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Geneva

2 stories from this place.

The Footnote June 26, 2026 · Les Délices, Geneva

The 234-Line French Poem Voltaire Wrote in Three Weeks After Lisbon and the Three-Year Argument It Started With Rousseau

Voltaire wrote the *Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne* in mid-November 1755 — three weeks after the earthquake — as a direct philosophical attack on the Leibnizian doctrine of optimism. Rousseau answered with a long defence in August 1756. The argument substantially defined the French Enlightenment's theological position for the next generation.

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The Footnote June 24, 2026 · Charlotte Street, London

The Pre-Raphaelite Painter Whose Uncle Wrote The Vampyre and Whose Mother Preserved the Diary

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's mother Frances was the sister of John Polidori — the physician who wrote *The Vampyre* at Lord Byron's Geneva villa in 1816 and committed suicide three years later. The Polidori family preserved his suppressed Geneva diary through three generations until Rossetti's brother William Michael edited it for publication in 1911.

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