Title: Down and Out in Paris and London
Author: George Orwell
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Title:      Down and Out in Paris and London
Author:     George Orwell





O scathful harm, condition of poverte!
CHAUCER




I



The rue du Coq d'Or, Paris, seven in the morning. A succession of
furious, choking yells from the street. Madame Monce, who kept the little
hotel opposite mine, had come out on to the pavement to address a lodger on
the third floor. Her bare feet were stuck into sabots and her grey hair was
streaming down.

MADAME MONCE: 'SALOPE! SALOPE! How many times have I told you not to
squash bugs on the wallpaper? Do you think you've bought the hotel, eh? Why
can't you throw them out of the window like everyone else? PUTAIN! SALOPE!'

THE WOMAN ON THE THIRD FLOOR: 'VACHE!'

Thereupon a whole variegated chorus of yells, as windows were flung
open on every side and half the street joined in the quarrel. They shut up
abruptly ten minutes later, when a squadron of cavalry rode past and people
stopped shouting to look at them.

I sketch this scene, just to convey something of the spirit of the rue
du Coq d'Or. Not that quarrels were the only thing that happened there--
but still, we seldom got through the morning without at least one outburst
of this description. Quarrels, and the desolate cries of street hawkers,
and the shouts of children chasing orange-peel over the cobbles, and at
night loud singing and the sour reek of the refuse-carts, made up the
atmosphere of the street.

It was a very narrow street--a ravine of tall, leprous houses,
lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all
been frozen in the act of collapse. All the houses were hotels and packed
to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and Italians. At the foot of
the hotels were tiny BISTROs, where you could be drunk for the equivalent
of a shilling. On Saturday nights about a third of the male population of
the quarter was drunk. There was fighting over women, and the Arab navvies
who lived in the cheapest hotels used to conduct mysterious feuds, and
fight them out with chairs and occasionally revolvers. At night the
policemen would only come through the street two together. It was a fairly
rackety place. And yet amid the noise and dirt lived the usual respectable
French shopkeepers, bakers and laundresses and the like, keeping themselves
to themselves and quietly piling up small fortunes. It was quite a
representative Paris slum.

My hotel was called the Hotel des Trois Moineaux. It was a dark,
rickety warren of five storeys, cut up by wooden partitions into forty
rooms. The rooms were small arid inveterately dirty, for there was no maid,
and Madame F., the PATRONNE, had no time to do any sweeping. The walls were
as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they had been covered with
layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed
innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like
columns of soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that one
had to get up every few hours and kill them in hecatombs. Sometimes when
the bugs got too bad one used to burn sulphur and drive them into the next
room; whereupon the lodger next door would retort by having his room
sulphured, and drive the bugs back. It was a dirty place, but homelike, for
Madame F. and her husband were good sorts. The rent of the rooms varied
between thirty and fifty francs a week.

The lodgers were a floating population, largely foreigners, who used
to turn up without luggage, stay a week and then disappear again. They were
of every trade--cobblers, bricklayers, stonemasons, navvies, students,
prostitutes, rag-pickers. Some of them were fantastically poor. In one of
the attics there was a Bulgarian student who made fancy shoes for the
American market. From six to twelve he sat on his bed, making a dozen pairs
of shoes and earning thirty-five francs; the rest of the day he attended
lectures at the Sorbonne. He was studying for the Church, and books of
theology lay face-down on his leather-strewn floor. In another room lived a
Russian woman and her son, who called himself an artist. The mother worked
sixteen hours a day, darning socks at twenty-five centimes a sock, while
the son, decently dressed, loafed in the Montparnasse cafes. One room was
let to two different lodgers, one a day worker and the other a night
worker. In another room a widower shared the same bed with his two grown-up
daughters, both consumptive.

There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slums are a
gathering-place for eccentric people--people who have fallen into
solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or
decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as
money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives
that were curious beyond words.

There were the Rougiers, for instance, an old, ragged, dwarfish couple
who plied an extraordinary trade. They used to sell postcards on the
Boulevard St Michel. The curious thing was that the postcards were sold in
sealed packets as pornographic ones, but were actually photographs of
chateaux on the Loire; the buyers did not discover this till too late, and
of course never complained. The Rougiers earned about a hundred francs a
week, and by strict economy managed to be always half starved and half
drunk. The filth of their room was such that one could smell it on the
floor below. According to Madame F., neither of the Rougiers had taken off
their clothes for four years.

Or there was Henri, who worked in the sewers. He was a tall,
melancholy man with curly hair, rather romantic-looking in his long,
sewer-man's boots. Henri's peculiarity was that he did not speak, except
for the purposes of work, literally for days together. Only a year before
he had been a chauffeur in good employ and saving money. One day he fell in
love, and when the girl refused him he lost his temper and kicked her. On
being kicked the girl fell desperately in love with Henri, and for a
fortnight they lived together and spent a thousand francs of Henri's money.
Then the girl was unfaithful; Henri planted a knife in her upper arm and
was sent to prison for six months. As soon as she had been stabbed the girl
fell more in love with Henri than ever, and the two made up their quarrel
and agreed that when Henri came out of jail he should buy a taxi and they
would marry and settle down. But a fortnight later the girl was unfaithful
again, and when Henri came out she was with child, Henri did not stab her
again. He drew out all his savings and went on a drinking-bout that ended
in another month's imprisonment; after that he went to work in the sewers.
Nothing would induce Henri to talk. If you asked him why he worked in the
sewers he never answered, but simply crossed his wrists to signify
handcuffs, and jerked his head southward, towards the prison. Bad luck
seemed to have turned him half-witted in a single day.

