Unlike Murith and the De Lucs, Saussure was not a trailblazer. Since 1760 he had combined a university career with vacation travels over well-trodden routes, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by friends and occasionally with his faithful guide, Pierre Simon. He was not, by nature, a hardy individual and rarely went anywhere without a manservant whose blue livery was so splendid that he was often taken for an army officer. During this period Saussure never climbed anything important but made his usual steady notes - a first draft, written as often as not sitting astride a mule, a second draft whenever he reached an inn and then, at home, a fair copy for the printers. He would have liked to do more but was constrained by his job at the Academy and by his wife, an heiress called Albertine Amélie Boissier who had no taste for cross-country tramps. She described herself in a teenage diary with remarkable candour: ‘I am fifteen and a half: I am plain but not painfully so. Some people find an attraction in my air of gentleness and kindness. Am I clever? No: still I am not actually stupid … I am rather disposed to langour rather than to too much vivacity. I do not care for fashionable society, and, to put it shortly, idleness is my favourite passion.’1 She would have preferred her husband to be idle too, and frequently berated him for his prolonged absences. At one point he was driven to retort that, ‘you would like better to see me as fat as a canon and asleep all day in the chimney corner after a big dinner, than to see me achieve immortal fame by the most sublime discoveries at the cost of a few ounces of weight and several weeks’ absence’.2
Despite his wife’s opposition Saussure persevered in his travels. Between 1774 and 1784 he made a protracted exploration of the Alps. He went southwards from Geneva to the Duchy of Savoy and thence southwards again to Piedmont, the north Italian province which formed part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. He went eastwards to Switzerland, and roamed through the Bernese Oberland before dipping south to the canton of Valais. His objective, which was shared by most geologists of the time, was to discover at a fundamental level how the landscape had been formed. Theories of upheaval and erosion, basic as they may seem nowadays, were still under discussion in the eighteenth century. The principles were well understood but their application was hampered by the Bible, whose statement that the globe had at one time been submerged by water was accepted without question. The irrefutability of this doctrine rested entirely on the clergy whose power, when not overtly temporal, influenced the nobility whose decisions and patronage most certainly were. Every wealthy man hoped to buy his way to heaven - as attested by the richness of myriad chapels and churches - and those who had money were unwilling to risk damnation by sponsoring heretics who had none. So tight was the biblical straitjacket that even scientists of independent means, such as Saussure, refused to countenance a theory that excluded the Deluge.
Hampered from the start, Saussure tried his hardest to explain the Alps in religious terms. In 1778 he wrote:
Retracing in my brain the succession of the great revolutions which our globe has undergone, I saw the sea, covering the whole surface of the globe, form by successive deposits and crystallisations first the primitive mountains, then the secondary. I saw these deposits arrange themselves symmetrically in concentric beds, and subsequently the fire or other elastic fluids contained in the interior of the globe lift and break up this crust and thus press out the interior and primitive part of this crust, leaving the exterior or secondary portions piled up against the interior beds. I saw next the waters precipitate themselves into the gulfs split open and emptied by the explosion of the elastic fluids [and thus erode the rocks]. I saw finally, after the retreat of the waters, the germs of plants and animals, fertilised by the atmosphere newly created, begin to develop on the ground abandoned by the waters and in the waters themselves where they were retained in the hollows of the surface.3
A few years later, having studied the rock strata more closely, he concluded from their contortions that the mountains had been raised by compression rather than subterranean explosion. It was a step in the right direction, but he still clung to the overall Flood theory. Interestingly, he found himself unable to depict what he saw - perhaps because in his heart he could not reconcile his scientific and religious beliefs. ‘It is a terrible task,’ he told his wife, ‘to draw a mountain in its detail, to make it come out clearly, so that the beds and the joints do not look flat - that it does not resemble a split board. Oh, this is really difficult! Still, I struggle on.’4
As to glaciers, Saussure was stumped. Once again he was trying to make sense of phenomena which seem unremarkable today. Glaciers accumulate in annual layers of snow which are marked by striations in the ice. They move downhill thanks predominantly to their plasticity and also to a process known as basal sliding, in which ice melted by friction acts as a lubricant. Saussure and his contemporaries had arrived at the latter theory - save that they believed the ice was melted by the heat of the earth’s crust. But the notion that ice could flow, as if a congealed fluid, was hard to believe. Looking at the vicious chunks which cracked off the Mont Blanc and Bernese glaciers, it seemed implausible that their movement could be related in any way to that of water. Saussure agreed with Scheuchzer that glaciers were forced downhill by the expansion of water freezing in their crevasses. As for glacial moraines, the lines of rock which retreating glaciers deposit on hillsides, Saussure noted them constantly in his journal but refused to associate them with their true cause. Instead, he explained them as debris left by the Deluge and proudly wove them into his biblical world view.
