396 LIFE OF HORACE BENEDICT DE SAUSSURE 



first contemplating his grandfather's biography, was a distinguished 

 traveller and biologist. He died in 1902. 



De Saussure's only daughter and eldest child, Albertine 

 Andrienne, demands fuller mention. Born in 1766, she inherited 

 a large share of her father's intellectual energy as well as of his 

 enthusiasm for educational reform. She records that her father 

 took great pains to help her in her studies and to explain her 

 difficulties. We have read of her social successes as a child of six 

 while travelling with her parents in Italy. At a later age she 

 repaid her father's constant and affectionate interest by a passionate 

 devotion. In her diaries she dwells frequently on his fairness of 

 mind, his sense of justice and his charm of manner. She delighted 

 in his companionship and shared largely in his interests. Her 

 own qualities of mind were derived from him rather than from 

 her mother, whose heart was, as she herself confessed, the strongest 

 or weakest point in her character. 1 Albertine's letters to her 

 future husband show her to have been a girl of deep feeling and 

 with a high ideal of woman's role in life . As a thinker and a writer 

 of exceptional force and ability she left her mark on her generation. 

 The talent for social observation and shrewd appreciation of char- 

 acter indicated in de Saussure's correspondence was transmitted 

 to her in a marked degree. At nineteen she married a son of M. 

 Necker de Germagny and nephew of M. Necker, the financier, 

 who had served as a captain in the French army, but on his marriage 

 returned to Geneva, and for some years took an active part in 

 public affairs. During the revolutionary period he turned to the 

 study of botany and chemistry, but after the restoration of the 

 Republic he resumed his place in politics and served twice (in 

 1817 and 1819) as Syndic. He died in 1825. By this marriage 

 Albertine became the first cousin of Madame de Stael. The two 

 young women were the same age, and the friendship that had 

 already sprung up between them became a very close one ; they 

 were attracted to one another by their dissimilarities. Madame 

 de Stael felt the warmest admiration for Madame Necker-dc 

 Saussure's gifts, her beauty, and her talents, and she fully appre- 



1 A recent author, however, writes : ' An interest in education was a tradition 

 in the family of Mme. H. B. de Saussure. Her mother, Mme. Boissier-Lullin, 

 occupied herself ably with education, and her father, Ami Lullin, had the same 

 taste.' (See P. Kohler's Mme. de Stael et la Suisse, p. 441. Paris, 1916.) 



