Father Enfantin and his followers lived in the hope of the coming of a feminine Messiah, who, in conjunction with the Father, was to redeem the world. But their labours were interrupted and their hopes dashed to the ground by the intervention of justice. In the columns of the Saint-Simonian newspaper, _Le Globe_, the Father had enunciated his views of marriage and sexual morality, with the result that he found his settlement at Menilmontant broken up, and himself (in 1832) condemned to a year’s imprisonment. It was on his release that he went to Egypt and studied the feasibility of cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Suez. When Juliette published her _Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes_ Father Enfantin was back again in Paris acting as director of the Paris-Lyons Mediterranée Railway. Struck by the cleverness of Juliette’s first book, he sent two of his followers to invite the young authoress to a Saint-Simonian banquet. But she thought it prudent to refuse the invitation, having heard that the Father regarded her in the same light as his Master had regarded Mme. de Staël, viz. as a possible feminine Messiah, who with the Father should make all things new. “Enfantin,” remarks Juliette, “at the age of sixty-two, was somewhat late in discovering his fellow-saviour,” though for her at twenty-two the discovery was premature, for she did not feel herself ripe for so exalted a mission. “Just think what I was expected to bring to the world!” she exclaims. “Nothing less than the golden age!” Though Juliette had refused the invitation to the banquet, she permitted her friend Arlès Dufour to take her to one of Enfantin’s evening receptions, where she found him assisted by a stout and comely lady. Arlès Dufour had been one of those who had brought her the invitation to the Father’s banquet. From the first he had taken a fatherly interest in the young Mme. Lamessine; and she felt drawn to him by a sentiment of filial devotion which never left her. He must indeed have been an attractive character. An ardent Saint-Simonian, a pacifist, an advocate of women’s rights and an Anglophil, he was the friend of John Stuart Mill and Richard Cobden. “It is charming to see him, at sixty-five, with his heart still running off with his head,” writes Cobden in 1860.[84] “He would not allow the word ‛obey’ to be used by women in the marriage ceremony, and has other very rebellious notions.” Though in practice a staid citizen of Lyons, a devoted husband and father of a family, theoretically Dufour, like his master, Enfantin, believed in free love. This was the only point on which he and his young friend Juliette disagreed. “Woman needs a certain dignity,” she argued, “which can never be hers if she violates convention and neglects her duty to society.”