CHAPTER V 

 ITALY 



ON 1st February 1769 de Saussure returned to Geneva to find 

 his younger sister-in-law, the charming Minette, just married. 

 The bridegroom was a son of the able politician, the Procureur- 

 General Jean Robert Tronchin, whose memory has survived as 

 the opponent who drew forth Rousseau's famous Lettres ecrites 

 de la Montague. The family were on the point of giving a 

 wedding ball in the great house in the Rue de la Cite, where they 

 entertained three hundred guests and the dancing was kept up 

 till eight in the morning. The fact is worth noting as proof that, 

 whatever prejudices might remain against theatres, the austere 

 rules of the city of Calvin had been considerably relaxed in 

 respect of other forms of amusement. 



De Saussure found plenty of work awaiting him on his return : 

 his lectures had to be resumed, the store of instruments, books, 

 and objects he had collected abroad to be unpacked and studied. 

 His travels, he tells Haller, in a letter congratulating him on having 

 resisted all temptations from foreign kings and universities to 

 quit Berne, had added to his taste for natural history. Hence- 

 forth he intends physics and chemistry, ' with so much literature 

 and society as may keep me from becoming a bear,' to form his 

 main occupation and pleasure. With politics and office, for 

 which he had never felt any attraction, the troubles of the times 

 had, he writes, still further disgusted him. He ' prefers a tranquil 

 independence to a stormy servitude.' Li the following year he 

 refused a nomination to the Council of Two Hundred, of which 

 he did not become a member till several years later. 



He was more agreeably engaged as a leading figure in the 

 brilliant society that gathered at Geneva during the sixties 

 and seventies of the eighteenth century. Himself a member of 



an old patrician family, and the husband of the eldest of the 



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