The chapter 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