Or there was R., an Englishman, who lived six months of the year in
Putney with his parents and six months in France. During his time in France
he drank four litres of wine a day, and six litres on Saturdays; he had
once travelled as far as the Azores, because the wine there is cheaper than
anywhere in Europe. He was a gentle, domesticated creature, never rowdy or
quarrelsome, and never sober. He would lie in bed till midday, and from
then till midnight he was in his comer of the BISTRO, quietly and
methodically soaking. While he soaked he talked, in a refined, womanish
voice, about antique furniture. Except myself, R. was the only Englishman
in the quarter.

There were plenty of other people who lived lives just as eccentric as
these: Monsieur Jules, the Roumanian, who had a glass eye and would not
admit it, Furex the Liniousin stonemason, Roucolle the miser--he died
before my time, though--old Laurent the rag-merchant, who used to copy
his signature from a slip of paper he carried in his pocket. It would be
fun to write some of their biographies, if one had time. I am trying to
describe the people in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but because
they are all part of the story. Poverty is what I am writing about, and I
had my first contact with poverty in this slum. The slum, with its dirt and
its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the
background of my own experiences. It is for that reason that I try to give
some idea of what life was like there.




II



Life in the quarter. Our BISTRO, for instance, at the foot of the
Hotel des Trois Moineaux. A tiny brick-floored room, half underground, with
wine-sodden tables, and a photograph of a funeral inscribed 'CREDIT EST
MORT'; and red-sashed workmen carving sausage with big jack-knives; and
Madame F., a splendid Auvergnat peasant woman with the face of a
strong-minded cow, drinking Malaga all day 'for her stomach'; and games of
dice for APERITIFS; and songs about 'LES PRAISES ET LES FRAMBOISES', and
about Madelon, who said, 'COMMENT EPOUSER UN SOLDAT, MOI QUI AIME TOUT LE
REGIMENT?'; and extraordinarily public love-making. Half the hotel used to
meet in the BISTRO in the evenings. I wish one could find a pub in London a
quarter as cheery.

One heard queer conversations in the BISTRO. As a sample I give you
Charlie, one of the local curiosities, talking.

Charlie was a youth of family and education who had run away from home
and lived on occasional remittances. Picture him very pink and young, with
the fresh cheeks and soft brown hair of a nice little boy, and lips
excessively red and wet, like cherries. His feet are tiny, his arms
abnormally short, his hands dimpled like a baby's. He has a way of dancing
and capering while he talks, as though he were too happy and too full of
life to keep still for an instant. It is three in the afternoon, and there
is no one in the BISTRO except Madame F. and one or two men who are out of
work; but it is all the same to Charlie whom he talks to, so long as he
can talk about himself. He declaims like an orator on a barricade, rolling
the words on his tongue and gesticulating with his short arms. His small,
rather piggy eyes glitter with enthusiasm. He is, somehow, profoundly
disgusting to see.

He is talking of love, his favourite subject.

'AH, L'AMOUR, L'AMOUR! AH, QUE LES FEMMES M'ONT TUE! Alas, MESSIEURS
ET DAMES, women have been my ruin, beyond all hope my ruin. At twenty-two I
am utterly worn out and finished. But what things I have learned, what
abysses of wisdom have I not plumbed! How great a thing it is to have
acquired the true wisdom, to have become in the highest sense of the word a
civilized man, to have become RAFFINE, VICIEUX,' etc. etc.

'MESSIEURS ET DAFFIES, I perceive that you are sad. AH, MAIS LA VIE
EST BELLE--you must not be sad. Be more gay, I beseech you!


    'Fill high ze bowl vid Samian vine,
    Ve vill not sink of semes like zese!


'AH, QUE LA VIE EST BELLE! LISTEN, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, out of the
fullness of my experience I will discourse to you of love. I will explain
to you what is the true meaning of love--what is the true sensibility,
the higher, more refined pleasure which is known to civilized men alone. I
will tell you of the happiest day of my life. Alas, but I am past the time
when I could know such happiness as that. It is gone for ever--the very
possibility, even the desire for it, are gone.

'Listen, then. It was two years ago; my brother was in Paris--he is
a lawyer--and my parents had told him to find me and take me out to
dinner. We hate each other, my brother and I, but we preferred not to
disobey my parents. We dined, and at dinner he grew very drunk upon three
bottles of Bordeaux. I took him back to his hotel, and on the way I bought
a bottle of brandy, and when we had arrived I made my brother drink a
tumblerful of it--I told him it was something to make him sober. He drank
it, and immediately he fell down like somebody in a fit, dead drunk. I
lifted him up and propped his back against the bed; then I went through his
pockets. I found eleven hundred francs, and with that I hurried down the
stairs, jumped into a taxi, and escaped. My brother did not know my address
--I was safe.

'Where does a man go when he has money? To the BORDELS, naturally. But
you do not suppose that I was going to waste my time on some vulgar
debauchery fit only for navvies? Confound it, one is a civilized man! I was
fastidious, exigeant, you understand, with a thousand francs in my pocket.
It was midnight before I found what I was looking for. I had fallen in with
a very smart youth of eighteen, dressed EN SMOKING and with his hair cut A
L'AMERICAINE, and we were talking in a quiet BISTRO away from the
boulevards. We understood one another well, that youth and I. We talked of
this and that, and discussed ways of diverting oneself. Presently we took a
taxi together and were driven away.

'The taxi stopped in a narrow, solitary street with a single gas-lamp
flaring at the end. There were dark puddles among the stones. Down one side
ran the high, blank wall of a convent. My guide led me to a tall, ruinous
house with shuttered windows, and knocked several times at the door.
Presently there was a sound of footsteps and a shooting of bolts, and the
door opened a little. A hand came round the edge of it; it was a large,
crooked hand, that held itself palm upwards under our noses, demanding
money.

