Livres des Irlandais?

MONSIEUR Maurice Caillet reaches in the glass case and lovingly extracts a small book, bound in red leather and embossed with gold. It was printed in 1699 and is dedicated to Queen Mary of Modena. The Irish harp and the crown on the coat of arms of King James II have been gouged out. "An Irishman came to own it long ago," explains the librarian. "He didn't like the English so he removed those parts of the coat of arms."

Mr Caillet has been the volunteer librarian of the College des Irlandais in Paris for the past 21 years, since retiring as Inspector General of Libraries for the French Ministry of Education. The 18th century library with its original furnishings can be visited by appointment.

The library's collection contains hundreds of works on the distrust between Anglicans and Catholics in the 17th and 18th centuries. Mr Caillet sums up their mutual relations in two words: "very bad". Books were published to discredit the beliefs of the opposing side. "1614 SYNOPSIS PAPISMI That Is A Generall View Of Papistrie: Wherein The Whole Mysterie of Iniquitie, and Summe of Anti Christian Doctrine Is Set Downe" says the frontispiece of a typical volume with Paisley like contempt.

"The language was extraordinarily violent," says Mr Caillet. "They called each other every imaginable name." The Catholic viewpoint is told in another book in the collection, a 1554 treatise against the marriage of priests which belonged to Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon.

"You try to understand why the book was written and why the owner loved it," says Mr Caillet. The son of a Catholic father and a Protestant mother, his fondness for the books is mingled with detachment. "The lesson I learn from them is one of tolerance."

There is also the thrill of literally touching history. Mr Caillet holds a History of the Fall of the Empire After Charlemagne, embossed with the Coat of Arms of Louis XIV. "They would not have gone to so much trouble for the binding if it hadn't been one of the king's personal books," he says. "There is every reason to believe that Louis XIV held this book in his hands, just as I hold it now." Mr Caillet draws his fingers over one of the pages. "They used rag paper," he says. "It is still perfect. Nowaday's we use wood paper - our books won't last like these have."

A bright emerald green book embossed with gold harps catches the eye. "This one has just been restored," Mr Caillet says. Dating from the 1870s, the volume celebrating the centenary of Daniel O'Connell's birth is one of the library's newer books. "Look at the inscription," he says. "I find it very moving." Signed by Peter Paul McSwiney, Lord Mayor of Dublin and President of the Centenary Committee, the dedication thanks the Irish College for "the many benefits received through it by the Irish Catholic Nation during the Penal Times".

MAURICE Caillet has never visited Ireland, and the country he imagines is the one he knows from books. "I see it very green, filled with castles, abbeys and for tresses." With its vaulted ceiling, musty odour and worn tile floor, the library where he cossets the college's 10,000 volumes - half of which are more than 200 years old - resembles the castle or fortress where his enemies are light, humility, heat, insects and mice. Established in 1772, the Irish library is the only one in Paris's Latin Quarter to have survived the 1789 French revolution intact, with its stock of old books; all others were closed or destroyed by the Jacobins.

The library was considered a foreign institution, and so was spared at the beginning of the revolution." Then the Convention declared war on England in 1793. Napoleon Bonaparte decided to make the College des Irlandais a centre of education for young Irishmen, who would be encouraged to fight the British. The books of the nearby English seminary and Scottish college had been confiscated by revolutionary authorities. Napoleon gave the collections to the Irish and they still constitute the backbone of the college's library.