Nys
The woman the narrator picks up at a café on the Place Clichy and later falls in love with. She spells her name out for him and says it sounds like the city of Nice.
A small house in the country, somewhere in the south of France, away from Paris.
The book
At a glance
- 'Nys' — the first name she gives, spelled out and likened to Nice
- The Café Wepler, on a corner of the Place Clichy; she gives no address
- Never asked — the narrator says he never questioned her about her past
- The future, and a house in the Midi
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeNys is a character in Quiet Days in Clichy, a short book by the American writer Henry Miller, written in 1940 and published in 1956. She works as a prostitute at the Café Wepler, a large café on a corner of the Place Clichy — the square at the northern edge of central Paris that gives the book its title, near the flat the narrator shares with his friend Carl.
She opens the book. The narrator spots her on a rainy afternoon as a newcomer among the regulars, spends everything he has on her that evening, and walks home with a single coin. What he gets out of it, at first, is a night and a hard lesson about the price of one. The relationship changes later: money stops being part of it, they become friends, and he takes her out of the city on her afternoons off.
Nys is not a real name that can be traced. She is described entirely from the outside, by a narrator who is candid about how little he knew of her and who never asked about her past.
This profile is drawn from the text of the Flamingo 1995 printing, read in the Internet Archive's scan.
How the book draws them
- The rainy afternoon at the Café Wepler"It was in the late afternoon of a rainy day that I espied a newcomer at the Café Wepler." The narrator had been out shopping, his arms full of books and gramophone records, and had a few hundred francs left from an unexpected payment from America. He sat down near the corner of the café where the women gathered.
- How she spells her nameAs they part he realises he has not asked her name, calls her back and asks for her first name only. "N-Y-S," she said, spelling it out. "Like the city, Nice." He walks off repeating it, having never heard it before, and thinks it sounds like the name of a precious stone.
- No address, only the caféThey make no arrangement to meet again and he never asks where she lives. It is simply understood that the place to find her is the Wepler. When he is broke and desperate a few days later he curses himself for it, because with an address he could have gone to her and asked for a few francs.
- What he assumes about herStarving in the flat that same night, he decides she must have eaten well, probably with a lover, and that her real problem is how to feed the man and buy him the clothes he wants. He has no evidence for any of it. He also notes that his own ribs stick out like the sides of an accordion and that she plainly was not going short of food.
- Afternoons out of the cityOnce they are friends and money is no longer part of it, he persuades her now and then to take an afternoon off. They go to small places along the Seine, or take a train out to a forest near the city and spend the day in the grass.
- Watching her eat"Just to watch Nys eat was inspiring." He says she enjoyed every mouthful, and it is one of the few things in the book he praises without any edge to it.
- The house in the southHe never asks about her past; she talks about the future instead, and mostly does the talking. What she wants is a little house in the country, preferably in the Midi, the south of France. She had no great fondness for Paris. It was unhealthy, she would say.
- The way she talksComparing her with the girl living in the flat, the narrator says Nys was not unintelligent, only lazy, and that everything she talked about was interesting even when it was about nothing at all. He rates that gift above the ability to talk cleverly, which he says only drains people and makes everything feel pointless.