MONTE ROSA 279 



He returned home from Aosta by the Great St. Bernard, where he 

 was welcomed for the last time by his cordial hosts of the Hospice, 

 with whom he had for so many years been on the best of terms, 

 and whose interests he had at one time promoted by defending 

 them against unfounded aspersions. 



Thus ends the record of de Saussure's last journey among 

 his beloved mountains. We belong to a generation which can 

 readily sympathise with him in the summary close to his Alpine 

 travels caused by a political upheaval which convulsed Europe. 

 It was to the civic and domestic anxieties brought on him by the 

 French Revolution, and to its reaction on the ancient Republic of 

 Geneva, that the final breakdown of his always delicate constitution 

 must be mainly attributed. When his concluding volumes were 

 sent to the press in 1796, their author's frame and intellect had been 

 impaired by more than one paralytic stroke. The pages bear signs 

 of careless revision ; there is a pathetic incompleteness in the 

 brief ' General View of the Alps,' which follows on the narrative. 

 The writer's failing strength, it is obvious, has not been equal to 

 his intention. We feel pained, as in listening to an orator who is 

 unable to complete his speech. De Saussure lays down his pen, 

 then takes it up again to introduce the Agenda, which he had for 

 years been elaborating, by a quotation from the Preface to the 

 first volume, written seventeen years earlier. 



In the present and four preceding chapters I have attempted to 

 tell, or rather to summarise, the story of de Saussure's travels and 

 climbing experiences. This seems to me, therefore, an appropriate 

 place to devote a few pages to a critical estimate of his position 

 as an Alpine explorer and mountaineer. It is a matter on which 

 divergent opinions have been expressed. If his claims have been 

 exaggerated in some quarters, they have been unjustly depreciated 

 in others. 



In any fair estimate of de Saussure's Alpine career local con- 

 ditions and the mental atmosphere of the time must be taken fully 

 into account. The standard of Geneva a hundred and fifty years 

 ago was very different from that of the modern mountaineer. 

 Among its sheltered aristocracy the taste for roughing it was 

 rare, if not altogether absent. It was only natural that a society 

 which habitually wore fine clothes and powdered hair should 

 prefer tea and talk in a lakeside garden to the ' beautiful horrors ' 



