What had dominated everything was a wise and impenetrable trickery by which Nature persuaded all young girls to become women, to adorn themselves with irresistible allurements, and to open their arms to men in order to assure the continuity of life, hiding from their truthful eyes the dangers and sufferings to which she condemns them by surrounding them with flowers. And thus humanity had continued without a stop, believing that its destiny was to enjoy without end and progress without a limit; and thus it had finally reached the annihilation of the race and the planet, without leaving anything behind of its splendours and its conquests. What is past is past. Neither terrestrial humanity nor its abode remained. All had disappeared, all had been suppressed, except the spirit. The universal spirit still reigned. But the metamorphoses of matter had transformed everything. The entire history of our globe had been wiped off the slate by the sponge of Time; and the sidereal universe went on as if that history had never been written. * * * * * For several millions of centuries, the Sun had been a globe of gas, shedding light and heat around it. After being a brilliant white it had become yellow and then red, passing, in the course of its cooling process, through the successive stages of white, yellow, orange, and red suns like Sirius, Arcturus, Betelgeuse, and Antares. As it had grown cooler, terrestrial life had become attenuated. The Sun had finally been covered with a solid crust, often pierced by the pressure of the incandescent lava within, and giving rise to prodigious volcanoes. With the failure of light and heat, the joys and pains of terrestrial life had come to an end. And the radiant day-star of former days had become an obscure globe covered with oceans and clouds, without a new sun to illuminate it, without day or twilight, careering through space in the eternal night, and gradually enveloped in a winding sheet of ice and snow consisting of carbonic acid. All the nations of the Earth had gone to rest in as many cemeteries. The dying Sun had recapitulated in its evolution the phases of its ancestors. In infinite space, the extinct suns are much more numerous than the luminous suns, and the stars revived by collision with another are the exception. Temporary stars, which only shine a short time, are exceptional occurrences. Thus our extinct Sun still roamed through the void, carrying along its retinue of defunct planets and travelling with great speed through empty and unconcerned space. And at the time of which we are speaking, the stars still shone in the sky, the worlds still gravitated around the suns in space; but they were no longer the same stars, nor the same suns, planets, or humanities; it was neither the Earth nor its contemporaries. Life continued to blossom; but it was not our life.