SubscribePlace de Clichy
So we meet on the Place Clichy. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night
Our next walk begins at the Place de Clichy in Montmartre and will finish in the adjoining suburb of Clichy. You can reach the Place de Clichy on metro line 12 (Paris metro map PDF).
Today, as in the nineteen-thirties, the Place de Clichy is a bustling intersection filled with restaurants and movie theaters. While Henry Miller lived in Clichy between 1932 and 1934, he passed through the Place Clichy daily on his walks to and from work at The Chicago Tribune. Several of his favorite haunts were to be found here, such as the brasserie Wepler and Au Petit Poucet, which still exist. Miller often recalled that his years spent living in this area were some of the happiest of his life:
Today it is the third or fourth day of spring and I am sitting at the Place Clichy in full sunshine. Today, sitting here in the sun, I tell you it doesn’t matter a damn whether the world is going to the dogs or not; it doesn’t matter whether the world is right or wrong, good or bad. It is—and that suffices—Black Spring
In the thirties, the cafés in the Place Clichy were littered with prostitutes and their pimps, spilling out from Pigalle, the red-light district which runs from the Place Clichy to the Moulin Rouge on Boulevard Rochechouart. Miller was particularly fascinated buy one prostitute with a wooden stump who stationed herself in front of the Gaumont movie theatre each night: ” One imagines all sorts of things-splinters, etc.” In Quiet Days in Clichy, he likened the neighborhood favorably to Broadway in New York:
On a gray day in Paris I often found myself walking towards the Place Clichy in Montmartre. From Clichy to Aubervilliers there is a long string of cafés, restaurants, theaters, cinemas, haberdashers, hotels and bordels. It is the Broadway of Paris corresponding to that little stretch between 42nd and 53rd Streets.
The comparison is apt, but miller found the squalor of Montmartre more appealing than the glitter of Broadway:
Montmartre is worn, faded, derelict, nakedly vicious, mercenary, vulgar. It is, if anything, repellent rather than attractive, but insidiously repellent, like vice itself. There are little bars filled almost exclusively with whores, pimps, thugs and gamblers, which, no matter if you pass them up a thousand times, finally suck you in and claim you as a victim. There are hotels in the side streets leading off the boulevard whose ugliness is so sinister that you shudder at the thought of entering them, and yet it is inevitable that you will one day pass a night, perhaps a week or a month, in one of them. You may even become so attached to the place as to find one day that your whole life has been transformed and that what you once regarded as sordid, squalid, miserable, has now become charming, tender, beautiful.
Place de Clichy — source: Terres d’Ecrivains
Location
Place de Clichy – See it on Google Maps
Next Stop
Next, we’ll be stopping at the Brasserie Wepler. This is the large café with the red awning situated directly in front of the Place de Clichy metro entrance. 
