There were reasons for Byron's late arrival in Geneva beyond his habitual, temperamental preference for a leisurely mode of travel. By going through France, the Shelley party had taken the direct route to Switzerland. Byron seems to have made enquiries about doing the same but learned that, although he could obtain travel documents for France in general, it would be on condition that he did not set foot in Paris. The authorities may have discovered that he was acquainted with one of the British officers involved in Lavallette's escape; they must have known that a book about France in 1815, which his friend Hobhouse had published and which dealt with the hundred days in a manner sympathetic to Napoleon, was mostly in the form of letters addressed to Byron; or perhaps he was just on the list as one of Britain's more notorious liberals. Always quick to take offence, the likely refusal of the necessary documents for Paris was why he chose to sail from Dover to Ostend, make his way to Cologne, and then follow the Rhine down to the Swiss border. That way he could avoid France altogether and the pain of seeing Napoleon's former people subjected to another of what he had called those ‘stupid, legitimate-old-dynasty boobies of regular-bred sovereigns’.

Choosing a longer route slowed Byron down but so too did the fact that he rarely travelled light. There was quite a large group to accommodate. With him was William Fletcher, who had worked on the Newstead estate, been converted into a valet and then accompanied Byron on his trip to the Levant. Also from Newstead was Robert Rushton, the son of one of his tenants. Because he was a boy at the time, he had set out on the Levantine tour in the capacity of a page but then been sent back home from Gibraltar by Byron, who was anxious about what might happen to a good-looking adolescent in those territories which were controlled by the Turks and where it was presumed – and not without good reason – that pederasty was rife. According to Caroline Lamb, in the testimony she eagerly passed on to Annabella Milbanke at the time of the separation crisis, this anxiety was needless because rushton had already been ‘corrupted’ by Byron himself.