ABSTRACT
As soon as Wessex Tales was off his hands, Hardy went with his wife to Paris and spent two weeks there in early June. He had been in Paris thrice before—in September 1874 (on his honeymoon), in 1882 (an October visit of several weeks), and in 1887 (on his way back from Italy). This time he visited the Archives Nationales, probably with no conscious intent of preparing for work on The Dynasts, which was still fifteen years off in the future, but with an unconscious instinct for improving his grasp of Napoleonic times.
