40 LIFE OF HORACE BENEDICT DE SAUSSURE 



By general consent, the great fault of Genevese society was 

 its tendency to break up into small coteries. This began in 

 childhood : a number of neighbours would arrange for their 

 children to meet frequently at each other's houses, and the 

 intimacies thus formed were apt to extend to after-life. About 

 1739 the lack of public amusements drove the men to form clubs 

 or circles , to hire in winter a room where they could meet frequently 

 to discuss politics and exchange the talk of the town, in summer a 

 garden on the lake where they could spend the long evenings. In 

 1745 the Venerable Company of Pastors looked on these clubs with 

 a pained disapproval. It complained to the Senate that there 

 were too many of them no less than fifty in the town, where, 

 ' besides talking a great deal, perhaps too much, of politics and 

 foreign affairs, it is certain that wine, gambling, the table, and 

 loose conversation are the principal, if not only, attractions . Cards 

 are played, even at the hour of the evening sermon.' The wives and 

 daughters started in revenge similar, if less dissipated, assemblies. 

 ' As the men are more susceptible than gallant, the women are 

 more romantic than coquettish,' writes an observer. The impres- 

 sion left is of a society somewhat prim and decorous, taking itself 

 seriously, and interested in serious subjects, in which the men 

 who were not in business engaged in political administration, or 

 literature, or learned pursuits ; while the women were apt to 

 be either genuine femmes savantes interested in botany, like 

 de Saussure's mother, or in education, like his daughter, or else 

 full of domestic details and the home farm, like his wife. We 

 find ourselves introduced to company that lacked the light- 

 ness in give-and-take, and also the mockery and frivolity of the 

 salons on the Seine, that had for its centre not a corrupt court, 

 but a more or less austere and puritanical group of about a 

 hundred 'noble families of the first quality' holders, present or 

 past, of the higher offices in the State, who refused to intermarry 

 or associate with the rest of the town. 



Madame Recamier is at pains to summarise the intellectual 

 bent of Genevese society : 



' Observe them closely ; all these Genevese of the old stock have 

 acuteness, moderation, a certain reserve, a power of patient and exact 

 analysis, more learning than effect, more substance than show, and 

 when they converse it is with more detail than colour, the touch of 



