The address of Chez les Vikings, a Scandinavian tavern in Montparnasse where Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin met regularly in the early 1930s. Miller headed a letter of 4 March 1932 from its tables. The café is gone; the buildings remain.
Chez les Vikings — the Taverne Scandinave — occupied the adjoining buildings at 29 and 31 rue Vavin, a short street between the boulevard Raspail and the Luxembourg. It was one of the many small foreign-run places that made Montparnasse in the 1920s and 30s: not a landmark café, just a room where a particular set of people could be found.
Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin met here regularly in the early 1930s, in the period when their relationship and their writing were forming around each other.
The evidence is unusually exact for a vanished café, because Miller wrote from it. A surviving letter of 4 March 1932 is headed "Chez les Vikings, Taverne Scandinave, 29 et 31 rue Vavin" — the establishment's own name and its own address, written at its own tables. Columbia University's architectural archive confirms that it occupied both adjoining numbers.
That heading is why this address can be published with confidence while others in Miller's Paris cannot. Most of the map is reconstruction; this is a letterhead.
Nothing of the tavern survives. Number 31 is now a supermarket. What you get is the street, the two buildings, and the knowledge of what was in them.
Miller and Anaïs Nin meet regularly at Chez les Vikings.
Miller writes a letter headed "Chez les Vikings, Taverne Scandinave, 29 et 31 rue Vavin".
A Scandinavian tavern — the Taverne Scandinave — occupying the adjoining buildings at 29 and 31 rue Vavin in Montparnasse. It was one of the small foreign-run places that made the quarter in the 1920s and 30s, and Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin met there regularly in the early 1930s.
Because he wrote from it. A surviving letter of 4 March 1932 is headed "Chez les Vikings, Taverne Scandinave, 29 et 31 rue Vavin" — the name and address in his own letterhead. Columbia's architectural archive confirms the tavern occupied both adjoining numbers.
Only the buildings. The tavern is long gone and number 31 is now a supermarket. The address is on the standard Montparnasse walk, a couple of streets from the Dôme and the Rotonde.
Frequented by · 1932
Chez les Vikings, the Scandinavian tavern on the rue Vavin where Nin and Henry Miller met regularly in the early 1930s, as their relationship and their writing formed around each other. A Miller letter of 4 March 1932 is headed from its tables.
Frequented by · 1932
Chez les Vikings, the Scandinavian tavern where Miller and Anaïs Nin met regularly. Miller headed a letter of 4 March 1932 from its tables with the tavern's name and this address.
The café every taxi driver delivered Americans to — the novel's driest Montparnasse joke, and before that the painters' living room, where the patron took drawings for drinks.
Visit the place
The quarter that took the painters from Montmartre around 1910 and the American writers a decade later, built around four cafés on one crossroads.
Visit the placeWhere Simone de Beauvoir was born in 1908 and grew up with her sister Hélène — in the middle of Montparnasse, the quarter she would spend most of her life within a few streets of.
Visit the place
The all-night café of the Vavin crossroads and the closest thing Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises has to a home address — the crowd always ends up at the Select.
Visit the placeThe Friday Letter
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.
