Mary shook off her somnolence in the streets of Calais; the gay bustle of the harbour, the picturesque costume of the fisherfolk, the confused buzz of voices speaking a strange language, revived her. The day was spent at the inn, as they had to wait for the luggage coming by the Dover Packet, but when this arrived it brought also Mrs. Godwin and her green spectacles. The fat lady hoped to persuade Jane, at least, to go back with her to Skinner Street, but Shelley’s eloquence won the day, and Mrs. Godwin returned alone. At six o’clock the travellers left Calais for Boulogne in a cabriolet drawn by three horses running abreast. * * * Their plan was to get to Switzerland, but after a few days in Paris their purse was empty. Shelley had a letter for a certain Tavernier, a French man of business, who was to act as banker for them. They invited him to lunch at the hotel, and put him down as a perfect idiot, for he seemed to have a difficulty in understanding the absolute necessity of this journey by two little girls, and a tall and excitable young man. Shelley had to pawn his watch and chain; he got eight napoleons for them. This would give them bread and cheese for a fortnight, so with minds at ease, they began to explore the Boulevards, the Louvre, and Notre Dame. Later on they preferred to remain in the hotel and re-read together the works of Mary Wollstonecraft and Byron’s poems. At the end of the week, Tavernier, a good fellow in the main, agreed to lend them sixty pounds. But, as this was not enough to pay for their places by diligence, they decided to start on foot, and to buy an ass to carry the luggage, and each of them ride it by turns. Shelley went to the cattle-market and came back to the hotel with a very small donkey. Next morning a hackney-coach took them to the Barrier of Charenton, the ass trotting behind the carriage. The roads in France in the year 1814 were not particularly safe. The armies had just been demobilized, and bands of marauders robbed those who travelled on them. The peasants working in the fields by the road-side stared with all their eyes at this extraordinary caravan of two pretty girls in black silk gowns, a stripling with curly hair, and a ridiculously small donkey. At the end of a few miles, the last appeared so tired that Shelley and Jane had to carry him! In the village where they slept they sold him to a peasant and bought a mule in his place. The whole of the district had been devastated by the war, the villages were half-destroyed, the houses mostly roofless with fire-blackened beams; if they asked a farmer for milk he replied by cursing the Cossacks who had carried off his cows.