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The turn of the “Lights” represents a particularly rich moment to grasp the generic complexity of the travel story and to better outline its historical, geographical and literary issues which will imprint the whole history of the genre in the 19th century. At that very specific “moment”, science and literature have not finished constituting their own spaces likely to lead to a breaking off. A number of scientists (from Haller to Humboldt and Ramond de Carbonnières) and writers (such as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre) still think it possible to invent a literary – if not poetic – form, that could carry a message of a didactic, or philosophical – even scientific – nature. To give an idea of the complex issues of the travel story in these days, we selected – among a considerable amount – three particularly significant trips to the Mont Blanc, published at the end of the 18th century: the stories of Bordier, Bourrit and Saussure. The comparison between their prefaces and a few abstracts treating similar subjects, will help us to understand the diversity of the proposed approaches, and the necessity of an attentive study of the conditions and manners of enunciation in order to extract all the anthropological and cultural knowledge transmitted by the travel stories in the 19th century.