Villa Seurat, is a blind alley in Paris, but for a sentence written there by Henry Miller, you could say a dead end as well, that you reach rue de la Tombe Issoire (Tomb of Issoire). Look, what a summary for a first book, Tropic of Cancer, with such a beginning!
I am living at the villa Borghèse. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.
Villa Seurat is the real name of the Villa Borghèse. Henry Miller had a first stay there in 1931, sleeping on the floor, then a second stay at the 18, the top-floor apartment where he wrote his Tropic. The process of losing myself began at the Villa Seurat, says Henry Miller. Anaïs Nin paid the rent for while, an apartement with a maravellous sun parlor, bath, space and steam heat, a hive of artistic life in the City of Light, cranks, nuts, writers, painters, Montparnasse derelicts, vagabonds, psychopaths. Among them Antonin Artaud, Chaïm Soutine, Salvador Dali. Whatever, when he was writing at the corner of a table the pages piled up beside Henry Miller while the red wine at his elbows sank lower and lower.
The Villa Seurat is named after the pointillist painter George Seurat.