Street · Plaisance / Montparnasse · 14e arrondissement

Rue du Château

The buildingStill standing

Getting inWalk straight in

What's there nowStill the same

A workers' street behind the Montparnasse yards with two literary lives — the surrealists' communal house at No. 54, and Henry Miller's broke wanderings looking for a friend and a meal.

Address: Rue du Château, 75014 Paris

Illustration The Rue du Château in flat gray light, weathered façades and shuttered fronts along the cobbled pavement

The street as Miller's circuit knew it — nothing picturesque on purpose.

Editorial illustration

The place, briefly

Rue du Château belonged to the other Montparnasse — not the boulevard of terraces but the working quarter of Plaisance behind the railway yards, cheap enough for artists who were poor in earnest. That cheapness gave it its first literary life: from 1924 the tumbledown house at No. 54 was the surrealists' commune — Yves Tanguy, Jacques Prévert, Marcel Duhamel — where the game of folded-paper collaboration got its name from a sentence the house produced: the exquisite corpse.

Its second life is Miller's. In Tropic of Cancer the street is part of the hungry man's circuit — walking down the Rue du Château to find Eugene, which is to say to find dinner, a floor, an evening's refuge. Where the surrealists chose the street for its cheapness, Miller's narrator is assigned to it by his; the two literary generations pass each other on the same pavement without meeting.

The quarter was heavily rebuilt in the tower-block decades and No. 54 is gone, but the street keeps its name and its length — and now, in these pages, both of its lives.

In their words

We walk down the Rue du Chateau, looking for Eugene.

— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Key facts

What it was: A working-class street of Plaisance, behind the Montparnasse railway yards
First literary life: No. 54 — the surrealists' communal house (Tanguy, Prévert, Duhamel), birthplace of the exquisite corpse
Second literary life: Miller's circuit in Tropic of Cancer — down the street looking for Eugene
Today: The street survives; No. 54 did not outlive the quarter's rebuilding

In images

Pen-and-ink illustration of the Rue du Château's low workers' houses, peeling shutters and cobbles in the old Plaisance quarter — Workers' Plaisance — cheap enough for two literary generations.Editorial illustration

The Rue du Château in flat gray light, weathered façades and shuttered fronts along the cobbled pavement — The street as Miller's circuit knew it — nothing picturesque on purpose.Editorial illustration

Timeline

1924
Tanguy, Prévert, and Duhamel take the house at No. 54; the surrealist commune begins.
c. 1925
A folded-paper sentence at No. 54 names the exquisite corpse.
1930s
Miller's narrator walks the street looking for Eugene in Tropic of Cancer.
Later
Plaisance is rebuilt; the house goes, the street name stays.

On the map

Related books

Depicted in its pages

Tropic of Cancer

Henry Miller · 1934

Part of the hungry man's circuit — down the street looking for Eugene, which is to say for dinner and a floor.

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.

Henry Miller wrote about Rue du Château in Tropic of Cancer.

Within walking distance

Bar · Montparnasse

The Dingo Bar

The American bar where Ernest Hemingway met F. Scott Fitzgerald in late April 1925 — two weeks after The Great Gatsby was published.

Visit the place

The same imagined Black Manikin shopfront in colour, cream awnings and green tilework against a pale stone Haussmann façade

Bookshop · Montparnasse

Black Manikin Press (4 Rue Delambre)

Edward Titus's Montparnasse bookshop and small press, where D. H. Lawrence settled terms on 5 April 1929 for the cheap Paris edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover that finally undercut the pirates.

Visit the place

Café · Montparnasse

Le Dôme

The noisy common room of Montparnasse and the setting of 'With Pascin at the Dôme' — the café for watching the show, not for working.

Visit the place

Restaurant · Montparnasse

La Coupole

The giant brasserie of the Boulevard du Montparnasse, opened in December 1927 with a party the quarter never forgot — Blaise Cendrars was in the opening-night crowd.

Visit the place

The Friday Letter

Paris, one address at a time.

The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.