Michel-Gabriel Paccard Michel-Gabriel Paccard Michel Gabriel Paccard (1757–1827) was a Savoyard doctor and alpinist, citizen of the Kingdom of Sardinia. Born in Chamonix, he studied medicine in Turin. Due to his passion for botany and minerals, he met Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, who initiated the race to be the first to ascend Mont Blanc. Gaston Rébuffat wrote "Like Saussure a devotee of the natural sciences, he has a dream: to carry a barometer to the summit and take a reading there. An excellent mountaineer, he has already made several attempts." Paccard had a first, unsuccessful, attempt in 1783 with Marc Theodore Bourrit. In
Gabriel Jacques Surenne who also published books on French military subjects. Gabriel Jacques Surenne Gabriel Jacques Surenne FSA FASE (1777-1858) was a 19th-century French-born military historian living in Scotland who authored numerous publications in the fields of warfare and battle analysis and also in French grammar. He was born in Compiegne in France on 25 October 1777. His early life is unclear other than various references made by himself as to having been trained in Paris. A newspaper epitaph mentions his war service with Napoleon Bonaparte in his successful Italian Campaign. He appears in Edinburgh around 1830, both as a teacher and prodigious