‘Yesterday,’ she writes, ‘I spent one of those days of emotion which do not affect us the less because we ought to be getting used to them. The people took up arms by order of the Committees of the Clubs. The gates were shut, the cannon rumbled along the streets, screaming women leant out of their windows to look. In the evening the town had that military air which you have sometimes seen in it--the streets full of armed citizens with flaming torches, patrols challenging the passers-by--and all this lasted till two or three in the morning; whereas to-day, everyone is at his shop, his café, or his office. And this tumultuous day had been selected for the celebration of the memory of the most peaceable of citizens--your uncle, Charles Bonnet.’ And so, amid such sorry scenes, the end approached. De Saussure sought relief and health in travel. He took the waters at Plombières, but without any good result, and died early in 1799, the great Cuvier pronouncing his eulogy before the Institut de France. CHAPTER XVI MEN OF LETTERS We have spoken of the literature of science. In the literature which is an art, and an end in itself, Geneva never excelled; and if we look for reasons, we can find several. The first difficulty was with the language. French came to the Genevans as a foreign tongue at a time when their men of learning wrote Latin and their populace spoke a Savoyard patois; and, even to the present day, few of them avoid a certain provincial awkwardness in the handling of it. Anyone who wishes to see the proof has only to compare the _Journal de Genève_ with the _Gil Blas_ or the _Figaro_. The few stylists whom Geneva can claim have generally been of French extraction, like Marc Monnier, or have lived abroad, like Rousseau and Madame de Staël. A far more typical Genevan writer was Charles Bonnet whose perplexing circumlocutions swamp his elevated sentiments and effectively prevent his books from being read. There is also, of course, Amiel; but even ‘Roulez, tambours’ is tolerably obvious; while the trail of the _cliché_ lies even over that famous ‘Journal Intime’ which Mrs. Humphry Ward translated.