Lambert highly instructed in ancient languages, have taken the
Montarsolo Press on good conditions; they will begin by pub
lishing a Notary’s Dictionary.’ Besides Lambert, a second friend,
Maurice, went into the business as a sleeping partner. Lambert
and Maurice appear to have put up almost all the capital, and the
press was conducted in Lambert’s name.
O f the early days o f Lambert and Company no information
exists, but it is certain that during the winter o f 1836 to 1837
Proudhon suffered from an illness (its nature is not recorded) that
forced him to abandon work for some months. It is possible that
his business responsibilities may have combined with the shock
of Fallot’s death in the previous July to precipitate the disorder.
He utilised his convalescence to make his first serious attempt at
writing— ‘a few fairly happy essays in sacred criticism and philo
sophy’— which led him to devote his attention once again to
‘grammatical researches.’
It is to the latter that we owe his first published work. In his
admiration for Bergier, Proudhon persuaded his partners to
reprint the theologian’s outdated philological work, Elements
primitifs des langues, in which Bergier tried to find the common
roots of the main world languages as a basis for determining the
manner o f their formation. To bring the book up to date, Proud
hon himself wrote an Essai de Grammaire Generale, which was
printed as a supplement to Bergier’s text.
Later he disowned this essay as ‘apocryphal,’ ‘perverse’ and
‘feeble.’ But at the time he was delighted with it and with the fact
that some Bisontin ‘persons of merit’ had, as he assured Just
Muiron, found in it ‘things which are entirely new and curious.’
Its substance need not long delay us, since, as he himself later
declared, it was based on ‘a thesis definitely rejected by science’,
but there are several features which can profitably be brought out
as having some bearing upon his later intellectual development.
The first is his attempt to confute the philologists who claim
that the key word in all languages is etre, by a rival claim that it is
in reality moi. The psychological connotations o f this argument
seem to point back to the childhood o f misery which toughened
Proudhon’s own ego, and forward, not only to the anarchism
that is basic to his whole later teaching, but also to the highly
personal and anti-systematic nature of his thinking in general.
More than once, as one reads through the antiquated philo
THE HILLS OF THE JURA