posing
that I had been his contemporary, and had enjoyed the honor of his
acquaintance. But I have known you, I have loved you, I have divined
your future, if I may venture to say so; for the first time in my life,
I am going to risk a prophecy. Keep this letter, read it again fifteen
or twenty years hence, perhaps twenty-five, and if at that time the
prediction which I am about to make has not been fulfilled, burn it as
a piece of folly out of charity and respect for my memory. This is my
prediction: you will be, Proudhon, in spite of yourself, inevitably,
by the fact of your destiny, a writer, an author; you will be a
philosopher; you will be one of the lights of the century, and your name
will occupy a place in the annals of the nineteenth century, like those
of Gassendi, Descartes, Malebranche, and Bacon in the seventeenth, and
those of Diderot, Montesquieu, Helvetius. Locke, Hume, and Holbach in
the eighteenth. Such will be your lot! Do now what you will, set type in
a printing-office, bring up children, bury yourself in deep seclusion,
seek obscure and lonely villages, it is all one to me; you cannot escape
your destiny; you cannot divest yourself of your noblest feature, that
active, strong, and inquiring mind, with which you are endowed; your
place in the world has been appointed, and it cannot remain empty. Go
where you please, I expect you in Paris, talking philosophy and the
doctrines of Plato; you will have to come, whether you want to or not.
I, who say this to you, must feel very sure of it in order to be willing
to put it upon paper, since, without reward for my prophetic skill,--to
which, I assure you, I make not the slightest claim,--I run the risk of
passing for a hare-brained fellow, in case I prove to be mistaken: he
plays a bold game who risks his good sense upon his cards, in return
for the very trifling and insignificant merit of having divined a young
man's future.

"When I say that I expect you in Paris, I use only a proverbial phrase
which you must not allow to mislead you as to my projects and plans.
To reside in Paris is disagreeable to me, very much so; and when this
fine-art fever which possesses me has left me, I shall abandon the place
without regret to seek a more peaceful residence in a provincial town,
provided always the town shall afford me the means of living, bread, a
bed, books, rest, and solitude. How I miss, my good Proudhon, that dark,
obscure, smoky chamber in which I dwelt in