On her arrival in Paris in 1828, Blessington notes down: ‘The woman who wishes to be a philosopher must avoid Paris!’ (IiF 1: 64– 65). Thus she marks a change in her interests after years spent in Italy. ‘The gay indifference of fashionable Paris’, as Sadleir puts it (1947, 104), would have offered a pleasing contrast after her stays in the unsettling cities of Rome and Venice, and in Genoa, then a city of mournful associations. At the time she must have already had in view her return to England, and thus from then on she devotes much more attention to what would most appeal to her female readers, as if she were trying to win the favour of the English ladies, who had excluded her from their company and sympathy. Paris could help her to gain the position of a ‘woman of Fashion […] Fashion of the highest kind’, as Benjamin Haydon called her seven years later (quoted in Lovell 1969, 107– 8). In The Idler in France, as well as in Journal of a Tour through the Netherlands to Paris, in 1821, Blessington sketches a fashionable map of Paris, recording all the places a woman of the world should visit.

It is also her manner of writing that changes during her stay in Paris. As Sadleir observes, once she leaves Rome and arrives in Paris, Blessington's ‘diary regains something of the old serenity and discursiveness’ (Sadleir 1947, 104). When browsing the table of contents, one notices numerous entries interspersed throughout the account of the city, which are reminiscent of recurring columns in a womanly magazine (such as the Lady's Magazine). Her manner of writing changes along with her changing perceptions of the city, since each place opens up new discursive spaces. Blessington's Paris is made of various modes of life, and so her relation is a compilation of various language modes and genres. It is best exemplified in the entries for July 1830, when she changes her style from that of a columnist describing Paris as the city of fashion into that of a journalist reporting it as the city of revolution.