The little party—five in all—Francis and Robert, and M. Marcombes, with their two French servants, “took post for Rye in Sussex; and there, though the sea was rather rough, they hired a ship,” and “a prosperous puff of wind did safely, by next morning, blow them into France.”[78] They were a day and night at sea, and “a little tossed att night”; they had escaped the perils of the deep and of “yᵉ Donkirks”; and after stopping for a short refreshment at Dieppe, they set off towards Rouen and Paris.[79] They enjoyed the company of several French gentlemen on the road, of which they were glad; for a robbery had been “freshly committed in a wood” between Rouen and Paris, through which the travellers would be obliged to pass by night. Marcombes sensibly observed that the very next day after the robbery would be the very safest time to ride through the wood; and accordingly they continued their journey. At Rouen, Robyn was fascinated by the great floating bridge, which rose and fell with the tide water; and in one of his “pretty conceits,” such as had so amused Sir Henry Wotton at Eton, the boy compared this bridge at Rouen to the “vain amorists of outward greatnesse, whose spirits resent” (_i.e._ rise and fall with) “all the flouds and ebbs of that fortune it is built on.” And this so soon after Frank’s gay wedding in Whitehall! Arrived in Paris on November 4, unmolested by brigands on their journey, Marcombes and the two boys spent some days in “that vast chaos of a city,” where they were shown most of the “varieties,” and met several English friends—among them one whom M. Marcombes heartily disliked, Frank’s new brother-in-law, Tom Killigrew, with the honeyed tongue, brother of the little bride who had been left behind in the House of the Savoy. They also called on the English Ambassador; but the great event of their visit to Paris has been described in Marcombes’s first letter to the Earl.[80] Mr. Francis, he says, had been so troubled at the moment of his departure from the Savoy on account of his father’s anger against him, that he had quite forgotten where he had put his own sword and the case of pistols which the Earl had given the boys; and Marcombes had been obliged, when they arrived at Paris, to buy them “a kaise of pistolles a piece”, not only because of the dangerous state of the roads in France (witness the robbery freshly committed in a wood), but because it was “yᵉ mode” in France for every gentleman to ride with pistols; and people would “Laugh att” the Earl’s hopeful sons if they were without them. A sword also had been bought for Mr. Francis, and “when Mr. Robert saw it he did so earnestly desire me to buy him one, because his was out of fashion, that I could not refuse him that small request.”