The area's old-world charm combines with the restaurants and boutiques effervescence in quite a fascinating way.

Saint-Germain is also the intellectual centre of Paris where jazz clubs and trendy after war cafes, of which the Flore and the Deux Magots where Boris Vian, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir would meet.

A walk along the rue Bonaparte lined with antique shops, followed by a romantic stroll along the Seine.

The private mansions dating from the XVIIth century and often converted into ministries. ministeres.

The Carrefour de l'Odeon with its cinemas, its cafés and its university bookshops.

The Orsay Museum, a former train station built on the ruin of the Palais d'Orsay, was first inaugurated in 1900 for the Universal Exposition and was then turned into a museum in the 1980's. It holds a superb painting collection dedicated to the end of the XIXth century and the beginning of the XXth.

The Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pres has now been reigning over the area for more than fifteen centuries.