Pension Orfila

The stone tablet on the wall above 62 rue d’Assas commemorates an especially turbulent period in the life of Swedish writer August Strindberg, who spent six months here beginning in February 1896 when the building was a Catholic hotel known as the Pension Orfila.

Severely depressed due to the recent collapse of his marriage, Strindberg arrived at the hotel alone and anxious to cut himself off from all but the most unavoidable of social contact. He chose the Orfila because it resembled a monastery. In his room he assembled an alchemical laboratory and began experimenting with the production of gold. When he discovered that the hotel was named for the Spanish chemist, Mateo Orfila, Strindberg thought he observed the hand of destiny in his choice of accommodation. Throughout this period, Strindberg was prone to interpret all of his experiences in ominous terms. As Henry Miller later observed: “Strindberg in his madness had recognized omens and portents in the very flagging of the Pension Orfila”.

Believing himself beset by demons, Strindberg spent the summer at the Orfila teetering on the edge of madness. Paris was gripped in a severe heat wave and Strindberg felt that he was literally descending into hell. A diary he kept at this time and later published under the title, Inferno, made a strong impression on Miller.

August Strindberg in 1896

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Like Strindberg, Miller found himself alone in Paris, tormented by the disintegration of his marriage and despairing over his lack of friends or resources. As he recounts in Tropic of Cancer, Miller walked into the Orfila one day and asked to be shown Strindberg’s room:

inspired by the plaque which I passed day in and day out, I impulsively entered the Pension Orfila and asked to see the room Strindberg had occupied. Up to that time nothing very terrible had befallen me, though I had already lost all my worldly possessions and had known what it was to walk the streets in hunger and in fear of the police. Up to then I had not found a single friend in Paris

But as he ruminated on Strindberg, Miller felt his good cheer return. Perhaps his own experience had not been so torturous as Strindberg’s:

One can live in Paris—I discovered that!—on just grief and anguish. A bitter nourishment—perhaps the best there is for certain people. At any rate, I had not yet come to the end of my rope. I was only flirting with disaster. [...] As I was leaving the place I was conscious of an ironic smile hovering over my lips, as though I were saying to myself “Not yet, the Pension Orfila!”

Miller emerged from the Orfila with a new vision of Paris and the historical role it has played in the gestation of the artist:

It was no mystery to me any longer why he [Strindberg] and others (Dante, Rabelais, Van Gogh, etc., etc.) had made their pilgrimage to Paris. I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the tortured, the hallucinated, the great maniacs of love. I understood why it is that here, at the very hub of the wheel, one can embrace the most fantastic, the most impossible theories, without finding them in the least strange [...] One walks the streets knowing that he is mad, possessed [...] Here all boundaries fade away and the world reveals itself for the mad slaughterhouse that it is.

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