PETER KROPOTKIN: TRIBUTES & APPRECIATIONS

PERSONAL REMINISCENCES

It must have in 1880 or 1881 that I met Kropotkin for the first time. Arriving in Paris, he came to pay me a visit accompanied by Madame Kropotkin.

We had already maintained epistolatory relations. I had sent him some articles for "Le Revolte", after which ensued a fortnightly correspondence on the social movement.

Those days are long since passed, alas! and the details of that interview are a bit hazy in my memory. What survives is the simplicity, the kindness, the enthusiasm of the man.

I have no doubt that I also must have pleased him, for it was at his suggestion that, some time afterward that, when comrade Herzig, who up to then had occupied himself with "Le Revolte", being unable to continue longer because of the serious necessity of devoting himself to relieve the wants of his family, Reclus asked me to go to Geonova in order to replace him.

Kropotkin has remained young all his years. He has kept the ardor of a youth of twenty throughout his life. Despite sufferings, despite the privations he had to undergo in the course of his agitated existence, he remained young in mind and body. Notwithstanding the extensiveness of his knowledge he paid attention to his interlocutors and knew how to surrender to an argument when it struck him as sound. how many, even amoung the anarchists who had neither his knowledge nor erudition would have profited by the example of his life. I have never heard him boast nor speak of himself or his birth.

[ Page 27 ]