THE HILLS OF THE JURAwhen he had long left his native city, he still claimed with pride
that more than a dozen o f his old workmates were among his
friends; the rest were dead. One o f the survivors, Milliet, who
later became the editor of a Burgundian newspaper, remembered
Proudhon as an ‘excellent boy, always passing his hand through
his hair, and going from time to time to the desks of the correc
tors to ask them about their occupation o f gleaning errors and to
raise questions concerning history or the events o f the day.’
There were times, indeed, when Pierre-Joseph found the labour
o f the printing works more onerous than he could endure. ‘The
day was ten hours long,’ he remembered. ‘In that period I had
sometimes to read in galley eight sheets of theological and de
votional works, an excessive task to which I owe my shortsight
edness. Poisoned by bad air, by metallic vapours, by human
breath, my mind dulled by insipid reading, I found nothing more
urgent than to go out o f the town in order to shake off that
infection... To find the purest air I would scale the high hills
that border the valley o f the Doubs, and I did not fail, whenever
there was a storm, to treat myself to the spectacle. Crouching in
a hole in the rocks, I loved to look into the face of flashing
Jupiter, without either defying or fearing him... I told myself
that the lightning and the thunder, the winds, the clouds and the
rain, were all one with me.’
It is possible that these lines, written in 1858 at a time when
Proudhon was most opposed to organised religion, tended to
exaggerate his adolescent leaning towards pantheism. Neverthe
less, his first years as a printer do appear to be marked by a
double crisis, which he may well have seen symbolised and re
flected in the conflict o f the elements. For what seems to have
been the only occasion in his life, he experienced intense romantic
love, and at the same time he underwent a renewal o f religious
fervour that extended over two or three years, and ended in final
disillusionment with Catholic orthodoxy.
Nothing is known about his first love beyond the references he
himself makes, and these are inexplicit. ‘I know today,’ he was to
write in his diary for 1846,1 ‘what at twenty made my spirit so
full, so loving, so enraptured: what made women seem to me so
1 Proudhon’s diaries, which are in the possession of his descendants and are
yet unpublished, begin in 1843 , and their eleven volumes cover, with varying
fullness, the whole period up to his death in 1865.