We jolted through the barriers with what I later learned was to be considered a minimum of fuss. The guards removed every box from Savill’s coach, including my own. They ordered each one of them to be opened. They shouted and demanded their tax. They held our passports to their lanterns and peered at the spidery writing, enquiring of our business again and again. I sat back against my seat, observing and silent, as cowed as a child. And this before we had so much as turned on to the darkened streets.

In London I had seen my fair share of the grotesque: the screeching peddlers and swarms of children, the snapping stray dogs and the beggars with scarcely a scrap to cover their nakedness. However menacing these spectacles appeared in England, they seemed all the more terrible in Paris. Not one road or byway appeared in any manner familiar. Indeed, the city seemed to extend before us in an infinite twist of black streets, which turned and rolled into one another like writhing snakes. At other times, its thoroughfares appeared as broad as rivers, lined with illuminated stalls and shops. Here hung threadbare coats and stained silk mantuas; there were goldsmiths and pawnbrokers, dentists, broom-sellers and barber surgeons ready with their knives and bleeding bowls. We passed beneath an endless succession of low-hanging street lamps, half of which had blown out. What pavements could be seen crumbled into the grime-slickened roads. In places, the darkness consumed everything. Nothing was visible but a single candle here and there, glowing yellow through unshuttered windows. Then there were the faces, gaunt-cheeked or fat, painted or hungry, appearing apparition-like from beyond the carriage glass. I sat and observed these images as I might the projections from a magic lantern.

We moved slowly across a narrow bridge, squeezed tightly with shops, until we arrived upon the left bank. There, I moved the fog from the window and spied below me the inky, flowing Seine.

I had heard Mr Savill direct his coachman to the rue Jacob, in the neighbourhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I knew this to be a salubrious address and now was most grateful to be repairing there. By the time we entered into the courtyard of the Hôtel l’Impératrice, I discovered my hands to be so tightly clenched together that they had turned entirely cold within my gloves.

Mr Savill, sensing my apprehension, had looked at me with what I took to be an expression of pity.