While in Geneva Balmat had offered his services to Saussure for a climb the following year. Saussure had accepted them immediately, and in the summer of 1787 he went to Provence to take readings at sea level, leaving instructions for Balmat to contact him as soon as the snows melted. ‘Le courageux Balmat,’ as Saussure now called him, reconnoitred the slopes throughout June without any success. Then on 5 July he reached the top accompanied by two other guides, Jean-Michel Cachat and Alexis Tournier. Two days later Saussure was in Chamonix but to his dismay the weather was too bad to make an immediate ascent. For the rest of the month he fretted in the valley, organising his porters and supplies while he waited for the clouds to clear.
He did not fret alone. Breaking one of his cardinal rules, he had invited his wife, his two sons and his two sisters-in-law to observe the great endeavour. Shadowing them closely from Geneva came Bourrit and his son. Paccard, too, arrived from a climbing expedition in Courmayeur. It was an odd mixture. To Saussure’s surprise his wife made one or two short climbs and enjoyed the experience enormously: ‘Madame de Saussure had never been in such high spirits,’1 one of her sisters recorded. Bourrit, meanwhile, pestered him with requests that he be allowed to take part in the ascent - he was firmly turned down. And Paccard maintained a wary silence on the outskirts. ‘I think he does not want to see me before my expedition,’ Saussure commented, noting that ‘he seems to have taken pains everywhere to have gone a little further and higher than I have been.’2
And so the days passed. Saussure tested his instruments, his shoes and his stamina on the lower slopes - he reckoned 1,500 feet per hour was the best he could do - and when the rain was too heavy for outdoor work he received parcels of books and delicacies from Geneva, talked to travellers who had been drawn to Chamonix by news of his intended climb and began to read the classics. Bourrit rented a chalet and sold his pictures to tourists, now and then visiting the Saussure ménage in the hope of softening the great man’s resolve. Bourrit, Jr. presented the women with meadow bouquets to no avail. The weather worsened, and Paccard’s father drowned on a perilous river crossing, thereby rendering the doctor even less communicative than usual. On 29 July Saussure recorded streams of stone and dust being blown off the summit. On 30 July he measured the cloud speed at 60 feet per second. Then, on 1 August, by which time he had learned several passages of the Iliad by heart, the skies cleared. ‘The barometer mounts quickly,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I make, therefore, all arrangements for a start, but keep the secret from my wife.’3
His proposed route was that followed by Balmat but this time there would be no unseemly final dash for the summit. Saussure wanted as much time to make his observations as possible, to which end he proposed to spend the first night at La Côte and the second on the Grand Plateau below the Dôme du Goûter. It would all be done in as much comfort as possible, a retinue of eighteen guides being hired to carry food, wine and all Saussure’s instruments plus an inventory of requisites that included a parasol, several changes of clothes, three pairs of shoes, two nightshirts and a bed with ‘mattresses, sheets, coverlet, and a green curtain’. A tent was made which could accommodate the whole party. And Saussure’s long-suffering manservant was also enrolled - though what he was meant to do is a bit of a mystery.
Obtaining the guides was at first difficult. ‘They imagined that during the night it would be insupportably cold in the high snows,’4 Saussure complained. Despite Balmat’s evidence to the contrary, ‘they seriously feared they would die’.5 Patiently, Saussure explained that they could dig a hole in the snow, cover it with the tent, and thus protected from the elements, and heated by the warmth of their bodies, they would be quite comfortable no matter how cold it was. ‘These arrangements reassured them,’ he said, ‘and we therefore went ahead.’6
To begin with it was almost ludicrously easy. They climbed to the village of La Côte, below the Taconnaz and Bossons glaciers, where Mme Saussure sent up a fresh supply of meat. ‘I was really vexed about that which you have, which has been made for two days,’ she fussed. ‘I shall be better satisfied that you have this as a supplement.’ She made a tart remark about Saussure slipping off without telling her but relented at the end: ‘I have used rose-coloured paper so that you may have something else than the white of the snows to look at. Will you sleep well under your tent, mon cher ami? I trust so.’7
Saussure’s first day passed without incident. The second was slightly different. As they crossed the glaciers, Saussure’s team began to flag. One of the guides fell through a snow bridge and was only saved because he was roped fore and aft. They were all frightened, especially Saussure.
