Walking Paris with Henry Miller

Au Petit Poucet (The Little Tomb Thumb), like the Brasserie Wepler, is a red-awninged corner café in the Place de Clichy which Henry Miller visited in the early 1930’s. From here, he wrote letters to Anaïs Nin and Brassaï, facsimiles of which can be found in Henry Miller, Letters to Anaïs Nin and Brassaï’s Henry Miller: The Paris Years. In Black Spring, Miller cast the workaday vista to be observed from the bar in surreal terms:

And so, when I stand at the bar of the Little Tom Thumb and see these men with three-quarter faces coming up through the trapdoors of hell with pulleys and braces, dragging locomotives and pianos and cuspidors, I say to myself: ‘Grand! Grand! All this bric-a-brac, all this machinery coming to me on a silver platter! It’s grand! It’s marvelous! It’s a poem created while I was asleep.
—Black Spring

Au Petit Poucet still exists and can be found just a few steps away from the Brasserie Wepler and the entrance to the Avenue de Clichy, which we’ll follow to our next stop, La Fourche.

Furthermore

The above illustration of Tom Thumb is taken from the Au Petit Poucet letterhead Miller used in his letters to Anaïs Nin and Brassaï.

Location

1 rue Biot – See it on Google Maps

Next Stop

To reach our next stop, walk up the avenue de Clichy until you reach an intersection known as La Fourche …

Posted September 14, 2006 - trackback