Mara
A prostitute the narrator meets outside a café on the Champs-Élysées, and the subject of 'Mara-Marignan' — the second, shorter piece printed alongside the title story.
To be talked to and known by a man, rather than only used by one.
The book
At a glance
- 'Mara' — the name she uses, in 'Mara-Marignan,' the second piece
- Outside the Café Marignan, on the Champs-Élysées
- Ran a night club in Costa Rica, and came back to Paris with nothing
- Ramon, gone more than a year without writing
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeQuiet Days in Clichy, a book by the American writer Henry Miller, prints two separate pieces. The first and longer one is the Clichy story the book is named after, about two broke writers sharing a flat on the northern edge of Paris. The second is called 'Mara-Marignan,' and Mara is its subject. It moves across the city to the Champs-Élysées, the wide avenue running down from the Arc de Triomphe; the Marignan of the title was a café on that avenue.
The name is not hers. Miller opens the piece by explaining that several different women in his life have gone by Mara and that none of them were born with it, and he describes this one as Mara "as she called herself." She tells the narrator she once ran a night club in Costa Rica and came back to Paris broke.
The whole piece covers a single evening: he picks her up outside the café, takes her for a meal, talks to her for hours, and pays for none of what he was picked up for. It is the saddest stretch of the book, and the one where Miller is least interested in the sex and most interested in the person.
As with everyone else here, the reader only has his account of her, recorded years after the night it describes.
This profile is drawn from the text of the Flamingo 1995 printing, read in the Internet Archive's scan.
How the book draws them
- Where he meets herHe has eaten well, been drinking, and had his shoes shined that day, and he walks down from the Arc de Triomphe feeling prosperous. She stops him near the lights of the Café Marignan. He guesses afterwards that his easy manner and his good clothes had given her the impression she had found an American millionaire.
- What she is wearingShe is lightly dressed for the weather and wears a piece of fur round her neck, which the narrator reads as the standard badge of her trade and describes as frowsy, worn and moth-eaten. What he actually looks at are her eyes, which are hazel, and which he finds beautiful and oddly familiar.
- She wants to speak EnglishShe picked the language up running a night club in Costa Rica, and Miller says it was the first time in all his years in Paris that a prostitute had asked to speak English with him. She tells him it usually tires her, but that it does not tire her tonight. "I think it is beautiful to talk English to someone who understands you."
- The American who took her to DeauvilleShe describes a Mr. Winchell, an American who belonged to an athletic club in New York and who treated her generously after she returned from Costa Rica with nothing. He introduced her to his own wife, and the three of them went to Deauville together. When he proposed that all three share a bed the wife objected, and Mara's verdict on that is "Elle avait raison" — she was right.
- Ramon, who is going to send for herAfter Winchell left for America and his money ran out, a man called Ramon turned up, broke, having fled Madrid when the revolution broke out and ruined his plan to open a cabaret. She trusted him completely. He has been gone over a year without a word, and she is certain he will send for her one day.
- She refuses the expensive caféHe assumes she will be glad to eat at the Marignan and suggests going in. She will not, because it is too dear. He tells her to forget what he said earlier about not being a millionaire and she still refuses, insisting on an ordinary little restaurant instead, even after he points out that it is past closing time for most of them.
- The mealIn a big café with an orchestra, which she has to be coaxed into, he notices for the first time how shabby her clothes are. She orders a veal cutlet and, while waiting, gets out a long file and does her nails, the varnish worn off some of them. She blushes when he butters a slice of bread and hands it to her, then eats the soup fast and the bread with her head down, as if she does not want to be seen how hungry she is.
- She talks about herself by nameShe refers to herself in the third person all evening. Telling him about men who never speak to her, she says, "He doesn't want to know me, Mara." Later, taking his hand across the table, she says: "Listen, Mara never forgets." She tells him the way he talked to her that night was worth more than money.
- The man at the next tableAn elderly, well-dressed Frenchman keeps looking over his newspaper at her during the meal, and the narrator can tell she has already assessed him. When he steps away for a few minutes and comes back, it is settled without a word being said in front of him: the man will wait until she has finished. She tells the narrator not to bother pretending he does not know why he left the table.
He does not take her to a hotel. Standing in the doorway of an empty mansion they hold each other for a long time, then he shakes her hand and walks off, turns back, and comes back to her. He empties his pocket into her hand and tells her to take it just in case, then leaves quickly.
She runs after him, thanks him wildly, and her body goes slack as she tries to slide down to her knees. He hauls her up by the waist and asks, almost angrily, whether nobody has ever treated her decently. He regrets it the moment it is out. She stands in the dark street with her hands over her face, sobbing and shaking, and he finds he cannot say anything at all — then bolts, and walks faster and faster with the sound following him.
Later he works out who she reminded him of, and the piece ends on the thought that she may have been sent to remind him of a woman he lost years before.