The day after Corbett's visit to Notre Dame, the English envoys had sufficiendy recovered from the ordeal at sea to begin their journey, following the coast down to the Somme before turning south to Paris. They had brought their own horses and baggage across, a cumbersome trail of animals carrying supplies for my lords the Earls of Richmond and Lancaster, not to mention the clerks, scribes, cooks, cursors, bailiffs, priests and doctors. There was no obvious distinction in degree or status, the biting cold weather and shrill, sharp winds ensured everyone was wrapped in thick brown cloaks.

Now there was the usual chaos outside the small monastery they had lodged in after leaving the port, horses were saddled, two needed a farrier, one was lame, another had sores on its back; girths, bridles and stirrups were checked, broken or damaged ones repaired before clothing, manuscripts and other baggage were loaded noisily on to them alongside provisions purchased at exorbitant prices from sly-eyed merchants. The calm of the monastery courtyard was shattered by cries, shouted orders, curses and the angry neighs of nervous, highly-strung horses. A number of mongrels wandered in to share and spread the confusion, only to be chased away by an irate, stick-wielding lay brother.

Corbett sat on a ruined bench in the corner of the courtyard and morosely watched the chaos. The shouts and curses would have drowned the cries of the damned in hell; Corbett stared up at the huge tympanum carved above the monastery church door where, etched eternally in stone, the damned hanged by their bellies from trees of fire while more smothered in furnaces, their hands across their mouths, their stone eyes staring through plumes of smoke; Christ in judgement held the saved in his hands while the wicked were swallowed by monstrous fish, some gnawed by demons, tormented by serpents, fire, ice or tormented by fruits forever hanging out of reach of their starving maws. Corbett morosely concluded such terrors were nothing compared to the experience of being sent across the channel in freezing winter on an English embassy to France.