We … found ourselves entangled in a labyrinth of rocks of ice separated by large crevasses, in some places opening very wide, in others covered either wholly or in part by snow, which sometimes forms a sort of arch underneath, and which are sometimes the only resources in one’s power to get over the crevasses; at other times it is an uneven ridge of ice which serves as a bridge to cross over. In some places the crevasses are quite empty, we had to go down to the bottom and get up at the other side by stairs cut with a hatchet in the very ice … and sometimes after having got to the bottom of these abysses, you can hardly conceive how you shall get out again.8
To cross the deepest crevasses they carried with them a ladder, which Balmat had previously stored in a cavern at the base of the glacier - he had also stored a long pole, but this had inexplicably been stolen - in places, however, the gap was so wide that the ladder did not suffice. Their only option in these circumstances was to use the snow bridges.
‘However narrow and sloping the ice ridges may be,’ Saussure wrote, ‘these intrepid Chamoniards … appear neither afraid nor uneasy; they talk, laugh, and defy each other in jest; but when they pass over these slight roofs suspended over deep abysses, they walk in a most profound silence; the three first tied together by ropes, about five or six feet between them; the others two by two holding their sticks by the ends, their eyes fixed on their feet, each endeavouring to place exactly and lightly his foot in the traces of the one before him.’9
They surmounted many such obstacles, each victory being marked by an explosion of relieved chatter. At the brink of one crevasse Saussure’s manservant dropped the barometer pedestal. ‘It slid with the swiftness of an arrow down the sloping wall of the crevasse and planted itself at a great depth on the opposite side, where it remained fixed and quivering like the lance of Achilles on the bank of the Scamander.’10 The pedestal was vital because it not only supported the barometer but the compass, telescope and almost every other instrument Saussure possessed. A guide lowered himself down and retrieved it. According to Saussure, ‘It took us three hours to cross this redoubtable glacier, although barely a quarter of a league in breadth.’11
On reaching the Grand Plateau, where they planned to spend the next night, they were pinched by cold and hunger. But before they could eat or sleep they had to find a place to pitch the tent. This was not as simple as it seemed. They had to choose a spot that would be safe from the avalanches that slid off the Dôme du Goûter. At the same time they had to watch out for crevasses: Saussure had followed a particularly wicked specimen that had sunk out of sight but whose direction led to the Grand Plateau; he had visions of his team digging the tent into a snow bridge and falling to their doom.
Eventually a safe site was found and operations commenced. More than once on his expeditions, Saussure had remarked on the hardiness of Chamonix guides. But when they began to dig the hole for the tent, he was amazed at what happened. ‘These robust men, for whom the seven or eight hours march we had just endured were absolutely as nothing, could only shift five or six shovelfuls of snow before declaring the task an impossibility.’12 Saussure had chosen to camp in an area of the mountain that he later described as one of stagnant air. The men could not breathe properly and the slightest effort became a trial. When one guide went down the mountain to collect water that they had seen running at the bottom of a crevasse he returned empty-handed, wracked by altitude sickness. ‘He spent the rest of the night in terrible pain,’13 Saussure recorded. They all suffered from thirst that was only slightly alleviated by the snow they melted on braziers fuelled by coal which they carried on their backs.
In his published journal Saussure was at pains to point out that he was well accustomed to heights and did not suffer in the slightest from altitude sickness. In his diary, however, he told a different story. ‘Immense view … but sickness. I eat some bread and frozen beef, raw and nasty, and drink some water which had been carried up to me.’14 It was not quite the regulated jaunt he had envisaged. That evening, after a meal that none could stomach, the guides crawled into the tent and shut every opening tight, just as their leader had instructed. Saussure was given a corner of the tent in which to lie down. The others crouched as best they could, knee to knee, babbling in terror and occasionally turning aside to vomit. ‘Detestable night,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘sickness, colic, close atmosphere produced by twenty heated and panting inmates.’15 Eventually he had to go out for air. He was stunned by the view: ‘The magnificent basin, glowing in the light of the moon which shone with the greatest brilliancy in an ebony sky, presented a superb spectacle. Jupiter rose radiant behind the Aiguille du Midi, and the glow reflected from the snows was so brilliant that only stars of the first or second magnitude were visible.’16 The sight was beautiful but also intimidating. ‘There were no living beings, no sign of vegetation; it was a realm of frigid silence. When I imagined Paccard and Balmat reaching this desert at the end of the day, without shelter, without the possibility of rescue, without even the knowledge that men could survive where they intended to go, but nevertheless carrying on, I could not help but admire their courage.’17 Returning to his foetid quarters, he was awoken shortly after midnight by an avalanche that crashed over the slopes he intended to cross the following day. He slept fitfully and was up before dawn to take readings. The temperature was 5°F below zero.
