Right Bank
Obelisk Press
This respectable office building at 338 rue Saint-Honore was once home to one of the more scandalous publishing houses of the twentieth century.
Café de l’Eléphant: Update
Michael Jones has just returned from a quick trip to Paris and sends along some updated photos of the Café de l’Eléphant.
Café de l’Eléphant
One of the first Parisian neighborhoods to draw Henry Miller’s fascination was the confluence of streets around the boulevard Beaumarchais in the eleventh arrondissement. Of particular appeal was a little tabac where the local prostitutes gathered in the evening.
American Express
The American Express office at 11 rue Scribe has been serving tourists in Paris for more than one hundred years since its opening in 1900. Henry Miller made extensive use of these services throughout his years in Paris as the American Express grew to be strongly associated with his personal misery.
Rue Laffitte
For Henry Miller, the view of the Sacré Coeur from the rue Laffitte was an emblematic vision of the ideal Paris that had formed in his mind long before he arrived in Europe.
Nanavati’s Place
The nadir of Henry Miller’s life in Paris occurred over the course of several weeks he spent living as a flunky in the apartment of N. P. Nanavati in August, 1930. Nanavati was an Indian pearl merchant whom Miller had met in New York prior to sailing for Paris…
Folies Bergère
Henry Miller visited the Folies Bergère in the early 1930’s when the cabaret’s best-known performers were Mistinguett and a banana-skirted Josephine Baker. Miller received a surreptitious backstage tour of the cabaret by helping a Russian emigré unload barrels of insecticide …
Grand Hôtel de la Havane
I like my cheap hotel—like its crazy wallpaper, the stains on the wall, the odor of mildew, the broken things, etc. Even the noise! For I have selected the very busiest district imaginable—one short block from the Rue Lafayette, from Chicago Tribune, from Folies-Bergère—etc…
Gillotte’s
The Chicago Tribune staff and taxi drivers were joined at Gillotte’s by other denizens of the Paris nightlife, notably the local prostitutes and their pimps. It was just the sort of setting, bringing together the Paris literati with the working class and demi-mondaine, all mixed with copious quantities of food and wine, at which Miller was in his element.
Hôtel Cronstadt
In March of 1932, Henry Miller lived at the Hôtel Cronstadt for about two weeks while waiting for repairs to be completed on his new apartment in Clichy. He was expecting the move to Clichy to deliver him from the circuit of cheap hotels he had been traveling since arriving in Paris more than a year before…