'My guide put his foot between the door and the step. "How much do you
want?" he said.

'"A thousand francs," said a woman's voice. "Pay up at once or you
don't come in."

'I put a thousand francs into the hand and gave the remaining hundred
to my guide: he said good night and left me. I could hear the voice inside
counting the notes, and then a thin old crow of a woman in a black dress
put her nose out and regarded me suspiciously before letting me in. It was
very dark inside: I could see nothing except a flaring gas-jet that
illuminated a patch of plaster wall, throwing everything else into deeper
shadow. There was a smell of rats and dust. Without speaking, the old woman
lighted a candle at the gas-jet, then hobbled in front of me down a stone
passage to the top of a flight of stone steps.

'"VOILA!" she said; "go down into the cellar there and do what you
like. I shall see nothing, hear nothing, know nothing. You are free, you
understand--perfectly free."

'Ha, MESSIEURS, need I describe to YOU--FORCEMENT, you know it
yourselves--that shiver, half of terror and half of joy, that goes
through one at these moments? I crept down, feeling my way; I could hear my
breathing and the scraping of my shoes on the stones, otherwise all was
silence. At the bottom of the stairs my hand met an electric switch. I
turned it, and a great electrolier of twelve red globes flooded the cellar
with a red light. And behold, I was not in a cellar, but in a bedroom, a
great, rich, garish bedroom, coloured blood red from top to bottom. Figure
it to yourselves, MESSIEURS ET DAMES! Red carpet on the floor, red paper on
the walls, red plush on the chairs, even the ceiling red; everywhere red,
burning into the eyes. It was a heavy, stifling red, as though the light
were shining through bowls of blood. At the far end stood a huge, square
bed, with quilts red like the rest, and on it a girl was lying, dressed in
a frock of red velvet. At the sight of me she shrank away and tried to hide
her knees under the short dress.

'I had halted by the door. "Come here, my chicken," I called to her.

'She gave a whimper of fright. With a bound I was beside the bed; she
tried to elude me, but I seized her by the throat--like this, do you see?
--tight! She struggled, she began to cry out for mercy, but I held her
fast, forcing back her head and staring down into her face. She was twenty
years old, perhaps; her face was the broad, dull face of a stupid child,
but it was coated with paint and powder, and her blue, stupid eyes, shining
in the red light, wore that shocked, distorted look that one sees nowhere
save in the eyes of these women. She was some peasant girl, doubtless, whom
her parents had sold into slavery.

'Without another word I pulled her off the bed and threw her on to the
floor. And then I fell upon her like a tiger! Ah, the joy, the incomparable
rapture of that time! There, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, is what I would expound to
you; VOILA L'AMOUR! There is the true love, there is the only thing in the
world worth striving for; there is the thing beside which all your arts and
ideals, all your philosophies and creeds, all your fine words and high
attitudes, are as pale and profitless as ashes. When one has experienced
love--the true love--what is there in the world that seems more than a
mere ghost of joy?

'More and more savagely I renewed the attack. Again and again the girl
tried to escape; she cried out for mercy anew, but I laughed at her.

'"Mercy!" I said, "do you suppose I have come here to show mercy? Do
you suppose I have paid a thousand francs for that?" I swear to you,
MESSIEURS ET DAMES, that if it were not for that accursed law that robs us
of our liberty, I would have murdered her at that moment.

'Ah, how she screamed, with what bitter cries of agony. But there was
no one to hear them; down there under the streets of Paris we were as
secure as at the heart of a pyramid. Tears streamed down the girl's face,
washing away the powder in long, dirty smears. Ah, that irrecoverable time!
You, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, you who have not cultivated the finer
sensibilities of love, for you such pleasure is almost beyond conception.
And I too, now that my youth is gone--ah, youth!--shall never again see
life so beautiful as that. It is finished.

'Ah yes, it is gone--gone for ever. Ah, the poverty, the shortness,
the disappointment of human joy! For in reality--CAR EN REALITE, what is
the duration of the supreme moment of love. It is nothing, an instant, a
second perhaps. A second of ecstasy, and after that--dust, ashes,
nothingness.

'And so, just for one instant, I captured the supreme happiness, the
highest and most refined emotion to which human beings can attain. And in
the same moment it was finished, and I was left--to what? All my
savagery, my passion, were scattered like the petals of a rose. I was left
cold and languid, full of vain regrets; in my revulsion I even felt a kind
of pity for the weeping girl on the floor. Is it not nauseous, that we
should be the prey of such mean emotions? I did not look at the girl again;
my sole thought was to get away. I hastened up the steps of the vault and
out into the street. It was dark and bitterly cold, the streets were empty,
the stones echoed under my heels with a hollow, lonely ring. All my money
was gone, I had not even the price of a taxi fare. I walked back alone to
my cold, solitary room.

'But there, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, that is what I promised to expound to
you. That is Love. That was the happiest day of my life.'

He was a curious specimen, Charlie. I describe him, just to show what
diverse characters could be found flourishing in the Coq d'Or quarter.




III



I lived in the Coq d'Or quarter for about a year and a half. One day,
in summer, I found that I had just four hundred and fifty francs left, and
beyond this nothing but thirty-six francs a week, which I earned by giving
English lessons. Hitherto I had not thought about the future, but I now
realized that I must do something at once. I decided to start looking for a
job, and--very luckily, as it turned out--I took the precaution of
paying two hundred francs for a month's rent in advance. With the other two
hundred and fifty francs, besides the English lessons, I could live a
month, and in a month I should probably find work. I aimed at becoming a
guide to one of the tourist companies, or perhaps an interpreter. However,
a piece of bad luck prevented this.

