penditure of energy and incessant toil, in spite of
the assistance of inter-terrestrial forces, had been necessary for
packing, transporting, and housing it all! And yet, for the greater
part, it was useless to those who voluntarily this task imposed upon
themselves. They all knew it. They were well aware that they were
probably condemned for the rest of their days to a hard and
matter-of-fact existence, for which their lives as artists,
philosophers, and men of letters, had scarcely prepared them. But--for
the first time--the idea of duty to be done found its way into these
hearts, the beauty of self-sacrifice subdued these dilettanti. They
sacrificed themselves to the Unknown, to that which is not yet, to the
posterity towards which were turned all the desires of their electrified
spirits, as all the atoms of the magnetised iron turn towards the pole.
It was thus that, at the time when there were still countries, in the
midst of some great national peril, a wave of heroism swept over the
most frivolous cities. However admirable may have been, at the epoch of
which I speak, this collective need of individual self-sacrifice, ought
we to be astonished at it, when we know from the treatises on natural
history that have been preserved, that mere insects giving the same
example of foresight and self-renunciation, used before their death to
employ their latest energies to collect provisions useless to
themselves, and only useful in the future to their larvae at their birth.

IV

SAVED!

The day at length arrived on which, all the intellectual inheritance of
the past, all the real capital of humanity having been rescued from the
general shipwreck, the castaways were able to go down in their turn,
having henceforth only to think of their own preservation. That day
which forms, as everyone knows, the starting point of our new era,
called the era of salvation, was a solemn holiday. The sun, however, as
if to arouse regret, indulged in a few last bursts of sunshine. On
casting a final glance on this brightness, which they were never to
behold again, the survivors of mankind could not, we are told, restrain
their tears. A young poet on the brink of the pit that yawned to swallow
them up, repeated in the musical language of Euripides, the farewell to
the light of the dying Iphigenia. But that was a short-lived moment of
very natural emotion which speedily changed into an outburst of
unspeakable delight.

How great in f