cannot be a pure and unwavering utopist. You are too well
acquainted with the economical and academical phraseology to play
with the hard words of revolutions. I believe, then, that you
have handled property as Rousseau, eighty years ago, handled
letters, with a magnificent and poetical display of wit and
knowledge. Such, at least, is my opinion.

"That is what I said to the Institute at the time when I
presented my report upon your book. I knew that they wished to
proceed against you in the courts; you perhaps do not know by how
narrow a chance I succeeded in preventing them.[1] What chagrin
I should always have felt, if the king's counsel, that is to say,
the intellectual executioner, had followed in my very tracks to
attack your book and annoy your person! I actually passed two
terrible nights, and I succeeded in restraining the secular arm
only by showing that your book was an academical dissertation,
and not the manifesto of an incendiary. Your style is too lofty
ever to be of service to the madmen who in discussing the gravest
questions of our social order, use paving-stones as their
weapons. But see to it, sir, that ere long they do not come, in
spite of you, to seek for ammunition in this formidable arsenal,
and that your vigorous metaphysics falls not into the hands of
some sophist of the market-place, who might discuss the question
in the presence of a starving audience: we should have pillage
for conclusion and peroration.

[1] M. Vivien, Minister of Justice, before commencing proceedings
against the "Memoir upon Property," asked the opinion of M.
Blanqui; and it was on the strength of the observations of this
honorable academician that he spared a book which had already