Proudhon - A Biography

THE STRICKEN YEARS
The first o f them was sent on the 21st August, from St.
Hippolyte, a little town among precipitous mountain slopes which
formed ‘an immense funnel where one breathes the best air in
France.’ The holiday was beginning propitiously. ‘I hope a great
deal for my health from this journey,’ he said on his first day in
the mountains, and two days later he reported that his breathing
was much improved. The mountaineers went out o f their way
to entertain him. He dined with the magistrate, and an open-air
fishing party in his honour was attended by 150 people, who ate
and drank and danced until twilight. He was taken for drives in
the region, saw ‘the most beautiful precipices in> the world’ and
looked vertiginously into great caverns with underground rivers.
But soon a note of doubt entered his letters. His optimism had
been premature; during the day he felt well, but at night the
misty dampness oppressed him, and he had to sleep upright in a
chair. A t such times he would forget the charming hospitality
o f St. Hippolyte and the ‘mad gaiety’ o f Cretin, and long to
be back with his family and above all with his wife. ‘I have need
o f you then, and nobody, you understand, can replace you near me.
You will doubtless say that it is egoism that makes me speak thus.
Good GodI dear wife, there is always a little egoism in our
actions. What at least is certain is that, ill or not, I hold above all
to my nest, and that I love you more than ever.’
A t the end o f August he returned to Besangon, and called on
Weiss, who was now 86. Weiss wept as he embraced him, partly
from joy and partly because o f the almost unrecognisably changed
appearance of the man who walked heavily into the room, sup­
ported on a cane. The two friends spent a morning discussing
their ideas and the writers of their time, and Proudhon acknow­
ledged his debt to Weiss for the benevolence he had repulsed so
proudly as a child. ‘You are my spiritual father,’ he told the old
scholar. ‘In my eyes you are the last incarnation o f the eighteenth
century. May you understand one day that I, for my part, am one
o f the incarnations o f the nineteenth.’
He spent the rest of his vacation at Dampierre, in the care of
Dr. Maguet, and on the way there he stopped at Fraisans to see
yet another old friend, Guillemin, whom he found, despite his
62 years, enviably healthy. ‘If his beard and hair were not com­
pletely white, one would believe that he did not grow old at all.
He is capable o f hunting sixteen hours a day, taking only a crust