After ‘the folly and madnesse of the Carnevall’ was over, Evelyn left Venice for Padua in January, 1646, but went back in March to take leave of his friends there, and at Easter set out on his return journey to England in company with the poet Waller, who had been glad to go abroad after being much worried by the Puritan party. They travelled by way of Vicenza, Verona, Brescia, Milan, the Lago Maggiore, the Simplon Pass, Sion, and St. Maurice to Geneva. Here again Evelyn became sick nigh unto death, from small-pox contracted at Beveretta, the night before reaching Geneva. ‘Being extremely weary and complaining of my head, and finding little accommodation in the house, I caus’d one of our hostesses daughters to be removed out of her bed and went immediately into it whilst it was yet warme, being so heavy with pain and drowsinesse that I would not stay to have the sheets chang’d; but I shortly after payd dearly for my impatience, falling sick of the small-pox so soon as I came to Geneva, for by the smell of frankincense and ye tale of ye good woman told me of her daughter having had an ague, I afterwards concluded she had been newly recovered of the small-pox.’ Becoming very ill he was bled of the physician ‘a very learned old man..... He afterwards acknowledg’d that he should not have bled me had he suspected ye small-pox, which brake out a day after.’ As nurse he had a Swiss matron afflicted with gôitre, ‘whose monstrous throat, when I sometimes awak’d out of unquiet slumbers, would affright me.’ But again he was spared for the work he was destined to do. ‘By God’s mercy after five weeks keeping my chamber I went abroad.’ Leaving Geneva on the 5th July 1646, Evelyn’s party went by way of Lyons, La Charite, and Orleans to Paris, arriving ‘rejoic’d that after so many disasters and accidents in a tedious peregrination, I was gotten so neere home, and here I resolv’d to rest myselfe before I went further. It was now October, and the onely time that in my whole life I spent most idly, tempted from my more profitable recesses; but I soon recover’d my better resolutions and fell to my study, learning the High Dutch and Spanish tongues, and now and then refreshing my danceing, and such exercises as I had long omitted, and which are not in much reputation amongst the sober Italians.’