64 LIFE OF HORACE BENEDICT DE SAUSSURE 



taken in far too literal a sense, while the more or less sarcastic 

 comments made on their nervousness in going armed prove 

 to be unreasonable. Contemporary records show that even 

 twenty years later Savoy was infested with smugglers, tramps, and 

 marauders to such an extent that the citizens of Geneva were in 

 the habit of arming themselves before going a few miles into the 

 environs. The doctor or the lawyer called to a sick-bed, the 

 pedlar going the round with his wares, the landlord collecting his 

 rents, did not set out without seeing to the priming of their 

 pistols. In a letter dated 10th September 1761, de Saussure tells 

 Haller the following story. Two German botanists had been 

 recently murdered on the Saleve. They had fallen victims to a 

 band of ' Bohemians ' who were lurking in the forests of Savoy. 

 These marauders had been bold enough to enter villages and rob 

 houses in broad daylight, until the Chamoniards turned out 

 in force to ' hunt them down like wild beasts.' Fortunately 

 for the Bohemians, 1 de Saussure writes, they escaped ; for had 

 they been caught they would have been slain without any 

 form of trial. He concludes by lamenting that he may have 

 for a time to give up his solitary rambles on the heights round 

 Geneva. 



Senebier, de Saussure 's biographer, puts the case on the whole 

 fairly enough : ' At Geneva,' he writes, ' in 1760 there was much 

 talk of a journey made by some Englishmen to Chamonix ; this 



1 De Saussure's first visit was, it may be noted, in the year before the murders, 

 but he went to Chamonix again in 1761. 'Bohemian ' was for a long time a common 

 term for marauders in the Alps. Sebastian Munster, a professor at Basle, who 

 published a Universal Cosmography in 1544, got into a scrape by asserting that 

 the inhabitants of the Engadine were ' worse robbers than the Bohemians.' He 

 had probably been taking a cure at St. Moritz, the waters of which were frequented 

 from early times. It is amusing to learn that a solemn deputation was sent all 

 the way from the valley to Basle to complain of the libel, with the result that due 

 apology was offered and accepted. The disorders about 1760 were partly conse- 

 quent on the Seven Years War, which was drawing towards its close. Troops of 

 deserters and disbanded soldiers roamed the country and made the roads unsafe. 

 Further evidence of the disturbed state of Faucigny at this period is found in a 

 pleasant anecdote told by de Saussure himself of his reception at the Chartreuse 

 of Le Reposoir. This lies in a secluded glen a few miles above Cluses, at the 

 back of the Pointe Percee, a lion-like summit, the other side of which is a con- 

 spicuous object from the Baths of St. Gervais and stands prominent against the 

 sunset in the view from the Grands Mulcts. I give de Saussure's tale in his own 

 words : 



' I have stayed at this Convent, a convenient resort for a naturalist, two or 

 three times, and always been well received by the Chartreux. My first visit, 