One day there turned up at the hotel a young Italian who called
himself a compositor. He was rather an ambiguous person, for he wore side
whiskers, which are the mark either of an apache or an intellectual, and
nobody was quite certain in which class to put him. Madame F. did not like
the look of him, and made him pay a week's rent in advance. The Italian
paid the rent and stayed six nights at the hotel. During this time he
managed to prepare some duplicate keys, and on the last night he robbed a
dozen rooms, including mine. Luckily, he did not find the money that was in
my pockets, so I was not left penniless. I was left with just forty-seven
francs--that is, seven and tenpence.

This put an end to my plans of looking for work. I had now got to live
at the rate of about six francs a day, and from the start it was too
difficult to leave much thought for anything else. It was now that my
experiences of poverty began--for six francs a day, if not actual
poverty, is on the fringe of it. Six francs is a shilling, and you can live
on a shilling a day in Paris if you know how. But it is a complicated
business.

It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have
thought so much about poverty--it is the thing you have feared all your
life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it, is
all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite
simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be
terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar LOWNESS of
poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the
complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.

You discover, for instance, the secrecy attaching to poverty. At a
sudden stroke you have been reduced to an income of six francs a day. But
of course you dare not admit it--you have got to pretend that you are
living quite as usual. From the start it tangles you in a net of lies, and
even with the lies you can hardly manage it. You stop sending clothes to
the laundry, and the laundress catches you in the street and asks you why;
you mumble something, and she, thinking you are sending the clothes
elsewhere, is your enemy for life. The tobacconist keeps asking why you
have cut down your smoking. There are letters you want to answer, and
cannot, because stamps are too expensive. And then there are your meals--
meals are the worst difficulty of all. Every day at meal-times you go out,
ostensibly to a restaurant, and loaf an hour in the Luxembourg Gardens,
watching the pigeons. Afterwards you smuggle your food home in your
pockets. Your food is bread and margarine, or bread and wine, and even the
nature of the food is governed by lies. You have to buy rye bread instead
of household bread, because the rye loaves, though dearer, are round and
can be smuggled in your pockets. This wastes you a franc a day. Sometimes,
to keep up appearances, you have to spend sixty centimes on a drink, and go
correspondingly short of food. Your linen gets filthy, and you run out of
soap and razor-blades. Your hair wants cutting, and you try to cut it
yourself, with such fearful results that you have to go to the barber after
all, and spend the equivalent of a day's food. All day you arc telling
lies, and expensive lies.

You discover the extreme precariousness of your six francs a day. Mean
disasters happen and rob you of food. You have spent your last eighty
centimes on half a litre of milk, and are boiling it over the spirit lamp.
While it boils a bug runs down your forearm; you give the bug a flick with
your nail, and it falls, plop! straight into the milk. There is nothing for
it but to throw the milk away and go foodless.

You go to the baker's to buy a pound of bread, and you wait while the
girl cuts a pound for another customer. She is clumsy, and cuts more than a
pound. 'PARDON, MONSIEUR,' she says, 'I suppose you don't mind paying two
sous extra?' Bread is a franc a pound, and you have exactly a franc. When
you think that you too might be asked to pay two sous extra, and would have
to confess that you could not, you bolt in panic. It is hours before you
dare venture into a baker's shop again.

You go to the greengrocer's to spend a franc on a kilogram of
potatoes. But one of the pieces that make up the franc is a Belgian piece,
and the shopman refuses it. You slink out of the shop, and can never go
there again.

You have strayed into a respectable quarter, and you see a prosperous
friend coming. To avoid him you dodge into the nearest cafe. Once in the
cafe you must buy something, so you spend your last fifty centimes on a
glass of black coffee with a dead fly in it. Once could multiply these
disasters by the hundred. They are part of the process of being hard up.

You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margarine in
your belly, you go out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere there is
food insulting you in huge, wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot
loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages, mountains of
potatoes, vast Gruyere cheeses like grindstones. A snivelling self-pity
comes over you at the sight of so much food. You plan to grab a loaf and
run, swallowing it before they catch you; and you refrain, from pure funk.

You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times
when you have nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in
nothing. For half a day at a time you lie on your bed, feeling like the
JEUNE SQUELETTE in Baudelaire's poem. Only food could rouse you. You
discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not
a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.

This--one could describe it further, but it is all in the same style
--is life on six francs a day. Thousands of people in Paris live it--
struggling artists and students, prostitutes when their luck is out,
out-of-work people of all kinds. It is the suburbs, as it were, of poverty.

I continued in this style for about three weeks. The forty-seven
francs were soon gone, and I had to do what I could on thirty-six francs a
week from the English lessons. Being inexperienced, I handled the money
badly, and sometimes I was a day without food. When this happened I used to
sell a few of my clothes, smuggling them out of the hotel in small packets
and taking them to a secondhand shop in the rue de la Montagne St
Genevieve. The shopman was a red-haired Jew, an extraordinary disagreeable
man, who used to fall into furious rages at the sight of a client. From his
manner one would have supposed that we had done him some injury by coming
to him. 'MERDE!' he used to shout, 'YOU here again? What do you think this
is? A soup kitchen?' And he paid incredibly low prices. For a hat which I
had bought for twenty-five shillings and scarcely worn he gave five francs;
for a good pair of shoes, five francs; for shirts, a franc each. He always
preferred to exchange rather than buy, and he had a trick of thrusting some
useless article into one's hand and then pretending that one had accepted
it. Once I saw him take a good overcoat from an old woman, put two white
billiard-balls into her hand, and then push her rapidly out of the shop
before she could protest. It would have been a pleasure to flatten the
Jew's nose, if only one could have afforded it.

