Hotel · Montparnasse (14th) · 14e arrondissement

Hôtel Central

Name: Hôtel Central
Address: 1 bis rue du Maine, Paris, 75014, FR

The buildingStill standing

Getting inIn, as a customer

What's there nowStill the same

A working hotel still trading under the Central name at the same address. Bookable — but a hotel rather than a public interior, so it is not somewhere to wander into.

A small Montparnasse hotel where Henry Miller lodged during several stretches of 1931 and 1932, sharing a room with Alfred Perlès in the leanest part of his Paris decade. Still trading under the same name at the same address.

Address: 1 bis rue du Maine, 75014 Paris
Years: Miller lodged here in 1931–32, sharing a room with Alfred Perlès

The place, briefly

Henry Miller arrived in Paris in 1930 with almost nothing, and for the next two years he had no fixed address so much as a sequence of temporary ones — borrowed rooms, friends' floors, cheap hotels taken for a week at a time.

The Hôtel Central on the rue du Maine was one of the more durable of them. He lodged here across several periods in 1931 and 1932, sharing a room with Alfred Perlès, the Austrian writer who was his closest companion of those years and who turns up throughout the Paris books.

Sharing a hotel room is the practical fact behind a lot of what gets romanticised about Miller's Paris. Tropic of Cancer was written by someone who did not reliably have a door of his own, and the book's restlessness — the constant moving between other people's rooms and tables — is a description of how he actually lived rather than a literary effect.

The hotel is still here, still called the Central, at 1 bis rue du Maine. It is a working hotel rather than a public room, so unlike the Zeyer or the Bouquet d'Alésia it is somewhere to note from the pavement rather than walk into.

Key facts

When: Several periods across 1931 and 1932
Who with: Alfred Perlès — they shared a room
Why it matters: Tropic of Cancer was written by a man without a reliable door of his own
Today: Still a working hotel under the Central name at 1 bis rue du Maine
Access: Bookable, but a hotel rather than a public interior

Timeline

1930
Miller arrives in Paris with almost no money and begins two years of temporary addresses.
1931–32
He lodges at the Hôtel Central across several periods, sharing a room with Alfred Perlès.
1934
Tropic of Cancer is published in Paris.

On the map

Questions before you go

Did Henry Miller live at the Hôtel Central?

He lodged there across several periods in 1931 and 1932, sharing a room with Alfred Perlès. It was one of the more durable of the temporary addresses that made up his first two years in Paris.

Can you stay there?

It is still a working hotel under the Central name at 1 bis rue du Maine, so it is bookable. But it is a hotel rather than a public room — worth noting from the pavement rather than wandering into, unlike the Alésia cafés a little further south.

Why does a shared hotel room matter?

Because it is the practical fact behind what usually gets romanticised. Tropic of Cancer was written by a man who did not reliably have a door of his own, and the book's restless movement between other people's rooms and tables describes how he actually lived.

Writers who knew this place

Henry Miller

American · The Brooklyn dropout who arrived in Paris broke at thirty-eight and wrote the exuberant, banned books that ended American censorship.

Lived here · 1931–1932

Miller lodged here across several periods in 1931-32, sharing a room with Alfred Perlès.

— Henry Miller: New Perspectives

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