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Updated: May 13, 2025
He put it in his hat, and tied a handkerchief over it; and hatless in the burning sun he brought it to Geneva. August 6. The day after our return we dined at Mrs. Marcet's with M. Dumont, M. and Madame Prevost, M. de la Rive, M. Bonstettin, and M. de Candolle, the botanist, a particularly agreeable man. He told us of many experiments on the cure of goitres.
M. de Bonstettin Gray the poet's friend told me that in Sweden, about thirty years ago, he saw potatoes in the corner of a gentleman's garden as a curiosity. "They tell me, sir," said the gentleman, "that in some countries they eat the roots of this plant!" Now they are cultivated there, and the people have become fond of them.
In proportion as the land has been cultivated in some districts the goitres have disappeared. M. Bonstettin told us of some cretins, the lowest in the scale of human intellect, who used to assemble before a barber's shop and laugh immoderately at their own imitations of all those who came to the shop, ridiculing them in a language of their own. To MRS. EDGEWORTH. PREGNY, Aug. 10, 1820.
Standing in the long salon, which contains many portraits and souvenirs of the habitués of Coppet, we realized something of the life of those brilliant days, when the walls echoed to what Bonstettin called "prodigious outbursts of wit and learning," and upon whose boards classic dramas and original plays were acted, often very badly, by the learned guests.
Yesterday evening, when Madame de Broglie had placed me next the oldest friend of the family, M. de Bonstettin, he whispered to me, "You are now in the exact spot, in the very chair where Madame de Stael used to sit!" Her friends were excessively attached to her.
After spending some weeks in the company of a hostess who could converse half the day and most of the night with no sign of fatigue, it is not strange that Benjamin Constant sometimes found himself wearied by the mental activity of Coppet, where "more intellect was dispensed in one day than in one year in many lands," or that Bonstettin said that after a visit to the château, "One appreciated the conversation of insipid people who made no demand upon one's intellect."
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