Jean-Pierre Pauthier, the sinologist, who was already preparing
his book on Taoism, and with Olympe Micaud, a young Comtois
poet.
Proudhon valued friendship and knew how to practise it. ‘I
spit on the gods and on men, and I believe only in study and
friendship,’ he declared, and there is a significant difference be
tween the pleasure with which he always pronounced the word
‘amitie” and the disgust with which he often spoke o f ‘amour'.
Throughout his life the acquiring and keeping of friends re
mained one of his talents, but none of his other friendships was
to have the same almost romantic intensity as his relationship
with Fallot. Fallot’s family, well-to-do industrialists, disapproved
o f his desire to follow an intellectual vocation, and he had there
fore severed his connection with them and come to Besan9on to
study in frugal independence. In order to live, he prepared a
Latin edition o f the Lives of the Saints. It was printed by Gauthier,
and one day Fallot was surprised to see some improvements in
his Latin text which showed that a student of the language had
been at work on the proofs. He asked the printer who had made
the corrections. ‘One of our workmen,’ was the answer, and
Fallot, astonished to hear of an artisan who was also an excellent
Latinist, immediately made Proudhon’s acquaintance.
Fallot was two years older than Proudhon, and his upbringing
had been far more comfortable, but they had in common an
extraordinary passion for languages and a voracity for miscel
laneous erudition. Through his work as a printer Proudhon had
already performed the considerable feat o f teaching himself
Hebrew and was becoming interested in etymology, and Fallot
encouraged him in pursuing this branch of learning. But he also
widened his friend’s perspective in a more general way, since he
was the first intellectual Proudhon had yet known whose mind
was not bound by the prejudices of Catholic dogma. Fallot had
that omnivorous curiosity which so often characterises French
Protestants (Gide was an outstanding example in our own age).
‘I would like to be an eye,’ was his most self-revelatory phrase,
but he might have added to the eye an ear to embrace his craze
for words.
During the evenings they spent together in Fallot’s gloomy,
smoke-filled room, Proudhon began to emerge from his twilit
world of theological controversies and* to absorb the great
THE HILLS OF THE JURA