Finally, and on a very basic level, Saussure wanted to know where the various Alpine ranges were and how they were linked. Such maps as existed were so meagre as to be useless: no two were the same, or agreed on the whereabouts of a particular mountain; all gave different heights; and many included non-existent peaks. Mountains real and imaginary leaped across the atlas in a cartographical hopscotch that baffled the most astute. They were of no help to a traveller who strayed off the main highways - just to look at them induced a sense of despair, the peaks being portrayed in little blodges as if a pack of cats had run across the page - and they were certainly no help to a scientist like Saussure.
While battling with the terrain, the maps and his geological drawings - which he would eventually cast aside - Saussure recorded everything of interest that he stumbled upon. On one occasion, having climbed a ridge near Geneva he was astonished to find at its summit a level plateau of grass which was, on the first two Sundays of August, a trysting ground for the youths from the villages below. A couple had gone so far as to hold their wedding there, he was told, but the bride had slipped over the edge while admiring the view. The groom, in trying to catch her had also fallen to his death. ‘A ruddy rock is pointed out which is reputed to be stained by their blood,’5 Saussure commented. Less dramatically, he met a young couple walking along one of the valleys. They were engaged. She came from near Geneva; he came from the mountainous cantons. They were making a two-day hike so that the woman could assure herself that her husband-to-be had as good a home as he had promised. Elsewhere he described the gnomelike activities of those who burrowed into the Alps in search of gold, lead and other minerals. So long did they spend underground, and so hazardous was their task, that disused galleries were converted into chapels complete with altars, flickering candles and memorial tablets.
Some scenes were memorably unpleasant, such as a village near Aosta in Piedmont where every inhabitant seemed to be either cretinous or afflicted with a goitre. Both ailments were commonplace throughout Europe - the Isle of Wight was mildly notorious for its goitres - but nowhere were they more prevalent than in remote Alpine valleys. It would be a hundred years before medical science discovered that cretinism and goitres were caused by iodine deficiency. Until then doctors could only speculate - poor religious habits and bad hygiene were seen as disposing influences - and travellers could only shudder at the elephantine throats of the goitred and the stunted bodies, misshapen heads and dulled intellects of cretins. Saussure had never seen so many sufferers in one spot and he was appalled by the spectacle. As far as he could tell there was not an able-bodied man in the place.
I asked the first person I met what the name of the village was, and when he did not reply I asked a second, and then a third; but a dismal silence, or a few inarticulate noises were the only response I received. The stupid amazement with which they looked at me, their enormous goitres, their fat, parted lips, their heavy, drooping eyelids, their hanging jaws, their doltish expressions, were quite terrifying. It was as if an evil spirit had transformed every inhabitant into a dumb animal, leaving only the human form to show that they had once been men. I left with an impression of fear and sadness which will never be erased from my memory.6
These and other observations were woven into a hugely influential tome titled Voyages dans les Alpes, which came out in four volumes, two in 1786, and another two in 1796, and which secured Saussure’s reputation as an Alpine expert. All the time, however, Mont Blanc loomed above him. Almost everywhere he went he could see it. Even as far afield as Lyons its pale, forbidding outline was visible. Saussure longed for it to be conquered. ‘It had,’ he later wrote, ‘become with me a species of disease; my eyes never rested upon Mont Blanc … without my undergoing a fresh attack of melancholy.’7 Nothing could have tantalised him more than Murith’s letter, written only a few years before the first two volumes of Voyages went to press. Surely, if Murith could climb the Vélan someone could get to the top of Mont Blanc? He was not alone: Bourrit was equally exasperated. In fact, as Saussure wrote with a tinge of anxiety, ‘M. Bourrit is even keener than I to conquer Mont Blanc.’8
