At the end of the holiday a group of sixth form boys sampled the historic sights of French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Paris. During a busy few days the tour guide encouraged the boys to feel the chilly finger of history in the Conciergerie as they traced the route to execution taken by figures such as Danton, Robespierre and Marie Antoinette and ran their fingers along a guillotine blade. The group surveyed the rooftops of Paris from the magnificent Arc de Triomphe and marvelled at the huge painting of Napoleon's coronation in the Louvre. This and the manifestations of the Napoleonic myth seen at his tomb at Les Invalides should prove a helpful aide memoire for upper sixth students in their exam. For the lower sixth, though they climbed the stone staircase at Versailles in the footsteps of the protesters of October 1789, it is possible that the escalator at the Louvre proved equally memorable (if for rather different reasons) and the 'insights' gleaned at Arras during a visit to Robespierre's house may not be quite what examiners expect.