er immediately following this one also remains unfinished. It
was not intended to close the narrative thus left uncompleted; but of
those many and so various works which have not unworthily associated
with almost every department of literature the name of a single English
writer, it is CHAPTER THE LAST. Had the author lived to finish it, he
would doubtless have added to his Iliad of the Siege of Paris its most
epic episode, by here describing the mighty combat between those two
princes of the Parisian Bourse, the magnanimous Duplessis and the
redoubtable Louvier. Amongst the few other pages of the book which
have been left unwritten, we must also reckon with regret some pages
descriptive of the reconciliation between Graham Vane and Isaura
Cicogna; but, fortunately for the satisfaction of every reader who
may have followed thus far the fortunes of Die Parisians, all that our
curiosity is chiefly interested to learn has been recorded in the Envoi,
which was written before the completion of the novel.

We know not, indeed, what has become of these two Parisian types of
a Beauty not of Holiness, the poor vain Poet of the Pave, and the
good-hearted Ondine of the Gutter. It is obvious, from the absence of
all allusion to them in Lemercier's letter to Vane, that they had passed
out of the narrative before that letter was written. We must suppose
the catastrophe of their fates to have been described, in some preceding
chapter, by the author himself; who would assuredly not have left
141. Gustave Rameau in permanent pos session of his ill-merited and
ill-ministered fortune. That French representative of the appropriately
popular poetry of modern ideas, which prefers "the roses and raptures
of vice" to "the lilies and languors of virtue," cannot have been
irredeemably reconciled by the sweet savours of the domestic pot-au jeu,
even when spiced with pungent whiffs of repudiated disreputability, to
any selfish betrayal of the cause of universal social emancipation from
the personal proprieties. If poor Julie Caumartin has perished in the
siege of Paris, with all the grace of a self-wrought redemption still
upon her, we shall doubtless deem her fate a happier one than any she
could have found in prolonged existence as Madame Rameau; and a certain
modicum of this world's good things will, in that case, have been
rescued for worthier employment by Graham Vane. To that assurance
nothing but Lemercier's description of the fate of Victor