None of the party wished to return to Paris, all agreeing that its pleasures had been sufficiently tried. The Darcys had no wish to deride the magnificence of Paris, but, to the English, the city was also a magnification of extremes. Where a cravat was high in England, it positioned the head even farther from its shoulders in France. Side-whiskers and beards were becoming almost as verdant as those of the Kossacks; coats were higher and trousers tighter and thinner; bodices were lower and more tightly circumscribed about the bosom; dresses draped in a gauze diaphanous to the point of near-transparency. On the other hand, Paris was also a place of contradictions: a residence might have the most exquisite silk curtains and furniture, but the floor of the same was greasy and unswept; the most delicious food was served by filthy hands, and cooked in a room adjacent to a dung pile of months’ accumulation. Where there was commerce, it had not the character of rational intercourse, but was a tumult of activity; the alternative to the disorder of daily business was a perverse and willful idleness. London had its poor, certainly, but it was not obvious to any of the English in France that the French peasantry were materially better off than had been their lot in the time of Marie Antoinette. And, as it was everywhere around them evident, where law ruled in England, France—and most particularly Paris—was governed by excess: of wealth, influence, display, and a disdainful disregard for the comfort of their fellow creatures, and certainly no concern for their censure. The French seemed to live by only one creed: immoderation. To the English observer, such excess was the antithesis of good-breeding and set every rule of civility at variance; yet, there was no denying that the French were exquisite in their art, fashion, and architecture.

However, other things considered, it was the indescribable filth emanating from all directions, the wretched combination of odours, and the appalling condition of the streets of Paris that were to send the party in the direction most opposite. The alteration to their original plan led Mr. Darcy to express a desire to visit the vineyard of Chateau d’Yquem, below Bordeaux. This made for a lengthy deviation across the country, but Mr. Darcy was of the opinion that the delights of such a detour would well-compensate for the additional days of travel. At least two of the three travellers began to recover their humour and spirits in the prospect of testing the best examples of the French wine, and the wine-cellars were reputed as worth a visit in themselves. The guidebooks and Mr. Darcy’s atlas were again consulted, and the family set off in the direction of Pouilly, fifteen posts distant, by the expedient of a detour southward.