Le Dôme
In April 1930, just one month into his stay in Paris, Miller sat alone on the terrace of the Dôme waiting for someone to rescue him. He was broke, the money he expected his wife to send from New York had not arrived and he had no place to sleep for the night. He continued ordering drinks because if he stopped, the drinks would have to be paid for. So the saucers piled up, each one representing another drink and another addition to the bill. Then Miller recognized an acquaintance from his 1928 trip to Paris and waived him over. It was Alfred Perlès, an Austrian expatriate, returning from his job as a proofreader for the Paris edition of The Chicago Tribune. Miller, who was to make a habit of exchanging inspired conversation for a handout, confessed his destitution to Perlès and turned on the charm. Perlès recalled:
He talked through his hat, like an inspired lunatic, and again I was struck by the melodiousness of his voice [...] He was going to stay in Paris and learn French and become a Frenchman. And above all, write!
—My Friend Henry Miller
Perlès paid the bill and brought Miller back to his room at the nearby Hôtel Central. The next day he bought Miller a new shirt and toothbrush and paid a week's rent for Miller to have his own room.
In the summer of 1930, Miller reported to Emil Schnellock that he could be found on the terrace of the Dôme any time after 8:00 PM drinking a beer or a café nature. A passage from Tropic of Cancer provides a surrealist portrait of the Dôme at dawn:
In the blue of an electric dawn the peanut shells look wan and crumpled; along the beach at Montparnasse the water lilies bend and break. When the tide is on the ebb and only a few syphilitic mermaids are left stranded in the muck, the Dôme looks like a shooting gallery that's been struck by a cyclone. Everything is slowly dribbling back to the sewer. For about an hour there is a death-like calm during which the vomit is mopped up. Suddenly the trees begin to screech. From one end of the boulevard to the other a demented song rises up. It is like the signal that announces the close of the exchange. What hopes there were are swept up. The moment has come to void the last bagful of urine. The day is sneaking in like a leper.
The Dôme first opened in 1897 and by the 1920's had become the café hub around which the American expatriate community in Paris revolved. Today it preserves a small café space, but most of the property has been transformed into an upscale seafood restaurant.