the fact of remaining for ten years after my puberty in the state
of agnus cast us.’
A decade after Proudhon’s puberty, the time in which he
lapsed from lamblike chastity, coincides approximately with the
period in which he was writing his singularly unencouraging
letter to his ‘mistress’ in Lucerne. And of this time he gives the
following description:
‘That long crisis ended [the ten years], I believed myself free;
but it was then that I was assailed by the devil who teased St.
Paul, and, I may say, it was to my great displeasure. The devil,
who had so long roasted me on the side of my heart, now roasted
me on the side of my reins, so that neither work, nor reading,
nor walking, nor refrigerants of any kind could give me peace.
I was the victim o f the senses against the spirit... The flesh
said: I would; the conscience: I would not. Should I give way,
or be consumed once again by that mystification to which I could
see no end? To combat physical love by platonic love, that is not
done by commandment; the latter exhausted, the other broke out
with all its violence.’
The implication of these devious confessions seems to be that
round about the end o f the period in Besangon which lasted
from 1833 to 1838 Proudhon became involved in a passionate
sexual relationship. That the experience was pleasant does not
follow; indeed, to a young man of Proudhon’s extreme sensitiv
ity it may have been humiliating, both in itself and as a surrender
to physical demands, and the very form o f his letter suggests a
desire to escape from an unwilling obligation by pleading greater
obligations elsewhere. Certainly, whatever may be the facts of
this relationship, it provides the last recorded instance o f women
taking any intimate part in Proudhon’s life until his marriage a
decade later. And, since this period of sexual crisis was followed
by a time o f mental activity and productiveness, it is possible that
Proudhon may have been able to sublimate a desire whose power
he admitted only with the utmost unwillingness.
Here it is appropriate, in order to illustrate the rapidity with
which Proudhon’s ideas on women were crystallising, to mention
a letter which he wrote in the summer of 1839 to a local priest
who had written a manuscript ‘on the Mystery of the Virgin.’
It included a citation from George Sand, which Proudhon made
the excuse for the first of many bitter criticisms of that authoress,
THE HILLS OF THE JURA