These three weeks were squalid and uncomfortable, and evidently there
was worse coming, for my rent would be due before long. Nevertheless,
things were not a quarter as bad as I had expected. For, when you are
approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the
others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of
hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the
fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually
true that the less money you have, the less you worry. When you have a
hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics. When
you have only three francs you are quite indifferent; for three francs will
feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than that. You are
bored, but you are not afraid. You think vaguely, 'I shall be starving in a
day or two--shocking, isn't it?' And then the mind wanders to other
topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own
anodyne.

And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I
believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling
of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down
and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs--and well, here
are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off
a lot of anxiety,




IV



One day my English lessons ceased abruptly. The weather was getting
hot and one of my pupils, feeling too lazy to go on with his lessons,
dismissed me. The other disappeared from his lodgings without notice, owing
me twelve francs. I was left with only thirty centimes and no tobacco. For
a day and a half I had nothing to cat or smoke, and then, too hungry to put
it off any longer, I packed my remaining clothes into my suitcase and took
them to the pawnshop. This put an end to all pretence of being in funds,
for I could not take my clothes out of the hotel without asking Madame F.'s
leave. I remember, however, how surprised she was at my asking her instead
of removing the clothes on the sly, shooting the moon being a common trick
in our quarter.

It was the first time that I had been in a French pawnshop. One went
through grandiose stone portals (marked, of course, 'LIBERTE, EGATITE,
FRATERNITE' they write that even over the police stations in France) into a
large, bare room like a school classroom, with a counter and rows of
benches. Forty or fifty people were waiting. One handed one's pledge over
the counter and sat down. Presently, when the clerk had assessed its value
he would call out, 'NUMERO such and such, will you take fifty francs?'
Sometimes it was only fifteen francs, or ten, or five--whatever it was,
the whole room knew it. As I Came in the clerk called with an air of
offence, 'NUMERO 83--here!' and gave a little whistle and a beckon, as
though calling a dog. NUMERO 83 stepped to the counter; he was an old
bearded man, with an overcoat buttoned up at the neck and frayed
trouser-ends. Without a word the clerk shot the bundle across the counter
--evidently it was worth nothing. It fell to the ground and came open,
displaying four pairs of men's woollen pants. No one could help laughing.
Poor NUMERO 83 gathered up his pants and shambled out, muttering to
himself.

The clothes I was pawning, together with the suitcase, had cost over
twenty pounds, and were in good condition. I thought they must be worth ten
pounds, and a quarter of this (one expects quarter value at a pawnshop) was
two hundred and fifty or three hundred francs. I waited without anxiety,
expecting two hundred francs at the worst.

At last the clerk called my number: 'NUMERO 97!'

'Yes,' I said, standing up.

'Seventy francs?'

Seventy francs for ten pounds' worth of clothes! But it was no use
arguing; I had seen someone else attempt to argue, and the clerk had
instantly refused the pledge. I took the money and the pawnticket and
walked out. I had now no clothes except what I stood up in--the coat
badly out at the elbow--an overcoat, moderately pawnable, and one spare
shirt. Afterwards, when it was too late, I learned that it was wiser to go
to a pawnshop in the afternoon. The clerks are French, and, like most
French people, are in a bad temper till they have eaten their lunch.

When I got home, Madame F. was sweeping the BISTRO floor. She came up
the steps to meet me. I could see in her eye that she was uneasy about my
rent.

'Well,' she said, 'what did you get for your clothes? Not much, eh?'

'Two hundred francs,' I said promptly.

'TIENS!' she said, surprised; 'well, THAT'S not bad. How expensive
those English clothes must be!'

The lie saved a lot of trouble, and, strangely enough, it came true. A
few days later I did receive exactly two hundred francs due to me for a
newspaper article, and, though it hurt to do it, I at once paid every penny
of it in rent. So, though I came near to starving in the following weeks, I
was hardly ever without a roof.

It was now absolutely necessary to find work, and I remembered a
friend of mine, a Russian waiter named Boris, who might be able to help me.
I had first met him in the public ward of a hospital, where he was being
treated for arthritis in the left leg. He had told me to come to him if I
were ever in difficulties.

I must say something about Boris, for he was a curious character and
my close friend for a long time. He was a big, soldierly man of about
thirty-five, and had been good looking, but since his illness he had grown
immensely fat from lying in bed. Like most Russian refugees, he had had an
adventurous life. His parents, killed in the Revolution, had been rich
people, and he had served through the war in the Second Siberian Rifles,
which, according to him, was the best regiment in the Russian Army. After
the war he had first worked in a brush factory, then as a porter at Les
Halles, then had become a dishwasher, and had finally worked his way up to
be a waiter. When he fell ill he was at the Hotel Scribe, and taking a
hundred francs a day in tips. His ambition was to become a MAITRE D'HOTEL,
save fifty thousand francs, and set up a small, select restaurant on the
Right Bank.

Boris always talked of the war as the happiest time of his life. War
and soldiering were his passion; he had read innumerable books of strategy
and military history, and could tell you all about the theories of
Napoleon, Kutuzof, Clausewitz, Moltke and Foch. Anything to do with
soldiers pleased him. His favourite cafe was the Gloserie des Lilas in
Montparnasse, simply because the statue of Marshal Ney stands outside it.
Later on, Boris and I sometimes went to the rue du Commerce together. If we
went by Metro, Boris always got out at Cambronne station instead of
Commerce, though Commerce was nearer; he liked the association with General
Cambronne, who was called on to surrender at Waterloo, and answered simply,
'MERDE!'

