some signs of decadence began to be visible in this brilliant Genevese
society. The generation which had waited for, prepared, and controlled,
the Restoration of 1814, was falling into the background, and the
younger generation, with all its respectability, wanted energy, above
all, wanted leaders. The revolutionary forces in the state, which had
made themselves violently felt during the civil turmoils of the period
preceding the assembly of the French States General, and had afterward
produced the miniature Terror which forced Sismondi into exile, had been
for awhile laid to sleep by the events of 1814. But the slumber was a
short one at Geneva as elsewhere, and when Rossi quitted the republic
for France in 1833, he did so with a mind full of misgivings as to the
political future of the little state which had given him--an exile and a
Catholic--so generous a welcome in 1819. The ideas of 1830 were shaking
the fabric and disturbing the equilibrium of the Swiss Confederation as
a whole, and of many of the cantons composing it. Geneva was still
apparently tranquil while her neighbors were disturbed, but no one
looking back on the history of the republic, and able to measure the
strength of the Radical force in Europe after the fall of Charles X.,
could have felt much doubt but that a few more years would bring Geneva
also into the whirlpool of political change.

In the same year--1833--that M. Rossi had left Geneva, Henri Frederic
Amiel, at twelve years old, was left orphaned of both his parents. They
had died comparatively young--his mother was only just over thirty, and
his father cannot have been much older. On the death of the mother the
little family was broken up, the boy passing into the care of one
relative, his two sisters into that of another. Certain notes in M.
Scherer's possession throw a little light here and there upon a
childhood and youth which must necessarily have been a little bare and
forlorn. They show us a sensitive, impressionable boy, of health rather