Proudhon - A Biography

THE MAN OF AFFAIRS
even saw himself as the writer who might start the necessary
revolution in dramatic forms. He went so far as to sketch several
scenarios— among others, for a tragedy on Judith and Holofernes
and for a play on the trial of Galileo, subjects close to his own re­
bellious turn of mind. It seems to have been the pressure o f other
affairs rather than doubts of his own ability that prevented him
from completing these works.
In the winter o f 1843 this ambition to write for the theatre was
by no means the only preoccupation that distracted Proudhon from
his studies. The news that Ackermann had married a young poetess
brought him back to the problem around which he prowled in
these years like a beast around the fire that scares and attracts.
‘A t last you are married!’ he wrote. ‘I received this great news
without surprise and without pleasure; without surprise because
it was in your nature to end up in that way; without pleasure be­
cause with my thirty-four years soon completed I am more dis­
posed to pity lovers than to feel a real sympathy for their pretend­
ed happiness. This does not hinder our friend Pauthier from
writing that he is holding at my disposition a pretty peasant girl
of Neuilly-sur-Marne; he pretends that in the way o f a wife a
peasant girl is all a philosopher needs. Indeed, I do not accept
that ambitious title, but we shall see the little girl, and, by God,
if it is written that I shall marry, I will accept my fate with a
completely philosophical resignation.’
Nothing more was heard of the girl from Neuilly, but the
question of marriage and its effect on husbands still troubled him,
and a year afterwards he remarked to Ackermann that, of all their
old group in Besan$on, he himself was the only one who had re­
mained unmarried, and also the only one who had remained con­
sistent in ‘the philadelphic bond’ o f friendship. ‘I notice that mar­
riage operates in a strange way on you other gentlemen, who have
taken wives. A t first you begin by wishing your friends as much
happiness as has come to you; then, withdrawing gradually into
the household, you end by forgetting that you were companions.
I used to believe that love and paternity augmented friendship
among men; I see today that this was only a paradox, an illusion.
Love is thus as limited in man as his intelligence.’
But, though he seems here to reject it as an enemy of the higher
relationship of friendship, it is evident that love, or at least its
physical manifestation, had not rejected him, and early in 1845