consolation. “ Consider,” I said to her, “ what is passing around
you; are you not gentle, chaste, hardworking, honest? How is it
that you find it hard to live, while a crowd of prostitutes display
their impudent luxury? I will explain this mystery to you. God
has willed that when evil and vice have reached their height
among mankind, the good shall be the first to suffer, so that they
may awake and oppose the flood which is about to drown them.
There are a hundred thousand young men in France who, like
me, have sworn to fulfil that holy mission, and sooner or later
they will know how to conquer or to die. It is for men of courage
to fight with head and arm; but you, poor girl, must pray to God
that he gives us intelligence and audacity, that he blesses our
ardour and makes his cause triumphl” What do you think a
young woman feels for a lover who talks to her in this manner?’
‘What, indeed?’ we may echo. But more interesting than the
priggishness of the sermon is the hint it contains of an amorous
relationship which had proceeded farther than the chaste infatua
tion of Proudhon’s early twenties. Once again we are at a loss
to identify the girl he addresses, but there are two passages in
De la Justice which throw light on the incident as a whole. In the
first he deals with the accusations which his critics had brought
against the chastity of which he boasted, perhaps a little too
extravagantly. He maintained obstinately that his life had indeed
been chaste. But he brought a curious qualification into the argu
ment.
‘I am chaste; I am naturally so, by inclination... but above
all through respect for women... However, this does not
mean that I have always been o f a perfect continence. There
exists, you know, a great difference between these two things,
chastity and continence, of which the one does not always pre
suppose the other... Very well, is that not a good text for
declamation— that in a century o f free loves, despite my natural
chastity, I should have happened, doubtless on more than one
occasion, to sin against the virtue of continence ?’
Bearing in mind this definition o f chastity as not necessarily
implying continence, we come to a further passage, in which
Proudhon criticises the idealistic conception of love and recalls
the first infatuation of his own adolescence. ‘As happens to many
others, my youth began with a platonic love affair which made
me very silly and very sad, but to which I owe, in compensation,
THE HILLS OF THE JURA