they want o f a pensioner,’ he said angrily, ‘ is not only that he
should become a savant, but that he should gain a good position in
the world. It is far from such ideas to those of an egalitarian.’ And
when the bourgeois of Besangon took it upon themselves to
congratulate him on having made the beginning of a great career,
he was even more disgusted, and began after all to think Paris
might be preferable to his native town. ‘There is still, you tell me,
intelligence and light in the capital,’ he stormed three weeks later
to Ackermann. ‘As for me, I live among sheep.’ More than two
hundred people, he complained, had congratulated him on his
chances of making a fortune and ‘of participating in the hunt for
places and great appointments, o f attaining honours and brilliant
positions.’ Nobody had told him that he owed himself to the
‘cause o f the poor, to the liberation of the lowly, to the instruc
tion of the people.’ Nobody had told him to ‘tell the truth and
take up the cause of the orphan’ without expecting any reward
other than ‘the blessings of his brothers.’ Proudhon took very
seriously the oath he had made in his application to the Academy,
and nothing enraged him more than the insinuation of cynicism
contained in these suggestions that he should follow the road
to prosperity and power, regardless of the class from which he
sprang. He was justified, for throughout his life he followed,
according to his own highly individual lights, the path he had
marked out for himself in 1838 when he wrote his application to
the academicians.8
In November, 1838, Proudhon made his third departure for
Paris. But before we begin to narrate the further course o f his
life, there is a passage in his correspondence from Besangon that
merits attention. It appears in the letter to Ackermann on the
20th August; the poet had been bewailing some reverse in his
personal life, and Proudhon gave him stoical consolation,
mingled with an elusively incomplete fragment of autobiography.
‘It is not at the end o f the way we follow that one meets
happiness; sacrifices, rather— sufferings, insurmountable disap
pointments, desertions, despairs... I have written during
these last days to my former mistress, at present in Lucerne; she
is dying of boredom, and perhaps of love; she asked me for
THE HILLS OF THE JURA3i