EUROPE TO-DAY

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVIII, Issue 182, 2 July 1938, Page 11

EUROPE TO-DAY

PARIS PAST AND PRESENT. Whoever walks in Paris to-day without something of the past in his mind misses half the glory. Within a small space bounded by the river and stretching back from it for less than a mile is included almost all the tourist’s Paris. Little do most tourists know of the tragic memories of the city. Here is the Louvre, for instance. To them the name may very likely suggest the big department store which took the name of the Palace built by Francis the First and now famous as a picture gallery and museum of rare and beautiful things Adjoining the Louvre are the gardens" of the Tuileries, another royal residence.

How many tourists think, when they see the Carrousel arch, of. the unhappy-king and queen who came forth from the Tuileries by the Carrousel entrance in the quiet night to try to escape beyond the frontier ? How many recall the escape of the Empress Eugenie after the surrender of Louis Napoleon to the Germans, when in disguise she took refuge with her English dentist till she rould safely leave the country? From these gardens of the Tuileries we have one of the finest of the long views for which Paris is famous, a view up the slope of the Champs Elysees, with the Arc de Triomphe at the top, that Arc de Triomphe of Napoleon by which the German troops m a relied in after tho surrender of the city in 1871, another tragic memory that goes with recollections of the Siege and tho Famine and tho streetfighting of the Commune, when Parisians turned their arms against one another after having for so long resisted the national foe.

Paris is especially rich in beautiful open spaces.—(G.)