Born around 1767 in
Geneva,
Republic of Geneva, the son of a
Huguenot banker, Jean-Jacques Sartoris, and Anne Greffuhle (aunt of
Jean-Henry-Louis Greffulhe), he was baptised on 5 August 1773. He used to live in
Gloucester Place close to
Regent's Park, and married in 1813 Hester Matilda Tunno, daughter of the Scottish banker John Tunno (1746–1819) and sister of
Edward Rose Tunno. They had six children including a son, the British statesman
Edward John Sartoris, and a daughter who later married Louis Victor Arthur des Acres de l'Aigle. In January 1809 he was
naturalised as a
British subject by a
private act of Parliament, ''''
(49 Geo. 3. c. 9'' ). Shortly after 1818, he acted as
first consul of the
Swiss Confederacy in the
United Kingdom, then was succeeded by Alexandre Prévost Prévost wrote of him : 'He [Urbain Sartoris] had both good fortune and ambition, or rather self-pride. Thanks to his diplomatic charge, he thought he could fling open the gates of high society for himself; yet no sooner had he passed the line he had been craving for, did he stop caring for a second-order office, which he openly declared to me, offering me to be introduced as his successor'. During the
French Restoration, Sartoris moved to France and invested millions of
francs in inland waterways. He bought a manor house at Sceaux. He also bought the estates of
la Garenne de Colombes, which his inheritors sold by pieces around 1865. He died in
Paris on 30 November 1833. ==Family==