L'ENVOI.

The intelligent reader will perceive that the story I relate is virtually
closed with the preceding chapter; though I rejoice to think that what
may be called its plot does not find its _dinoument_ amidst the crimes
and the frenzy of the _Guerre des Communeaux_. Fit subjects these,
indeed, for the social annalist in times to come. When crimes that
outrage humanity have their motive or their excuse in principles that
demand the demolition of all upon which the civilisation of Europe has
its basis-worship, property, and marriage--in order to reconstruct a new
civilisation adapted to a new humanity, it is scarcely possible for the
serenest contemporary to keep his mind in that state of abstract
reasoning with which Philosophy deduces from some past evil some existent
good. For my part, I believe that throughout the whole known history of
mankind, even in epochs when reason is most misled and conscience most
perverted, there runs visible, though fine and threadlike, the chain of
destiny, which has its roots in the throne of an All-wise and an All-
good; that in the wildest illusions by which muititudes are frenzied,
there may be detected gleams of prophetic truths; that in the fiercest
crimes which, like the disease of an epidemic, characterise a peculiar
epoch under abnormal circumstances, there might be found instincts or
aspirations towards some social virtues to be realised ages afterwards by
happier generations, all tending to save man from despair of the future,
were the whole society to unite for the joyless hour of his race in the
abjuration of soul and the denial of God, because all irresistibly
establishing that yearning towards an unseen future which is the leading