THE MAN OF AFFAIRS
pocket. The sole means of earning any money in the near future
was through his publisher, for Guillaumin offered to pay a small
advance on his next book and to take articles for the Journal des
Economistes.
Proudhon did not escape from Lyons as quickly as he had antici
pated, and the slowness of winding up his connection with the
Gauthiers was doubtless due to a conscientious desire not to
embarrass them by leaving any o f his tasks uncompleted. On the
ijth November, he was still writing to Euphrasie from Lyons,
and he did not leave that city until at least a week afterwards. In
the end he appears to have parted cordially from his employers,
for his friendship with Antoine Gauthier continued to the end of
his life.
From Lyons Proudhon went first to the Franche-Comtd, where
he was anxious to finish the sequel to Economic Contradictions. But
on arriving he found his mother seriously ill— ‘in a reverie or
lethargy that removed her from the things o f this world— an
apprenticeship to death.’ When the need to organise Le Represen-
tant du Peuple made it imperative for him to return to Paris, a
deceptive appearance o f recovery on his mother’s part led him to
suppose he could leave her until the spring. Tw o days after his
arrival in Paris, she was dead. ‘Sorrows and misfortunes killed
that woman,’ he remarked in a note where his inner sorrow per
colates through all his imposed restraint. Her death renewed his
guilty feeling that the life he chose had prevented him from giving
his parents either the material comforts or the pride in his success
which they might justly have expected. ‘I have been cheated of
my dearest hope, that o f proving to the authors of my days that
I was not deceived in my economic studies, and of letting them
enjoy the fruits of my work.’ His sense of solitude became more
poignant than ever. ‘I die by degrees and today I have hardly any
further ties with the world,’ he noted. ‘I can call myself free. But
what freedom!’ And to Maurice he wrote: ‘I tell myself in vain
... that I no longer have either family, or home, or status, or
position; I cannot believe in this complete denuding.’
There was indeed a peculiar fatality about Proudhon’s situation
at the end of 1847. Deliberately he had cut himself off from his
business life in Lyons and had embarked on a career in Paris in
which his economic interests, as well as his daily occupation of
writing, would inevitably be bound up with the trend of political
ri3