Having made their escape from the Porte Saint Martin, Mr. Darcy instructed the coachman to turn eastward, before proceeding down the Rue du Temple to avoid the crowds of foot-traffic through the parks that lay between the Rue St. Martin and the Rue St. Denis. The carriage continued the length of the Rue du Temple and thence along the Quay de la Grève, which ran along the Seine. They first passed the imposing façade of the Hôtel de Ville, where, but a few years before, hundreds of the country’s surviving élite welcomed the return of Louis XVIII, in celebration of what they thought marked the end of years of horror and war, the Ile de la Cité, the vast form of the Notre Dame, and the enchanting Sainte-Chapelle. They drove westward, past the Conciergerie and Palais du Justice, after turning northward just before the magnificent esplanade of the Hôtel des Invalides. The boulevards of Paris were a constant bustle, busy with persons, animals, conveyances, and vendibles. Commerce appeared to be conducted from innumerable stalls, at which every article of necessity and diversion was sold, including books, cloathing, ironmongery, shoes, hats, fruits, vegetables, cheeses, poultry, and all manner of other victual. Elizabeth exclaimed at the custom of letting out seats, which were filled with respectable-looking persons by the score, all seated in a row, watching and being watched, and doing little else except exchanging a few words now and again. Itinerants were everywhere: blind-men, dwarfs walking with sticks and under hats that were nearly half their total height, ragged children begging for alms, and a man with a fantastical machine affixed to his back, from which he seemed to be vending a beverage of some sort. A woman bent under an enormous basket, from which she was selling melons to an officer; a man was strapped to a basket of equally large size from which sprang twigs and branches, apparently a wood-seller. A cheese-seller struggled under his wide yoke, a long, flat board as tall as the bearer and nearly as wide, along which were affixed several baskets, all filled with enormous cheeses. A washer-woman strolled unconcernedly through the throngs with an heavy burthen of linens, all wrapt in paper and tied with a ribband of some sort, balanced upon her head, miraculously avoiding a collision with a man harnessed to a large cart full of brooms, who had suddenly found his way thoroughly impeded by a menacing dog. Two pot-men could be seen amongst the crowd: one balanced what appeared to be an immense preserves pan upon his head, filled to over-flowing with at least a score of metal wares, a long row of progressively larger soup-pots hanging from one arm tied through with a cord, affixed to a range of other, larger pots carried in his hand; the other iron-monger of decidedly shabbier appearance, wearing an old, tattered frock-coat which had seen at least a score of years, carried only two enormous cauldrons slung by a rope about his neck. Amidst this scene of aspiring commerce trouped a group of girls, obviously from a pension de jeunes demoiselles, led from the front by a remarkably handsome young man dressed very smartly, with an hat and cane, and hurried along by a rear-guard in the form of an older lady whose years of this congenial employment had produced such an impassivity of countenance, as was incapable of any humour, good or ill. Swarming amidst the brigade of bonnets and muslins were the ubiquitous poodle-dogs, which the French considered indispensable.