The only things left to Boris by the Revolution were his medals and
some photographs of his old regiment; he had kept these when everything
else went to the pawnshop. Almost every day he would spread the photographs
out on the bed and talk about them:

'VOILA, MON AMI. There you see me at the head of my company. Fine big
men, eh? Not like these little rats of Frenchmen. A captain at twenty--
not bad, eh? Yes, a captain in the Second Siberian Rifles; and my father
was a colonel.

'AH, MAIS, MON AMI, the ups and downs of life! A captain in the
Russian Army, and then, piff! the Revolution--every penny gone. In 1916 I
stayed a week at the Hotel Edouard Sept; in 1920 I was trying for a job as
night watchman there. I have been night watchman, cellarman, floor
scrubber, dishwasher, porter, lavatory attendant. I have tipped waiters,
and I have been tipped by waiters.

'Ah, but I have known what it is to live like a gentleman, MON AMI. I
do not say it to boast, but the other day I was trying to compute how many
mistresses I have had in my life, and I made it out to be over two hundred.
Yes, at least two hundred... Ah, well, CA REVIENDRA. Victory is to him who
fights the longest. Courage!' etc. etc.

Boris had a queer, changeable nature. He always wished himself back in
the army, but he had also been a waiter long enough to acquire the waiter's
outlook. Though he had never saved more than a few thousand francs, he took
it for granted that in the end he would be able to set up his own
restaurant and grow rich. All waiters, I afterwards found, talk and think
of this; it is what reconciles them to being waiters. Boris used to talk
interestingly about Hotel life:

'Waiting is a gamble,' he used to say; 'you may die poor, you may make
your fortune in a year. You are not paid wages, you depend on tips--ten
per cent of the bill, and a commission from the wine companies on champagne
corks. Sometimes the tips are enormous. The barman at Maxim's, for
instance, makes five hundred francs a day. More than five hundred, in the
season... I have made two hundred francs a day myself. It was at a Hotel in
Biarritz, in the season. The whole staff, from the manager down to the
PLONGEURS, was working twenty-one hours a day. Twenty-one hours' work and
two and a half hours in bed, for a month on end. Still, it was worth it, at
two hundred francs a day.

'You never know when a stroke of luck is coming. Once when I was at
the Hotel Royal an American customer sent for me before dinner and ordered
twenty-four brandy cocktails. I brought them all together on a tray, in
twenty-four glasses. "Now, GUARCON," said the customer (he was drunk),
"I'll drink twelve and you'll drink twelve, and if you can walk to the door
afterwards you get a hundred francs." I walked to the door, and he gave me
a hundred francs. And every night for six days he did the same thing;
twelve brandy cocktails, then a hundred francs. A few months later I heard
he had been extradited by the American Government--embezzlement. There is
something fine, do you not think, about these Americans?'

I liked Boris, and we had interesting times together, playing chess
and talking about war and Hotels. Boris used often to suggest that I should
become a waiter. 'The life would suit you,' he used to say; 'when you are
in work, with a hundred francs a day and a nice mistress, it's not bad. You
say you go in for writing. Writing is bosh. There is only one way to make
money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter. But you
would make a good waiter if you shaved that moustache off. You are tall and
you speak English--those are the chief things a waiter needs. Wait till I
can bend this accursed leg, MON AMI. And then, if you are ever out of a
job, come to me.'

Now that I was short of my rent, and getting hungry, I remembered
Boris's promise, and decided to look him up at once. I did not hope to
become a waiter so easily as he had promised, but of course I knew how to
scrub dishes, and no doubt he could get me a job in the kitchen. He had
said that dishwashing jobs were to be had for the asking during the summer.
It was a great relief to remember that I had after all one influential
friend to fall back on.




V



A short time before, Boris had given me an address in the rue du
Marche des Blancs Manteaux. All he had said in his letter was that 'things
were not marching too badly', and I assumed that he was back at the Hotel
Scribe, touching his hundred francs a day. I was full of hope, and wondered
why I had been fool enough not to go to Boris before. I saw myself in a
cosy restaurant, with jolly cooks singing love-songs as they broke eggs
into the pan, and five solid meals a day. I even squandered two francs
fifty on a packet of Gaulois Bleu, in anticipation of my wages.

In the morning I walked down to the rue du Marche des Blancs Manteaux;
with a shock, I found it a shimmy back street-as bad as my own. Boris's
hotel was the dirtiest hotel in the street. From its dark doorway there
came out a vile, sour odour, a mixture of slops and synthetic soup--it
was Bouillon Zip, twenty-five centimes a packet. A misgiving came over me.
People who drink Bouillon Zip are starving, or near it. Could Boris
possibly be earning a hundred francs a day? A surly PATRON, sitting in the
office, said to me. Yes, the Russian was at home--in the attic. I went up
six nights of narrow, winding stairs, the Bouillon Zip growing stronger as
one got higher. Boris did not answer when I knocked at his door, so I
opened it and went in.

The room was an attic, ten feet square, lighted only by a skylight,
its sole furniture a narrow iron bedstead, a chair, and a washhand-stand
with one game leg. A long S-shaped chain of bugs marched slowly across the
wall above the bed. Boris was lying asleep, naked, his large belly making a
mound under the grimy sheet. His chest was spotted with insect bites. As I
came in he woke up, rubbed his eyes, and groaned deeply.

'Name of Jesus Christ!' he exclaimed, 'oh, name of Jesus Christ, my
back! Curse it, I believe my back is broken!'

'What's the matter?' I exclaimed.