Ever since Saussure had put a price on Mont Blanc, Bourrit had positively frothed over the mountain. He had written several books on Chamonix and had analysed the different routes by which Mont Blanc might be climbed. He had gone up the Brévent, on the opposite side of the valley, and had given a torrid description of what was to most people an easy enough jaunt: ‘It was infinite labour; the sweat ran down our faces; the instant we sometimes thought ourselves perfectly safe, in having grasped the solid rock, the edge would deceive us, and break off in our hands; or the stone upon which we set our foot would escape, and we were carried down with the rubbish.’9 On reaching the top, he and his fellows ‘looked at one another in expressive silence’, and then began the journey down. It was even worse than the journey up: ‘Perplexed, shaking and trembling at every step, our danger painted itself in all its terrors.’10 Later, Bourrit navigated the Mer de Glace. The huge glacier had been crossed by Saussure without any difficulty but it gave Bourrit nightmares. ‘Redoubling then my ardour I climbed afresh with inexpressible fatigue from rock to rock, and with the caution of a reptile making its way upon some bristly plant, I insinuated along the traces of these ornamental winding crypts … till astonished with the prodigious height at which I saw myself and still more with what remained to do, I at last discerned the full extent of my ability.’11
Bourrit was a dedicated and at times grovelling admirer of Saussure. He supplied the illustrations for Voyages -all from a distance, none from a height - and charted the approaches to Chamonix in exactly the same manner as had Saussure. He wrote, obsequiously, that Chamoniards raised their hats whenever Saussure’s name was uttered. His attitude to Alpine exploration was, however, slightly different from Saussure’s and veered towards the dramatic rather than the scientific. At Balmes, for example, he explored the same mysterious cavern with its tantalising pit. Whereas Saussure had wanted to get to the bottom of the hole, Bourrit simply threw down a grenade to see what would happen. (All his torches blew out.) Nevertheless, he reached a wide audience and was as much an agent of Mont Blanc’s popularity as was Saussure.
Bourrit’s outpourings and Saussure’s bounty had resulted in a number of attempts on Mont Blanc. They had all been fruitless and in 1783, after three guides had failed yet again, Bourrit announced that he himself would climb the mountain. He felt confident that he could overcome at least some of his phobias, having embarked on an eccentric regime of acclimatisation - ‘he sleeps during eight months in the year under a walnut-tree in his garden,’ wrote an acquaintance, ‘with a fur coat in July, and no greatcoat in January’.12 The only drawback was that Bourrit needed to climb Mont Blanc for a reason. Wanting to reach the summit was not good enough in public opinion. The climb had to have scientific value. Bourrit begged Saussure for the loan of a barometer, that emblem of respectability. He begged in vain. He invited a Genevese naturalist, H. A. Gosse, to accompany him. Gosse refused. Finally, Bourrit secured the companionship of Michel-Gabriel Paccard, a 26-year-old Chamonix doctor whom Saussure described as ‘a handsome youth, full, as it seemed, of intelligence, fond of botany … wanting to climb Mont Blanc or at least to attempt it’.13
Paccard, like so many of his educated Alpine brethren, was an amateur scientist. He corresponded with the Academy of Turin, was creating a garden of Alpine plants and had assisted several foreign visitors in their search for botanical specimens. These were not oustanding qualifications but they added the requisite gloss to Bourrit’s attempt. Equally important, as far as Bourrit was concerned, was Paccard’s mountaineering pedigree. Two of his cousins had been among those who had already made unsuccessful attempts on Mont Blanc. Paccard himself had scouted a possible route to the summit while on a plant-gathering expedition in 1775. He had also made a habit of recording every climb ever made on the mountain. And he owned a barometer.
Bourrit, Paccard and three guides set out on 15 September 1783, ascending via the central Glacier des Bossons. It was a failure, but a glorious one according to Bourrit. He told searingly of his tussles with snow and ice, of his sensation at being ‘surrounded by horrible crevasses and great frozen cliffs’. He described how he and his team threw themselves into thick veils of rain to forge a passage. They came nowhere near the top but were rewarded, when the weather cleared, by ‘a ravishing view’ of the mountain and its surrounding needles of rock. ‘Such were the magnificent scenes which compensated us for not having attained the summit of Mont Blanc,’14 he wrote, wringing the greatest possible triumph from the occasion. Paccard also wrote an account of the trip. It was somewhat terser and did not quite coincide with that of his companion: ‘I started with M. Bourrit, the miller Marie, and Jean-Claude Couttet… we arrived only at the glacier … Mont Blanc was covered with clouds, and M. Bourrit did not dare go on the ice.’15 The following year both Paccard and Bourrit renewed their efforts. Significantly, they did not climb together.
