This small task left me quite tired and I lay back in my chair, watching the busy scene in the harbor outside my window. It was all so foreign and fascinating with peasant ladies in white lace caps and the fishermen in their blue smocks, contrasting with the red sails. No wonder the Impressionst painters were so keen to paint here. After lunch Therese, the landlady’s daughter, came to amuse Liam, whose eyes no longer looked sunken. It was a huge relief to hear him laugh loudly when Therese knocked down a tower of blocks. I tried him on a little mashed potato and gravy that night and he ate well. It seemed that our ordeal was finally at an end. By tomorrow night I’d be safely with Sid and Gus.

In the morning we set off, the wagon piled high with ourselves and our luggage, for the station. I noted the departure time of the train then paid a boy to deliver my telegram to the telegraph office. Sid and Gus would probably be waiting anxiously, I thought. They’d be so relieved to know I was all right and finally on my way. Miss Hetherington found an empty compartment for the six of us plus Liam and the train pulled out of the station. Yesterday’s good weather had given way to a steady rain as we made our way toward the capital city. The French countryside looked bleak and gray, rainswept scenes of fields divided by lines of poplar trees, just coming into leaf. We passed the massive cathedral at Reims, rising above the sloping roofs of the town.

“Catholics, of course,” Miss Pinkerton said when the other women remarked how magnificent it was. “Why can’t Protestants build decent cathedrals?”

Liam had just fallen asleep on my lap when we came into the outer suburbs of Paris. After having lived in New York for four years, the thing that struck me was that this was a city of low buildings. In New York we were used to new skyscrapers and apartment blocks. Even the tenements were five or six floors high. Here church spires and domes rose above rooftops. And to my disappointment these buildings did not resemble my vision of Paris. They were small and mean and dirty, reminding me of the back streets of Belfast or Liverpool. The only difference was that these houses all had shutters, some brightly painted, some peeling. And there were bright advertising signs painted on house walls. Signs advertising Gauloises cigarettes and Dubonnet and other unfamiliar names. Then I spotted something in the distance above the rooftops, an ironwork tower, impossibly high. I pointed excitedly.

“Look,” I said. “Over there.”

“Goodness me,” Miss Pinkerton exclaimed. “I heard it was quite a monstrosity, and it is, isn’t it? I wonder they didn’t take it down after the exhibition.”