They set off again at 7.00 a.m. with barely 2,500 feet left to climb. Compared to how far they had already come, it was a relatively small distance. But Saussure found it fearsomely hard work, having to stop for breath every thirty paces. After two hours, during which time they had climbed some 1,600 feet, they reached a terrifying crevasse. ‘This was one of the worst places,’ Saussure wrote in his diary. ‘The slope is 39 degrees, the precipice below is frightful, and the snow, hard on the surface, was flour beneath. Steps were cut, but the legs insecurely placed in this flour rested on a lower crust which was often very thin, and then slipped.’18 He tottered past this obstacle thanks only to a pole that two guides held as a kind of balustrade on the edge of the drop. He became weaker and weaker. Rest stops now occurred every fifteen paces and frequently his legs gave way beneath him. It took the same time to climb the remaining 900 feet as it had the preceding 1,600 - in the nineteenth century the mountaineer Edward Whymper was to reckon on fifty minutes for this last stretch - but finally, at 10.00 a.m. on 3 August 1787, Saussure reached the summit.
In Saussure’s first published account he said that his initial thought was of his wife. Unfortunately for Europe’s sentimentalists this was not quite correct. True, when he took out his telescope he saw her unfurling a flag, their pre-arranged signal that she could see him on the top. But in later amendments to his journal he revealed that his feelings were of disappointment, even rage. ‘Since I had had for the last two hours under my eyes almost all one sees from the summit, the arrival was no coup de théâtre - it did not even give me all the pleasure one might have imagined,’ he wrote. ‘The length of the struggle, the recollection and the still vivid impresssion of the exertion it had cost me, caused me a kind of irritation. At the moment that I trod the highest point of the snow that crowned the summit I trampled it with a feeling of anger rather than pleasure.’19 Not only was it an anticlimax but the protracted climb had robbed him of precious time in which to make ‘the observations and experiments which alone gave value to my venture, and I was very doubtful of being able to carry out more than a portion of what I had planned’.20
Still, he had to admit that the panorama was very grand from a scientific point of view. He did not have the time or the ability to make a map but the view gave him at last an overall sense of how the Alps fitted together. ‘I could not believe my eyes,’ he wrote. ‘It seemed as if it was a dream when I saw beneath my feet these majestic peaks … of which I had found even the bases so difficult and dangerous of approach. I realised how they were related, how they were connected, I saw their structure, and a single glance cleared the uncertainties which years of work had been unable to dispel.’21 For the next four and a half hours he toiled away with his instruments, taking a quantity of readings that he later described as ‘prodigious’. Among them was an attempt to ascertain whether the sky was really darker when seen from high altitude than when seen from below. Before setting out he had coloured sixteen cards in deepening shades of blue. While he flicked through them on Mont Blanc to see which accorded best to the sky above, scientist friends were by pre-arrangement shuffling similar swatches in Geneva and Chamonix. The verdict, delivered with due solemnity, was that the sky did, indeed, appear darker from Mont Blanc than from below. From certain vantage points one could see stars during the day. But it was definitely not the stratospheric black recorded by Leonardo da Vinci and others. According to the cards, the sky at Geneva was of the seventh shade of blue, at Chamonix it was between the fifth and sixth and on Mont Blanc it was almost at the first - a blue du roi.
By 3.30 p.m. Saussure had to give up. Clouds were coming in and he feared that if the descent took anything as long as the ascent he would be overtaken by night. He left the scene with regret. ‘I felt a painful sense of not being able to draw from it all the profit possible,’ he wrote. ‘I counted what I had done but little compared to what I had hoped to do.’ All in all, he declared, he was ‘like an epicure invited to a splendid festival and prevented from enjoying it by violent nausea’.22
In fact, the descent took just half the time Saussure had expected, allowing him to draw the conclusion that ‘it is the pressure on the chest from lifting the knees which causes the enormous fatigue one feels in going uphill’.23 By 9.30 the following morning they were below the snowline where they were greeted by Bourrit. The distraught Precentor had burst into tears when he saw Saussure on the summit and since then had been fluttering around Mont Blanc like a moth, desperate to find someone to lead him up - ‘but the guides refuse,’24 Saussure wrote. They left Bourrit where they found him. It was a Sunday, and Saussure travelled the remainder of the way on a mule, arriving Christ-like in Chamonix to the peal of church bells.
