Petit-Senn and Etienne Gide were the poets who remained in their city. It is characteristic of Genevan literary history that the others sought their fortune abroad. _Trop grand poisson pour notre petit lac_ was presumably their motto, though they were not fish who cut any very striking figure in the lakes to which they repaired. Charles Didier was the one of them who succeeded best. He took long walking tours in Italy, glorified the carbonari, pictured the meetings of their secret societies in the style of ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho,’ and ultimately acquired something of a literary position in Paris, where he was numbered among the friends of George Sand. Imbert Galloix also went to Paris, but fell into destitution there. Nodier helped him. ‘I send you,’ he wrote, ‘the half of what I have in the house. It is the first time that I blush for my poverty.’ Petit-Senn also sent him money, for which he appealed in a very pathetic letter; but he died--a pitiful figure, reminding one of Chatterton--at the age of twenty-one. Others of the company were Henri Blanvalet, who for twenty years was private tutor to the Frankfort Rothschilds--truly a sorry position for a poet; and André Verre, who went to Russia to teach in a girls’ school, and ultimately edited a newspaper in Buenos Ayres. None of them count. They were merely echoes of the louder voices heard in the French _cénacle_. CHAPTER XX LATER MEN OF LETTERS One would be tempted, if space permitted, to say something of the later literary luminaries of Geneva: of Amiel, the ‘virtuous Don Juan,’ as his friends called him, who, after living rather a futile life, acquired posthumous fame through his ‘Journal’; of Cherbuliez, the novelist, once very popular, though now somewhat out of fashion; of Marc Monnier, the sparkling and versatile father of Dr. Philippe Monnier who has inherited his wit; of Toepfer, author of ‘Nouvelles Genevoises,’ described by one critic as ‘a sort of Swiss Ally Sloper,’ and by another as ‘a sort of Swiss Max O’Rell, with just a dash of Mr. Barlow’; of Emile Javelle, who climbed the Alps diligently and wrote of them poetically; of MM. Eugène Ritter and Albert de Montet, the pillars of historical research in French Switzerland. But space does not permit. What little space remains is claimed by certain distinguished strangers who have shed lustre upon Geneva by living in the neighbourhood. We must visit Voltaire at Ferney, and Madame de Staël at Coppet. Let the patriarch come first. CHAPTER XXI VOLTAIRE