The Cité gave birth to Paris and raised her, while the river’s other island, Saint-Louis, is a secluded area, left to its own devices for years, joined to the Left Bank by two and to the Right Bank by three bridges. No one came and settled there. While the Cité pressed Paris to its bosom, it forgot the island of Saint-Louis, abandoning it to its fate.

FRENCH COMMUNICATIONS AT THE EIFFEL TOWER
After the Cité and the island of Saint-Louis, the Eiffel Tower comes to my mind when Paris is mentioned. During the first years of my Paris adventure, the Eiffel Tower was a monument which I expressly did not visit, indeed did not even look at in passing. A person becomes inured to the monuments of the city where he lives in any case and loses the ability to look at them with the eye of a stranger, the chance of rediscovering their special properties. But the Eiffel Tower, that ubiquitous Parisian symbol that shows up on gift items of every variety, bears the entire brunt of France’s communications with the world, and we aren’t even aware of it.