Jasper County Democrat, Volume 1, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 April 1899 — TREASURE SEEKING IN PARIS. [ARTICLE]

TREASURE SEEKING IN PARIS.

Widespread Belief teit Grut Treasure* Are Midden in the City. Same Parisians are actually kept from wandering by conviction that there is bidden treasure behind the walla, or beneath the flooring, or in the chimney nook, or under the roof. Yoa are told that during the nunaberles sieges to which Paris has been subjected. and the internal revolutions it has undergone, there exists not a cellar or a garret but has become the receptacle of some part of the immense riches accumulated in religious houses and obi families. There is, perhaps, nothing irrational in the supposition that in the good old times convents were made the depositories not only of the secrets of the aristocracy, bnt of the jewels likewise, instances must have occurred wherein these deposits were buried and remain undiscovered, together with the treasure off the confraternity. But human felly has of late years exalted this rational possibility into dazzling certainty. Every means is now resorted to, and more gold and s preeious time expended than the most valuable treasure eonld repay, in order to seize the secret which still resists discovery. “While you of the matter-of-fact, plodding Anglo-Saxon race are toiling and bruiting in Australia and California searching for gold, we gold-seekers of Paris find it here beneath our feet in the old quarters of the city round Notre Dame and the Hotel de Ville, where gold Is teeming in greater plenty than amid the rocky bowlders of California, or beneath the soil of Ballarat,” said Dncasse, the great treasure s?eker. As if to mock this feverish and nevereeasing chase, not one of the great tin ditfona! treasures—of which four are believed to exist—has been yet brought to tight, although now' and then some token is vouchsafed of their real existence. From time to time, for instance, the tradition of the famous treasure buried by Napoleon's order, on his hurried departure from the Tuileries before Waterloo, is justified by the turning up in ail parts of the palace garden of gold pieces and silver crowns. TIIO holes of the elm trees down the middle aliey of the garden were all marked with hieroglyphic signs, which, ceasing at certain points, began again on the time trees of the Terrace of the Feuiliians. But the elm tree where these signs began and the lime tree on which they have ended have been uprooted and the soil all about them turned over without avail. Then, during the laylag oct of the Bois de Boulogne, great interest was excited by the fencing off of a portion of the wood close to the Pre Catelan, and ransacking of th*s small spot for a month, under the superintendence of a government officer, while crowds waited anxiously outside the line to see one of the forty workmen strike upon the golden deposit confidently believed to have been buried there by Fouche, Duke of Otranto. The hoard is actually calculated ns part of the family wealth.—Chambers’ Journal.