'My back is broken, that is all. I have spent the night on the floor.
Oh, name of Jesus Christ! If you knew what my back feels like!'

'My dear Boris, are you ill?'

'Not ill, only starving--yes, starving to death if this goes on much
longer. Besides sleeping on the floor, I have lived on two francs a day for
weeks past. It is fearful. You have come at a bad moment, MON AMI.'

It did not seem much use to ask whether Boris still had his job at the
Hotel Scribe. I hurried downstairs and bought a loaf of bread. Boris threw
himself on the bread and ate half of it, after which he felt better, sat up
in bed, and told me what was the matter with him. He had failed to get a
job after leaving the hospital, because he was still very lame, and he had
spent all his money and pawned everything, and finally starved for several
days. He had slept a week on the quay under the Font d'Austerlitz, among
some empty wine barrels. For the past fortnight he had been living in this
room, together with a Jew, a mechanic. It appeared (there was some
complicated explanation.) that the Jew owed Boris three hundred francs, and
was repaying this by letting him sleep on the floor and allowing him two
francs a day for food. Two francs would buy a bowl of coffee and three
rolls. The Jew went to work at seven in the mornings, and after that Boris
would leave his sleeping-place (it was beneath the skylight, which let in
the rain) and get into the bed. He could not sleep much even there owing to
the bugs, but it rested his back after the floor.

It was a great disappointment, when I had come to Boris for help, to
find him even worse off than myself. I explained that I had only about
sixty francs left and must get a job immediately. By this time, however,
Boris had eaten the rest of the bread and was feeling cheerful and
talkative. He said carelessly:

'Good heavens, what are you worrying about? Sixty francs--why, it's
a fortune! Please hand me that shoe, MON AMI. I'm going to smash some of
those bugs if they come within reach.'

'But do you think there's any chance of getting a job?'

'Chance? It's a certainty. In fact, I have got something already.
There is a new Russian restaurant which is to open in a few days in the rue
du Commerce. It is UNE CHOSE ENTENDUE that I am to be MAITRE D'HOTEL. I can
easily get you a job in the kitchen. Five hundred francs a month and your
food--tips, too, if you are lucky.'

'But in the meantime? I've got to pay my rent before long.'

'Oh, we shall find something. I have got a few cards-up my sleeve.
There are people who owe me money, for instance--Paris is full of them.
One of them is bound to pay up before long. Then think of all the women who
have been my mistress! A woman never forgets, you know--I have only to
ask and they will help me. Besides, the Jew tells me he is going to steal
some magnetos from the garage where he works, and he will pay us five
francs a day to clean them before he sells them. That alone would keep us.
Never worry, MON AMI. Nothing is easier to get than money.'

'Well, let's go out now and look for a job.'

'Presently, MON AMI. We shan't starve, don't you fear. This is only
the fortune of war--I've been in a worse hole scores of times. It's only
a question of persisting. Remember Foch's maxim: "ATTAQUEZ! ATTAQUEZ!
ATTAQUEZ!"'

It was midday before Boris decided to get up. All the clothes he now
had left were one suit, with one shirt, collar and tie, a pair of shoes
almost worn out, and a pair of socks all holes. He had also an overcoat
which was to be pawned in the last extremity. He had a suitcase, a wretched
twenty-franc cardboard thing, but very important, because the PATRON of the
hotel believed that it was full of clothes--without that, he would
probably have turned Boris out of doors. What it actually contained were
the medals and photographs, various odds and ends, and huge bundles of
love-letters. In spite of all this Boris managed to keep a fairly smart
appearance. He shaved without soap and with a razor-blade two months old,
tied his tie so that the holes did not show, and carefully stuffed the
soles of his shoes with newspaper. Finally, when he was dressed, he
produced an ink-bottle and inked the skin of his ankles where it showed
through his socks. You would never have thought, when it was finished, that
he had recently been sleeping under the Seine bridges.

We went to a small cafe off the rue de Rivoli, a well-known rendezvous
of hotel managers and employees. At the back was a dark, cave-like room
where all kinds of hotel workers were sitting--smart young waiters,
others not so smart and clearly hungry, fat pink cooks, greasy
dish-washers, battered old scrubbing-women. Everyone had an untouched glass
of black coffee in front of him. The place was, in effect, an employment
bureau, and the money spent on drinks was the PATRON'S commission.
Sometimes a stout, important-looking man, obviously a restaurateur, would
come in and speak to the barman, and the barmanwould call to one of the
people at the back of the cafe. But he never called to Boris or me, and we
left after two hours, as the etiquette was that you could only stay two
hours for one drink. We learned afterwards, when it was too late, that the
dodge was to bribe the barman; if you could afford twenty francs he would
generally get you a job.

We went to the Hotel Scribe and waited an hour on the pavement, hoping
that the manager would come out, but he never did. Then we dragged
ourselves down to the rue du Commerce, only to find that the new
restaurant, which was being redecorated, was shut up and the PATRON away.
It was now night. We had walked fourteen kilometres over pavement, and we
were so tired that we had to waste one franc fifty on going home by Metro.
Walking was agony to Boris with his game leg, and his optimism wore thinner
and thinner as the day went on. When he got out of the Metro at the Place
d'Italie he was in despair. He began to say that it was no use looking for
work--there was nothing for it but to try crime.

'Sooner rob than starve, MON AMI. I have often planned it. A fat, rich
American--some dark corner down Montparnasse way--a cobblestone in a
stocking--bang! And then go through his pockets and bolt. It is feasible,
do you not think? I would not flinch--I have been a soldier, remember.'

He decided against the plan in the end, because we were both
foreigners and easily recognized.

