Rousseau; but listen: I know not whether I should have divined
the author of "Emile" when he was twenty years of age, supposing
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