hood that she was being looked after there. ‘It is nothing for an
intelligent man to suffer,’ he told Suchet, an old companion o f the
Conciergerie. ‘But to watch suffering, the suffering o f one’s own
family, that is a torture. Imagine what my wife must have endured,
forced to look after me herself, to be ceaselessly near me— for I
was constantly asking for her— to swallow her tears and show me
a good face for fear of affecting me by her sadness.’
The loss o f Marcelle grieved him profoundly. ‘I was attached
to that child who, more than her sisters, reproduced the paternal
type, and I had promised myself that I should find in her an
energetic intelligence and character. It is thus that we are punished
in our vanities.’ But, bitter as he found this loss, the inroads
which the disease had made into his own physical condition were
to affect him even more deeply. The doctors warned him that his
convalescence would be long, and in a sense he never reached the
end of it, for his health, which had been fairly robust until his
imprisonment, now became chronically weak. The rest o f his life
was to be punctuated by long periods of ailing, and the weak
nesses that eventually caused his premature death can almost cer
tainly be traced to the cholera of 1854.
Yet, though he was so afflicted by paternal sorrow, weakened by
illness, and troubled by the fact that his incapacity had meant
many weeks away from the work on which his family urgently
depended, there was a warmth in his letter to Suchet which shows
a faculty for friendship undulled by misery or misfortune.
‘When either o f you comes to Paris,’ he asked him, ‘try to have
an hour for No. 83, Rue d’Enfer. We are poor, but we do not
take a pride in our poverty; we remain simple and modest, hiding
our patches as best we can, living each day according to our
resources, and, thanks to work, good conscience and good friend
ship, ending with perhaps more happiness than those whose
luxury insults us in passing. We shall always, I hope, have a leg
of lamb or a fowl with a glass of wine to offer a friend. To the
devil with pride! I shake your two hands and I believe, when I
write to you, that it is a song o f my spirit in the centre of your
heart.’
6
During these years when his personal anxieties were at their
deepest, Proudhon could not remain indifferent to the alarming
THE PALADIN OF JUSTICE