On 9 September 1784, Paccard tried a new approach from the west, up the Glacier de Bionnassay. As was by now de rigueur, he did not succeed. ‘My guide, Henri Pornet, fell ill, owing probably to the fatigue and the brandy he had taken,’ Paccard wrote resignedly. ‘On crossing the Bionnassay stream, I broke my barometer, and Joseph Jacques de Villette gave me his … The rock is rotten, and more difficult to climb than it appears.’16 Bad weather drove him back and, on the descent to Chamonix, ‘I again broke the barometer.’
Seven days later, on 16 September, Bourrit followed exactly in Paccard’s footsteps, taking with him a dog, four guides and a sketchbook. Events followed their habitual pattern. At a certain height Bourrit felt cold and sick. He sat down to sketch the scenery, and then, while two of the guides went ahead, he returned with the other two to safety. Bourrit wrote an overblown description of the climb, concluding with the information that at 11.00 p.m., while he was asleep in a chalet, the two missing men arrived and announced that, ‘Thanks to God, they had returned from Mont Blanc without accident.’17
Paccard scratched drily in his ledger that on meeting the glacier Bourrit ‘had a headache, felt extremely cold … was very pale’18 and could go no farther. The two guides who had been last to return had arrived at 7.30, not 11.00, and had endured none of the difficulties at which Bourrit had hinted. In fact, they ‘did not suffer … at all, and came down the hill like birds’.19
Paccard’s history of Mont Blanc, which eventually ran as far as 1827, was not published in his lifetime. Even without his insights, however, cognoscenti detected a certain liberality in Bourrit’s descriptions. ‘Bourrit has just given a manuscript reduction of his new attempt on Mont Blanc,’ Guillaume-Antoine De Luc wrote to his brother, who was currently in England. ‘The title is very funny and so are several paragraphs of the text. It is easy to see it has not been corrected by his friend Bérenger.’20 Bérenger, who acted as Bourrit’s editor, generally toned down the Precentor’s more inflammatory assertions. On this occasion he seems not to have been available, thus allowing Bourrit to escape with the inference that it was he, rather than Paccard, who first tried Paccard’s route.
Bourrit was still expostulating in Chamonix when Saussure, teased beyond endurance by a letter from Paccard describing his climb of 9 September, decided to make his own attempt on Mont Blanc. He arrived in the summer of 1785 with the intention of following Paccard’s route. He most certainly did not want to take Bourrit. Unfortunately, there was no way he could avoid doing so. Had not Bourrit published the route as his own discovery? To leave him out would have been an unforgivable insult. ‘Though, as a rule, I infinitely prefer to make excursions of the sort alone with my guides, I could not refuse to associate M. Bourrit,’21 he wrote. Bourrit took advantage of the situation to bring along his 21-year-old son who had no mountain experience but whose scientific achievements were said to be ‘of no ordinary character’.
When the expedition departed on 14 September 1785, it comprised Saussure, Bourrit pére etfils, and 17 porters whose luggage included barometers, thermometers, hygrometers and electrometers, a seemingly random assortment of six sheets, five blankets and three pillows, plus a huge amount of food and wine. Whether they needed the provisions was debatable. Previous climbers had found that the higher they climbed the less they wanted to eat. Alcohol, which was an integral part of any endeavour, even in the lowlands, often became abhorrent at altitude (though it was still drunk in large quantities, perhaps in the hope that application would solve the problem). What climbers wanted most was water to satisfy their unaccountable thirst. And sometimes they did not even want that. A member of the 1783 three-man attempt had said that to climb Mont Blanc one should cast everything aside; all one needed was an umbrella and a bottle of smelling salts.
