DE CANDOLLE. 99 



They were stirring times, and this energetic man 

 once, in travelling through Grenoble into Switzer- 

 land, learned that the Duke of Savoy intended to 

 take Geneva by surprise, with his army. When the 

 attempt was made, Pyramus de Candolle fought as 

 a citizen of his adopted town. Subsequently he 

 went to Yverdun and established manufactories, 

 but the jealousy of the Bernese ruined him, and he 

 died broken-hearted. The family returned to 

 Geneva to live on small means, and the father of 

 De Candolle became a banker, and was much 

 employed by the State during troublous political 

 times. 



An industrious, simple, loving, clever man was 

 the father, and he married Mademoiselle Bri^re. 

 De Candolle wrote of his mother : " She was an 

 educated woman, good, fond of fun, and clever ; 

 she was gifted with all the graces and virtues of 

 the mind, and she contributed by her amiable con- 

 versations and teachings to give me a taste for 

 science and literature. She had only one fault, and 

 it strangely enough influenced my character. She 

 was proud of her family, which she considered was 

 superior in station to that of my father, because 

 her mother was a distant relation of La . Fort, the 

 minister of Peter the Great of Russia. She took 

 every opportunity of making my father feel this 

 pretended superiority, so that when he became 

 forty-eight years of age, he thought that he would 

 make himself known to his relatives and take up 



his nobility in Provence, and show his wife that his 



