35 



were prosperous, and several of them, turning bankers, had 

 become the Rothschilds of the day and were ready to lend money 

 even to princes. The citizens held investments in French 

 securities the annual interest on which amounted in 1780, we 

 are told, to sixteen millions of francs, and they had also large 

 holdings in Holland and England. 



The society of Geneva, if it fell far short of the brilliancy 

 and extravagance of the Parisian salons, was very subject 

 to their influence. With wealth had come more or less leisure 

 and luxury ; the upper classes were no longer content to 

 submit to the sumptuary laws issued by a clerical committee. 

 They assimilated to some extent the fashions of the French 

 aristocracy and the mental atmosphere of the day. Their 

 town mansions, though many and spacious, no longer 

 sufficed them, and since the summer evenings were long and 

 pleasant on the lake shores, and the city gates were regularly closed 

 soon after sunset, they established country homes. Stately 

 villas with terraced gardens replaced in the environs the homely 

 granges of an earlier time. Their inmates must have seen Mont 

 Blanc, but they took little notice of its distant snows. 1 De 

 Saussure's contemporaries were not even sure on which side of 

 Chamonix the ' Monts Maudits ' stood. A party of Englishmen 

 might set out to investigate certain strange masses of ice hanging 

 from them, that were said to penetrate the forests and invade 

 the meadows. But the Genevese were only vaguely interested 

 in these disagreeable and baleful curiosities . They laughed at their 

 visitors . It was like Englishmen, they said, to take trouble for such 

 an object but perhaps they were really looking for mines ; there 

 were known to be minerals worked near Sallanches. At any rate 

 this was the view taken at the time by some of the Savoyard 

 authorities, who were very suspicious of their foreign visitors. 

 Modern mountaineers in remote districts have often found 

 themselves subject to similar surmises. When in 1868 English 



1 De Saussure's grandson, the late M. Henri de Saussure, pointed out at a 

 Conference of Alpine Clubs held at Geneva in 1879, that the eighteenth century 

 has left in the country-houses of the environs of the city, a permanent record of 

 its taste in scenery. He said : 



' They most of them turn their backs to the view ; fashion at that date pre- 

 ferred the picture formed by an artificial landscape ornamented with a geo- 

 metrical frog-pond to the magnificent panorama of our Alps and our lake.' 



