When the Gestapo Raided the Villa Seurat

Villa Seurat, XIV Arrondissement. Wikimedia. CC BY 3.0.

In 1930, Henry Miller arrived in Paris with only a razor, toothbrush, pen, notebook and walking stick to his name. He set up shop on the Villa Seurat, a short cul-de-sac street in the 14th arrondissement, near the writers Anais Nin and his sometimes housemate, Lawrence Durrell, as well as the painter Chaim Soutine.

It was here that Miller began to write Tropic of Cancer. It was also here that Miller became so obsessed with astrology that he painted his astrological chart on the wall of his room. He would spend many evenings on the roof of the house, scanning the heavens with his telescope. One night he became so entranced by his planetary observations that he stepped onto the building’s skylight, breaking through the glass and falling down more than 20 feet to a hard landing on the floor. Somehow he emerged with only a few cuts and bruises from a fall that could have killed him.

Miller consulted his astrologer, a certain Morcard, on the meaning of the episode. Morcard asked Miller what planet or constellation he was looking at when he fell.

“Ah,” said Morcad, nodding his head. “That means Jupiter is your protector!”

To make money, the perpetually skinflint Miller started writing an astrology column and dispatches on Paris’s fashion scene for a publication called La Revue Officielle de la Villa Seurat, where Nin wrote the society and gossip columns and Durrell served as the zine’s sports reporter. What sort of sports, I’ll leave to your imagination.

Miller escaped the Nazi occupation, but his letters, notes, drafts of his novels and likely some of the porn he was being paid by the word to write didn’t. The Nazis confiscated Miller’s papers when they raided the Villa Seurat in search of Soutine, but the Jewish painter had already fled occupied Paris.

Self-Portrait (Detail), Chaïm Soutine. 1918. The Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation, on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum. Public Domain.

Soutine had barely escaped the Gestapo and spent the last two years of his abbreviated life on the run, sleeping in forests, barns, abandoned buildings, in rural motels under fake documents, always in fear of being discovered or, worse, secretly denounced. Still, he continued to sketch and paint. His landscapes became darker and more distorted, almost warped, with each passing month. The faces of his portraits twisted with anguish, the eyes reflecting the descending darkness.

In the summer of 1943, Soutine, stressed out from being hunted, the paranoid outbursts of his lover Marie-Berthe Aurenche, and impoverishment, developed an ulcer. For weeks he could eat only porridge and he often could keep that meager meal down. Eventually, the ulcer perforated his stomach lining and the pain grew so intense that he was forced to leave his sanctuary in the Chinon commune of the Loire Valley for a desperate flight to Paris, seeking emergency surgery. But he arrived too late. Chaim Soutine bled to death on the operating table. He was 50 years old.

Jeffrey St. Clair is co-editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: [email protected] or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.