140 LIFE OF HORACE BENEDICT DE SAUSSURE 



Genthod ; had I been at Geneva and able to know from moment to 

 moment what was going on and that you were safe, I should not 

 have been the victim of the darkest forebodings.' l 



She goes on to describe vividly Louis Seize 's character : 



* He has plenty of physical courage, but no resolution. He yields 

 to the last advice given him, and his feebleness and vacillation endanger 

 the lives not only of those who are attached to him, but of all the 

 people of Paris and France, because, as a Jacobin very truly said 

 the other day, "If there is a revolution, all who have anything to lose 

 will be robbed and murdered ! " ' 



Judith must have kept a home, or at any rate property, in 

 Geneva, for in 1794 the revolutionaries seized in her apartments 

 895 ounces of silver and 8687 florins. The last letter I have of 

 hers is to her sister-in-law, written in reply to one describing 

 Bonaparte's visit to Madame de Saussure in May 1800 during her 

 early widowhood. Madame de Saussure 's letter is unfortunately 

 missing. Judith avows herself one of the warmest admirers of 

 Bonaparte ; she sees no one else capable of giving peace and a 

 stable government to France, and her feelings towards him, she 

 writes, are those of devotion and gratitude. Is the rumour true 

 that he is going to take the command of the army in Italy, where 

 he will be proclaimed Emperor ? She concludes by expressing 

 her regret that her sister-in-law had not seized the opportunity 

 for obtaining from the First Consul some favours for her family or 

 her friends. 



Judith published in 1808 a little volume entitled Anecdotes 

 extraites de la Volumineuse Histoire de Russie de Le Clerc, par 

 Mile, de Saussure, auteur de Veloge de M. le Comte de Perigord. 

 Its interest for us lies in the preface, in which she states that when 

 at Geneva in 1795 she had tried to distract her brother by reading 

 to him these extracts, as he was too ill to attempt the original 

 work. She now publishes them because ' she loves all that reminds 

 her of her brother,' and adds that she would have dedicated 

 them to his memory had she not desired to pay a compliment to 

 M. Baume, her doctor at Montpellier, to whom she owed much. 

 A copy of the book is preserved in the library at Genthod. 



I have put together in these few pages the little we know of 



1 This was the date of the revolt of the peasants led by Grenus. (See p. 359.) 



