"ILE ST. LOUIS."

Golden Bay Argus, Volume XIII, Issue 50, 12 May 1910, Page 2

"ILE ST. LOUIS."

FASCINATING PART OF OLD PARIS, If you wish to fiad the Paris of olden times, the Paris of Balzac, the Paris of Revolution, the Paris of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, you rrvust frequent the populous quarters, at present abandoned by the gentry, and seek out the glorious mansions of the past, now transformed into work-houses and factories. There are many of them. All through the Quartier Saint Merri, and near the Pantheon, you will constantly come upon ancestral dwellings, now the homes of hundreds of "petits metiers Parisiens." But there yet remains a spot in the Metropolis which, on account of its privileged situation, the ravages of time and progress have left untouched. It is the "lie St. Louis," the tiny island back of Notre Dame. D.'screet little corner, silent little province, in the heart of the mighty city, it still bears its haughty mien and continues its reticent existence, like those aged persons we have sometimes met, who linger so long that death seems to have forgotten them, and whose rare conversations interest and astonish us. When we decided on Paris as a permanent place of residence, we chose our home on St. Louis Isle. As time went on, we became fonder and fonder of its history, more and more interested in the past, until at length we have come to regard it as belonging, in a measure, to us. And if to-day we wish to show you about the island, it is with something of the pride of a landholder who escorts his guests around his estate,

Here each house has its distinct personality, its own style of architecture, and, above all, that sympathetic and attractive air possessed so by things # lived long and could "relate' mucn. A glance at the high colourless walls, the dingy little streets, and even the sunlit, tree-bordered quays suffices to transport me into the pa*t. Everything Beemfl filled with a kind of melancholy poesy,; to breathe forth the perfume of history. As I y&sa each corner, I Bhould not be surprised to see a Sedan chair stop before one of those huge iron grills, and a charming powdered lady step out. Or, further on, from under the massive porte-cochere of that Louis XIV. mansion, is not a gilded coach with pompous and insolent outriders going to issue forth and clatter over the cobbles ?—"Scribner's Magazine."