ITALY 123 



M. Fizeau, please offer them my respects.' He goes on : ' I love 

 with passion all ladies who are at once very charming and fond of 

 natural science.' 1 He must have needed an expansive heart, 

 for in the eighteenth century it was as fashionable with the fair 

 sex to set up ' cabinets ' and pretend a taste for shells and fossils 

 as it is in the twentieth to buy vellum -bound volumes of Greek 

 philosophy and discuss psychical problems . 



Voltaire more than once expressed his warm esteem for his 

 amiable country neighbour, to whom he gave an introduction to his 

 friend the Cardinal de Bernis, then French Ambassador to the 

 Vatican, for use on de Saussure's visit to Rome. In due course 

 the Cardinal replied congratulating the host of Ferney on living 

 in a society which had such an agreeable member. But the best 

 evidence to de Saussure's talent for friendship is afforded by his 

 private correspondence. From that we learn on what intimate, 

 and often affectionate, terms he was, both with the English nobility 

 and the great French ladies who on their visits to Geneva received 

 the hospitality of the mansion in the Rue de la Cit6. The latter 

 in their letters speedily drop the customary formalities and com- 

 pliments of the time, and in their place end by assuring their 

 ' dear friend ' of a lifelong affection. 



The Geneva Visitors' List was a remarkable one. Among 

 the celebrities from Paris were the philosophers Condorcet and 

 d'Alembert ; Madame d'Epinay was Dr. Tronchin's favourite 

 patient, and she delighted in his company as much as she profited 

 by his prescriptions . Other distinguished visitors were the Duchesse 

 d'Enville, 'the Philosophic Duchess,' mother of the young Due 

 de la Rochefoucauld d'Enville ; Madame de Montesson, the 

 acknowledged wife (though she did not take his name in society) 

 of Louis Philippe, the fourth Due d' Orleans and father of Philippe 

 Egalite ; the attractive and romantic Duchesse de Bourbon, his 

 daughter and the mother of the Due d'Enghien ; Madame de 

 Lezay-Marnesia, the wife of a Marquis de Lezay-Marn6sia, who 

 travelled in America and wrote Letters from the Banks of the Ohio. 



With most of these de Saussure was on intimate terms. The 

 Duchesse d'Enville and Madame de Montesson remained his 



1 De Saussure describes in this note the blackballing of Dr. J. Hill at the 

 Royal Society. Hill was a successful producer of quack medicines. Dr. Johnson 

 labelled him an ingenious man who had no veracity. 



