a lever whose power you do not know,’ he exhorted his undecided
friend. ‘Decide, make an end to it; if you wish to leave the print
ing house, if you can get away from Besancjon, if you want to
reach your objective in the shortest way, here it is: come to Paris
— I have a bed to give you, I have a revenue o f 1,500 livres to
share with you and six months will not pass, after your arrival,
before I shall have succeeded in getting you an occupation by
which you can live.’
ThisofferbrokedownProudhon’sresistance. ‘Iflewtohis appeal.’
In more prosaic terms, he walked to Paris and was there before the
end of March. Fallot’s welcome was as generous as his word; ‘I
entered his house,’ said Proudhon, ‘like the house of my father.’
Proudhon now settled down to familiarise himself with the
Latin Quarter, where Fallot lived in the Rue Mazarin. Paris in
those days, before Haussmann had set to work on his vast pro
gramme of reconstruction, was still the city o f narrow mediaeval
streets which had seen the Revolution; indeed, the district Proud
hon frequented was virtually unaffected by the changes during the
Empire, and the visitor who walks in it today still traverses the
narrow carriage-ways, and passes between the high shabby houses
which Proudhon saw when he first arrived there, less than two
years after the July Revolution of 1830.
In some respects metropolitan life disquieted and disgusted this
uncompromising young provincial. Fallot introduced him to his
scholarly friends and to the savants who gathered at the house of
his uncle, the pastor Cuvier, but Proudhon was awkward and
suspicious among these professional intellectuals, and he preferred
to continue his studies alone. Besides, the city was under the
shadow of a cholera epidemic which gave life an unusually sombre
aspect, and on Maundy Thursday Proudhon wrote a letter to his
parents in which the discontent he felt with his circumstances
appears clearly beneath the attempt to reassure their querulous
anxiety. It is the first letter we have from his hand, and one of the
few strictly contemporary documents of his life at this period,
when the revolutionary prophet was just beginning to stir under
the rough surface of the self-taught artisan with a mania for words.
‘My dear Parents,
The water of Paris does not trouble me; it is more agreeable than
that o f Besan$on, because it is fully filtered and saturated with
THE HILLS OF THE JURA