YOUTH AND EARLY TRAVELS 49 



farming and an old system of physics, and but little interested in 

 the stormy politics of the moment. Yet a few months before 

 only his son's intervention had saved him from being held up as 

 a hostage at the city gates and prevented from returning to his 

 farm and his family. He died in 1792, at the age of eighty-three, 

 predeceasing his son by only seven years. But there are few 

 traces of any influence exercised by him on Horace Benedict's 

 character and career. What correspondence between them has 

 survived relates mainly to agricultural matters. 



Nicolas de Saussure was fortunate in his marriage with Mile. 

 Renee de la Rive, 1 a member of a family of distinguished ability 

 and considerable wealth, who brought him both happiness and 

 an increase of fortune. During his father Theodore's lifetime 

 Nicolas and his wife continued to live at Conches, a homely 

 country-house situated in a bend of the Arve, some distance out- 

 side the town near the Savoyard frontier. It had come into the 

 family through the marriage in 1683 of an Anne de Saussure to 

 Andrew Hamilton, a 'gentilhomme ecossais,' to whom it had 

 belonged. Here, in the spring of 1740, Nicolas 's son was born 

 and named Horace Benedict, after his maternal grandfather. 

 The chief authority for the events of de Saussure's early life, apart 

 from the Voyages, private diaries and letters, and official documents, 

 is a little volume by his friend Senebier. 2 Senebier was a man of 

 many accomplishments, a pastor, a naturalist, the author of a 

 literary history of Geneva and the keeper of the Town Library. 

 But he wrote in a style the style of Louis xvi. which has 

 been admirably characterised by Sainte-Beuve : ' It is essentially 

 well-mannered, flowing, and gay ; it breathes a virtuous senti- 

 mentalism. Benevolence, desire for improvement, confidence, 

 love of right, an optimism showy and quite amiable these are 

 its moral characteristics, and the mixture finds easy expression 

 in a form that is elegant, but inclined to flatness and too sugary.' 

 Senebier is of his age to a degree that is often distressing, and 

 Sainte-Beuve's criticism exactly fits his flowing and flowery 

 periods. De Candolle, who knew Senebier well, while speaking 



1 A Pierre Louis de la Rive was among the first oil painters to represent Mont 

 Blanc on canvas. A picture painted in 1802, taken from Secheron, is preserved 

 in the Art Museum at Geneva. He also painted Mont Blanc from Sallanches. 



2 Memoire historique sur la Vie et les Ecrits de H. B. de Saussure, par Jean 

 Senebier, Geneva, ix. (1801). 



D 



