Village St-Paul and Around
From Paris Hotels Reviews
The Village St-Paul and Around
Shift eastwards to the next tangle of street and you’ll find chic, modern flats in the "Village St-Paul" (M° St-Paul/Pont Marie), with clusters of antique shops in the courtyards. This part of the Marais suffered a postwar hatchet job, and, although seventeenth- and eighteenth-century magnificence is still in evidence (there’s even a stretch of the city’s defensive wall dating from the early thirteenth century in the lycée playground on rue des Jardings ST-Paul0, it lacks the architectural cohesion of the Marais to the north. The fifteenth-century Hotel de Sens, on the rue du Figiuer, looks bizarre in its isolation. The public library it now housed, the Bibliotheque Forney, filled with volumes of fine and applied arts, maked a good excuse to explore this outstanding medieval building.
Amid the antique shops on nearby rue St-Paul is the Musee de la Magie at no. 11, a delightful museum of magic and illusion. A few tricks are explained, but don’t expect to glean all the answers. Automates, distorting mirrors and optical illusions, things that float on thin air, a box for sawing people in half – they’re all n view, with examples from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as contemporary magicians’ tools and plenty of hands-on exhibits for children. The best fun is alive demonstration of the art (every 30min from 2.30-6pm) by a skilled magician. The museum shop sells books on conjuring and magic cards, wands, boxes, scarves and the like. Groups of schoolchildren tend to visit on Wednesday, so its better to visit at weekends.
