THE LAST YEARS 393 



relatives. On the morning of the 22nd January the end came ; 

 after a restless night de Saussure passed away peacefully in his son 

 Theodore's arms before his wife and daughter could be summoned 

 to his bedside. A letter from Madame Necker-de Saussure to her 

 husband gives touching details of the scene, and of her own 

 despair at not having been able to be present at her father's last 

 moments, ' a privilege,' she wrote, ' I had surely earned.' l Both 

 his sisters-in-law joined the mourners on the next day. Five 

 deputation* from public bodies paid visits of condolence. On 

 the 24th he was buried in the cemetery of Plainpalais outside 

 the walls. The funeral was public. The Professors of the 

 Academy and the College walked on either side of the coffin ; 

 it was followed by officers of the municipality in their robes, 

 by the French general in command and his staff, by the mem- 

 bers of the Societies of Arts and of Natural History, by a crowd 

 of the students whose interests de Saussure had always had at heart . 

 The drums beat as it passed the Hotel de Ville and the city gates. 

 No ceremonial honour was lacking. Geneva realised, if only for 

 a few hours, that she had lost the most distinguished of her sons 

 and the most loyal of her citizens . 



Three months later Tingry, an eminent man of science who has 

 already been mentioned in these pages, suggested that a suitable 

 slab should be placed over de Saussure 's grave to mark its position. 

 This proposal, strange to say, was never carried out, and the 

 exact spot is now unknown, though it is believed to be close to the 

 grave of Sir Humphry Davy, who died at Geneva in 1829. It 

 must surely be a matter of lasting regret to the inhabitants of 

 Geneva that the resting-place of one of their most famous fellow- 

 citizens should thus remain uncertain and without record. It 

 may perhaps be urged in extenuation of a contemporary neglect 

 which seems strangely inconsistent with the honours of a public 

 funeral that tombstones were among the ' articles of luxury ' 

 long denied to the inhabitants of Geneva by their Calvinistic 

 legislators. 



In the year before his death de Saussure had come to an 

 arrangement with the fiscal authorities with regard to the tax on 



1 Madame Necker-de Saussure's account of the death-bed scene obviously 

 supersedes that derived by Professor Naville from a journal of the time. See 

 Bibl. Universette, tome xvii., No. 61, mars 1883. 



