y pounds per annum; I mean unfurnished. All games of
chance are strictly prohibited, and it seems to me the only law they do
not try to evade: they play at quadrille, piquet, &c., but not high.
Here are no regular public assemblies. I have been visited by all of the
first rank, and invited to several fine dinners, particularly to the
wedding of one of the house of Spinola, where there were ninety-six sat
down to table, and I think the entertainment one of the best I ever saw.
There was the night following a ball and supper for the same company,
with the same profusion. They tell me that all their great marriages are
kept in the same public manner. Nobody keeps more than two horses, all
their journeys being post; the expense of them, including the coachman,
is (I am told) fifty pounds per annum. A chair is very near as much; I
give eighteen francs a week for mine. The senators can converse with no
strangers during the time of their magistracy, which lasts two years.
The number of servants is regulated, and almost every lady has the same,
which is two footmen, a gentleman-usher, and a page, who follows her
chair.

Certainly the simple life appealed to Lady Mary, but much as she liked
Geneva the cost of living irked her. "Everything is as dear as it is at
London," she complained to her husband in November, 1741. "'Tis true, as
all equipages are forbidden, that expense is entirely retrenched.... The
way of living is absolutely the reverse of that in Italy. Here is no
show, and a great deal of eating; there is all the magnificence
imaginable, and no dinners but on particular occasions; yet the
difference of the prices renders the total expense very near equal....
The people here are very well to be liked, and this little republic has
an air of the simplicity of old Rome in its earliest age. The
magistrates toil with their own hands, and their wives literally dress
their dinners against their return from their little senate. Yet without
dress and equipage 'tis as dear living here for a stranger, as in places
where one is obliged to both, from the price of all sort of provision,
which they are forced to buy from their neighbours, having almost no
land of their own." How much more agreeable, from Lady Mary's point of
view, was Chambery: "Here is the most profound peace and unbounded
plenty that is to be found in any corner of the universe; but not one
rag of money. For my part, I think it amounts to the same thing, whether
on