He was slightly sunburned, a touch snow-blind and a little stiff, but otherwise fine. He embraced his family and then hurried home to write up his journal. On the way to Geneva he met an old correspondent by the name of Wyttenbach. ‘Congratulate me!’ he cried as he fell into his friend’s arms. ‘I come from the conquest of Mont Blanc!’25
The adulation which greeted Saussure on his return to Geneva was astounding. Paccard and Balmat may not have existed as far as the world was concerned. Saussure was the true victor, and when he published an account of the journey his fame rocketed yet higher. ‘We have trembled while following you among precipices and perils,’ wrote his daughter’s mother-in-law, Mme Necker. ‘You have lifted my soul, Monsieur, by showing me these storehouses of the world, and I continually grieve at the weakness which hinders me from following in your footsteps. But my imagination supplies my lack of strength. While I read you I hear the dull roar of avalanches and the palpitations of the electric current… I imagine that I could wish to end my days in these quiet retreats beside M. Necker, so as to render a last homage to Nature and to married love, the only things that remain to us in the wreck of all the illusions of life.’26 This was not the half of it. His account of the climb was translated into English and Italian. A year later he was elected a Fellow of London’s Royal Society. In scientific circles he was considered on a par with Joseph Banks, whose circumnavigation of the globe with Captain James Cook between 1768 and 1771 had made him one of the century’s most famous figures.
Meanwhile, Geneva’s poets issued screed after terrible screed in honour of Saussure and anything connected with him. One effort, which ran to 112 lines in the classical style, devoted five lines to Mme de Saussure’s telescope: ‘this tube which brings near the objects removed by distance’.27 Saussure was fair game for anyone with a pen and a sense of rhyme. Even a convict, serving a life sentence for murder, made his own contribution from ‘L’Hôtel de Patience, on the 18th of August, the 129th month of his captivity’.28 The only discordant note was an ode that eulogised Balmat as the Columbus of the Alps, mispelled Paccard’s name, disparaged Saussure as a mere amateur and included several laudatory references to one Marc-Théodore Bourrit. Nobody took much notice.
Poor Bourrit. Having yearned for so long to climb Mont Blanc he was relegated to the position of helpless hanger-on - much the same role, in fact, that he had earlier ascribed to Paccard. The day after Saussure’s climb he found guides willing to take him to the summit. But once again his courage failed him. He lost his tinted spectacles and withdrew at the first sign of strong winds on the excuse that dust had blown into his eyes. Four days later, to his utter dismay, a young Briton named Mark Beaufoy found the spectacles and wore them on a successful climb to the summit, during which he walked - according to Paccard - as sturdily as any guide. Bourrit’s chagrin was compounded when he rushed forward to ask Beaufoy his impressions of the journey. Had his first thought on the summit, like Saussure before him, been of his wife? (The young woman, to whom Bourrit had taken a shine, was in the room at the time.) Beaufoy’s dispiriting reply was, ‘Not at all.’29
Bourrit’s moment came in 1788. In that year he joined an Englishman and a Dutchman to make the fifth successful ascent of Mont Blanc. It was notable for its bad weather and Bourrit wrote it up with all the vim he could muster. Even allowing for his exaggeration, it was clearly an unpleasant climb. The temperature sank to 13°F and the Dutchman turned back, fearing for his life. Groups of exhausted guides scattered the Grand Plateau, gasping the thin air before following his example. When the remainder finally reached the summit they were suffering badly from exposure. By the time they reached their downward bivouac on the Grands Mulets, ‘the Englishman Woodley [had] both feet frozen [and] never ceased complaining; Dominique Balmat was almost blind; Cachat le Géant’s hands were in a dreadful condition, and the other guides were little better off.’30 Back in Chamonix, Woodley spent thirteen days with his feet in a bath of ice and salt before he regained their full use; Bourrit did likewise for a whole day. The one snag, and it is a snag that his narrative does its best to obscure, was that Bourrit did not actually reach the top. He dropped behind - or, as he put it, Woodley pressed ahead unreasonably fast - and ground to a halt 400 feet from the summit. Still, it was amazing that he got so far; and had not Saussure said the last stretch revealed little new? In spirit, if not in fact, Bourrit had vanquished Mont Blanc. This was the view he took in his published account and it would be mean now to quibble with it. Whatever his faults, Mont Blanc’s most persistent loser should be given credit for its nearest conquest.