stylized language, which in effect, as some critics have said, out-Baroques Calderón’s Baroque original. This article analyzes this contention in detail and tries to answer the question what were the sources and reasons of Słowacki’s fascination with the 17-th century Spanish poet and playwright. The second part of the article deals with two of the 20th-century stage productions of the drama and the adapters’ handling of Słowacki’s text. The summary includes a brief survey of the treatment Calderón’s heirs accorded to his key trope perigrinatio vitae (‘life is pilgrimage’).