The houseboat Anaïs Nin rented from the actor Michel Simon on 28 February 1938, moored on the quai des Tuileries near the Pont Royal. She kept it until August, when boats were ordered out of the city and it had to be towed to Neuilly. Photographs of her aboard survive with her 1938 diary.
On 28 February 1938 Anaïs Nin answered an advertisement, negotiated a rent, and took possession of a houseboat called La Belle Aurore. It belonged to the actor Michel Simon, and it was moored on the quai des Tuileries, on the Right Bank below the garden, near the Pont Royal.
The boat became what a boat can be and a flat cannot: a private room in the middle of a city, reached by a gangplank, with the current under it. Nin used it as a refuge and as a place to gather people, through the months when Europe was visibly moving toward war.
It ended by municipal order. In August the boats on the Seine were told to leave the city for the visit of the King of England, and La Belle Aurore had to be hauled downriver to Neuilly. Nin gave it up.
The evidence is unusually good for a vanished vessel: UCLA's Anaïs Nin Papers hold her diary for March to September 1938, and the file includes photographs of Nin and her husband Hugh Guiler aboard the boat.
A correction worth making, because the retellings run the two together. Nin had two houseboats, not one. In autumn 1936 she rented an earlier boat, also on the quai des Tuileries near the Pont Royal, which her lover Gonzalo Moré nicknamed Nanankepichu — a Quechua word he glossed for her as something like "not a home". That naming is real and belongs to that boat: UCLA's catalogue of her papers titles the diary covering 31 August to 27 December 1936 "Nanankepichu". La Belle Aurore is a different, later vessel. Le Monde states plainly that Nanankepichu was succeeded by La Belle Aurore, rented from Michel Simon in 1938; Noël Riley Fitch calls it "another houseboat" and Deirdre Bair dates the taking independently. So Nanankepichu is not an alias for La Belle Aurore, and La Belle Aurore is not the 1936 boat — but Moré did name a boat, and it was the first one.
What the sources do not give is a berth. There is no numbered mooring, no bollard, no documented spot on the stone. The Pont Royal is the best orientation point available, and the coordinate here marks a stretch of quay rather than a place a boat was tied — which is the honest limit of what is known.
Nin rents an earlier houseboat on the quai des Tuileries, which Gonzalo Moré nicknames Nanankepichu — a different vessel from this one. UCLA titles her diary of 31 August to 27 December that year "Nanankepichu".
She takes possession of La Belle Aurore, owned by the actor Michel Simon.
Her diary of the period, now at UCLA, includes photographs of her and Hugh Guiler aboard.
Boats are ordered out of Paris for the King of England's visit; La Belle Aurore is towed to Neuilly and Nin gives it up.
A houseboat owned by the actor Michel Simon, which Anaïs Nin rented on 28 February 1938 and moored on the quai des Tuileries near the Pont Royal. She used it as a private refuge and a place to gather people during the months before the war, and gave it up that August.
No, and the two are frequently run together. Nin had an earlier houseboat in autumn 1936, also moored on the quai des Tuileries, which her lover Gonzalo Moré nicknamed Nanankepichu — a Quechua word he glossed as something like "not a home". La Belle Aurore is a separate, later vessel taken in 1938. Both Noël Riley Fitch and Deirdre Bair treat them as different boats.
A municipal order. In August 1938 the boats on the Seine were required to leave the city for the visit of the King of England, and La Belle Aurore had to be towed downriver to Neuilly. Nin let it go.
No. The sources establish the quai des Tuileries and the Pont Royal as the area, but no numbered berth or mooring is documented anywhere. The coordinate marks a stretch of quay accurate to roughly 150–300 metres, not a place where a boat was tied.
The quay. The vessel is long gone and the riverside there is now a public walk. It is worth standing on for the geography — the Tuileries above, the Pont Royal alongside, the Louvre across the water — which is the view she had from the deck.
Lived here · 1938
Nin took La Belle Aurore, owned by the actor Michel Simon, on 28 February 1938 and moored on the quai des Tuileries near the Pont Royal. She gave it up that August, when boats were ordered out of Paris for the King of England's visit and the vessel was towed to Neuilly. This is not the 1936 houseboat that Gonzalo Moré nicknamed Nanankepichu — that was an earlier, separate boat.
The Beaux-Arts terminus on the Seine where Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton, in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, board the morning train south toward Spain — today the Musée d'Orsay.
Visit the place
The crossing from the Louvre to the rue des Saints-Pères: an 1834 iron bridge replaced by a stone one in 1939, with distinctive telescoping streetlamps designed to rise after dark.
Visit the place
André Le Nôtre's great axis between the Louvre and the Concorde — the garden every walker in these pages crossed sooner or later, palace or no palace.
Visit the place
The Paris town house of Harry and Caresse Crosby, and the address of the Black Sun Press, which published D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Hemingway and Hart Crane in editions made to be beautiful rather than to sell.
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.