The party spent its first night at a small cabin of rock slabs which Bourrit had had erected at the base of the Aiguille du Goûter. The Bourrits felt ill and went early to bed while Saussure, who was already experiencing ‘a slight annoyance’, stayed outside to admire the view by starlight. Having spent so many years staring at Mont Blanc from below, he experienced a near religious sense of awe now that he was actually on the mountain. Exhilaration was mixed with dread. ‘The repose and deep silence cast over this huge expanse, and increased by my imagination, inspired me with a sort of terror,’ he wrote. ‘I felt as if I were the sole survivor in the universe, the dead body of which I saw lying at my feet.’22
The morning of 15 September was cold, and the Bourrits refused to leave the cabin before 6.20 a.m., far too late for Saussure’s liking. The slow-moving party climbed for five hours before being thwarted by thick, soft snow. Two guides were sent ahead to scout the way and, after a while, shouted down that it was impossible to go farther. Reluctantly, Saussure agreed to retreat. He stayed awhile, however, to take observations before rejoining the group at the cabin. There he found to his dismay that the Bourrits had made arrangements for an immediate retreat to the valley. Swearing that he would never again climb accompanied by any other than guides, he settled down for a second night in the cabin while his companions went downhill. On looking over his measurements he calculated that they had climbed to 11,400 feet - ‘a higher level than any observer before me had in the Alps’23 - and had therefore come within 1,500 feet of the summit. He was wrong in his latter calculation by more than 2,000 feet.
When he eventually reached Chamonix, Saussure learned that the Bourrits had already started on their narratives. Keen to reassure his wife, Saussure made it a rule never to advertise the hazards he encountered on the hill. Bourrit, however, was circulating preposterous tales about the dangers that he and Saussure had faced. More, he was castigating Saussure’s climbing skills. ‘I could not but notice that the way in which you came down was not the happiest,’ Bourrit told him. ‘You might have fallen backwards, you might have been hit by the rocks dislodged by the guides, whom you made keep behind you, and we noticed the trouble they had to take to avoid this. As to my mode of coming down, I followed the advice of [my guide] who saw how impossible it was for me, with ruined boots which had lost their heels [Bourrit was wearing his usual, impractical fur slippers], to keep myself from falling. I was forced to put my feet in his footsteps; and if I rested on him, I took care to do so as lightly as possible.’24 Saussure’s reply was a model of restraint: ‘No one perhaps believes more than I do in the kindness and modesty of your heart, but I know very well also that your flighty imagination often makes you see things in a false light. If you could put aside this tendency, there is no reason why you should not keep an agreeable recollection of our excursion.’25
Bourrit Jr. also had something to say. ‘Sir,’ he wrote to Saussure, ‘do you not envy me my twenty-one years? Who will wonder if a youth of this age, who has nothing to lose, is bolder than a father of a family, a man of forty-six?’26 Wearily, Saussure picked up his pen.
Monsieur, a moderate amount of boastfulness is no great crime, especially at your age … You say you descended agilely. It is true, you descended agilely enough in the easy places, but in the difficult places you were, like your father, resting on the shoulder of one guide in front and held up behind by another. I do not blame you for these precautions; they were wise, prudent, even indispensable; but in no language in the world is that the manner of progress styled agile climbing. But enough … After what I have written to you, sir, I am under no anxiety as to anything you may say or write, and am very far from asking you to show me your narrative. On the contrary, I desire there may be an end to this discussion.27
Silently, in his ledger, Paccard gave a dispassionate account of the whole business. He noted that Saussure had ‘always shown a dislike for snowy tracks - though he was a good walker on rocky ground’, and that he was roped ‘like a prisoner’28 to his guides. As for the Bourrits, father leaned on the shoulder of one guide and was gripped by his collar by another; son, meanwhile, suffered from mountain sickness and made the ascent hanging onto the tails of the guides’ coats. They were all equally incompetent as climbers, he reckoned. And he didn’t think much of Saussure’s altitude measurements, either.
Saussure was discouraged by the failure. From Geneva he wrote to a friend that ‘To reach this summit, then, it is essential to find some shelter for the night at a higher point than ours, and to select a year when the mountain is entirely stripped of [new] snow by the month of July, or at latest by the beginning of August, and even then the enterprise will be pretty dangerous and always infinitely laborious.’29 Thinking of the distance he had left unclimbed, he wondered whether Mont Blanc might not be better conquered by balloon. ‘But I believe it would be very dangerous,’ he added mournfully, detailing with typical precision all the perils that would attend such an effort.
It had been a quarter of a century since Saussure had first offered his reward. He was now wondering if he would ever have to pay it. Mont Blanc was clearly impossible to climb.