YOUTH AND EARLY TRAVELS 77 



commercial employ in Geneva. De Saussure bids him warn the 

 youth to have nothing whatever to do with the German shopboys, 

 who are in very bad repute owing to their conduct having been so 

 disorderly that they have had to be publicly reprimanded. In 

 April 1763 he writes to Haller a long memoir of twelve pages, 

 entering in much medical detail into his mother's symptoms, 

 and asking for a formal opinion. The patient, it seems, had again 

 lost confidence in the favourite doctor of Geneva. No doubt she 

 had many friends to suggest the expediency of taking other 

 advice. Tronchin's treatment, which Madame de Saussure had 

 been under for seven years, had been, her son writes, entirely 

 palliative. Would not Haller come to her aid ? If he thought 

 badly of her case, would he be good enough to say so in a private 

 note, and not in a formal opinion, so that the patient might not be 

 alarmed. The whole letter bears witness to the affection and 

 tender solicitude of a devoted son. Nothing, however, came of it, 

 as Madame de Saussure was unable to make the journey to Berne 

 which Haller suggested, and Tronchin was again called in. 



His Professorship and his mother's health were not, however, 

 de Saussure's only interests in the autumn of 1763. A still more 

 absorbing one had come into his life. He was in love. The object 

 of his affections was a girl of seventeen, Mile. Albertine Amelie 

 Boissier, the eldest of three sisters, who were the great heiresses 

 of the city, and also, says Senebier, ' conspicuous in the society of 

 Geneva by their charms both of mind and person.' Looking at 

 the ages of the young ladies the eldest was not yet eighteen the 

 worthy Senebier would appear to be here somewhat anticipating 

 events. They were the only surviving children of Jean Jacques 

 Andre Boissier, described to Haller by his future son-in-law as 

 ' of a family not ancient, but wealthy and esteemed.' The Boissiers 

 were prosperous bankers, and had a London house and English 

 connections. Madame Boissier was the only daughter of a well- 

 known professor and pastor, Ami Lullin (1695- 1756), himself the son 

 of a prosperous banker, Jean Antoine Lullin, whose wealth he had 

 inherited. It was therefore to his wife's parents that de Saussure 

 owed not only most of his means, but the townhouse, counted the 

 finest in Geneva, in which he spent a great part of his life. It was 

 built according to the designs of Abeille, a celebrated architect of his 

 day, and completed in 1707. It now remains quite unaltered and 



