His wife, in her peasant’s dress, came to him then for one of those brief moments, stolen from Heaven. She knew him well. That ‘Justification’ of his conduct, his Apologia, that looking back on deeds and sacrifices meant to bring the Golden Age to men and which _had_ brought, or so it seemed, the hell of the Terror--this was no fit work for him now. Look ahead! Look on to that new country which your pure patriotism and your self-devotion,--ay, and this Terror itself--shall have helped to make--that warless world of equal rights and ever widening knowledge, the beautiful dream of a sinless and sorrowless earth, which may yet be realised, in part. On the manuscript of the ‘Justification’ there is written in her hand ‘_Left at my request to write the History of the Progress of the Human Mind_.’ In the very shadow of death, Condorcet told the story of men’s advance toward life, of the evolution of their understanding from the earliest times until now. Calm, just, and serene, with not an intemperate line, not an angry thought, the ‘Progress’ reads as if it had been written by some tranquil philosopher who had seen his plan for man’s redemption adopted, and had received for his labour honours, peace, and competence. Its fault, indeed, is its too sanguine idealism. Condorcet, like many enthusiasts, thought his own way of salvation for man the only way; he believed his own magnificent dream to be the only possible Utopia. Beneath the guillotine and in social convulsions for which history has no parallel, he looked through and past them, in that last great chapter, in the exalted spirit of noble prophecy, to that Golden Age which _must_ surely come! But ‘The Progress of the Human Mind’ is something more than a splendid hope, more than the greatest and most famous of its author’s works. It bears highest testimony to the character of him who in the supreme hour of his individual life could thus forget himself, and in the midst of personal ruin, foresee with exultant joy the salvation of the race. It remains for ever among the masterpieces which men cannot afford to forget. During his hiding Condorcet also wrote ‘The Letter of Junius to William Pitt’ in which he expresses his aversion to Pitt, and an essay, never printed, ‘On the Physical Degradation of the Royal Races.’ He also planned a universal philosophical language. In December, 1793, he wrote ‘The Letter of a Polish Exile in Siberia to his Wife’--a poem in which another exile bade farewell to the woman he loved. The death-shadows were creeping closer now.