When we had got back to my room we spent another one franc fifty on
bread and chocolate. Boris devoured his share, and at once cheered up like
magic; food seemed to act on his system as rapidly as a cocktail. He took
out a pencil and began making a list of the people who would probably give
us jobs. There were dozens of them, he said.

'Tomorrow we shall find something, MON AMI, I know it in my bones. The
luck always changes. Besides, we both have brains--a man with brains
can't starve.

'What things a man can do with brains! Brains will make money out of
anything. I had a friend once, a Pole, a real man of genius; and what do
you think he used to do? He would buy a gold ring and pawn it for fifteen
francs. Then--you know how carelessly the clerks fill up the tickets--
where the clerk had written "EN OR" he would add "ET DIAMANTS" and he would
change "fifteen francs" to "fifteen thousand". Neat, eh? Then, you see, he
could borrow a thousand francs on the security of the ticket. That is what
I mean by brains...'

For the rest of the evening Boris was in a hopeful mood, talking of
the times we should have together when we were waiters together at Nice or
Biarritz, with smart rooms and enough money to set up mistresses. He was
too tired to walk the three kilometres back to his hotel, and slept the
night on the floor of my room, with his coat rolled round his shoes for a
pillow.




VI



We again failed to find work the next day, and it was three weeks
before the luck changed. My two hundred francs saved me from trouble about
the rent, but everything else went as badly as possible. Day after day
Boris and I went up and down Paris, drifting at two miles an hour through
the crowds, bored and hungry, and finding nothing. One day, I remember, we
crossed the Seine eleven times. We loitered for hours outside service
doorways, and when the manager came out we would go up to him
ingratiatingly, cap in hand. We always got the same answer: they did not
want a lame man, nor a man without experience. Once we were very nearly
engaged. While we spoke to the manager Boris stood straight upright, not
supporting himself with his stick, and the .manager did not see that he was
lame. 'Yes,' he said, 'we want two men in the cellars. Perhaps you would
do. Come inside.' Then Boris moved, the game was up. 'Ah,' said the
manager, 'you limp. MALHEUREUSEMENT--'

We enrolled our names at agencies and answered advertisements, but
walking everywhere made us slow, and we seemed to miss every job by half an
hour. Once we very nearly got a job swabbing out railway trucks, but at the
last moment they rejected us in favour of Frenchmen. Once we answered an
advertisement calling for hands at a circus. You had to shift benches and
clean up litter, and, during the performance, stand on two tubs and let a
lion jump through your legs. When we got to the place, an hour before the
time named, we found a queue of fifty men already waiting. There is some
attraction in lions, evidently.

Once an agency to which I had applied months earlier sent me a PETIT
BLEU, telling me of an Italian gentleman who wanted English lessons. The
PETIT BLEU said 'Come at once' and promised twenty francs an hour. Boris
and I were in despair. Here was a splendid chance, and I could not take it,
for it was impossible to go to the agency with my coat out at the elbow.
Then it occurred to us that I could wear Boris's coat--it did not match
my trousers, but the trousers were grey and might pass for flannel at a
short distance. The coat was so much too big for me that I had to wear it
unbuttoned and keep one hand in my pocket. I hurried out, and wasted
seventy-five centimes on a bus fare to get to the agency. When I got there
I found that the Italian had changed his mind and left Paris.

Once Boris suggested that I should go to Les Halles and try for a job
as a porter. I arrived at half-past four in the morning, when the work was
getting into its swing. Seeing a short, fat man in a bowler hat directing
some porters, I went up to him and asked for work. Before answering he
seized my right hand and felt the palm.

'You are strong, eh?' he said.

'Very strong,' I said untruly.

'BIEN. Let me see you lift that crate.'

It was a huge wicker basket full of potatoes. I took hold of it, and
found that, so far from lifting it, I could not even move it. The man in
the bowler hat watched me, then shrugged his shoulders and turned away. I
made off. When I had gone some distance I looked back and saw FOUR men
lifting the basket on to a cart. It weighed three hundredweight, possibly.
The man had seen that I was no use, and taken this way of getting rid of me.

Sometimes in his hopeful moments Boris spent fifty centimes on a stamp
and wrote to one of his ex-mistresses, asking for money. Only one of them
ever replied. It was a woman who, besides having been his mistress, owed
him two hundred francs. When Boris saw the letter waiting and recognized
the handwriting, he was wild with hope. We seized the letter and rushed up
to Boris's room to read it, like a child with stolen sweets. Boris read the
letter, then handed it silently to me. It ran:


My Little Cherished Wolf,

With what delight did I open thy charming letter, reminding me
of the days of our perfect love, and of the so dear kisses which I
have received from thy lips. Such memories linger for ever in the
heart, like the perfume of a flower that is dead.

As to thy request for two hundred francs, alas! it is
impossible. Thou dost not know, my dear one, how I am desolated to
hear of thy embarrassments. But what wouldst thou? In this life
which is so sad, trouble conies to everyone. I too have had my
share. My little sister has been ill (ah, the poor little one, how
she suffered!) and we are obliged to pay I know not what to the
doctor. All our money is gone and we are passing, I assure thee,
very difficult days.

Courage, my little wolf, always the courage! Remember that the
bad days are not for ever, and the trouble which seems so terrible
will disappear at last.

Rest assured, my dear one, that I will remember thee always. And
receive the most sincere embraces of her who has never ceased to
love thee, thy

Yvonne


This letter disappointed Boris so much that he went straight to bed
and would not look for work again that day. My sixty francs lasted about a
fortnight. I had given up the pretence of going out to restaurants, and we
used to eat in my room, one of us sitting on the bed and the other on the
chair. Boris would contribute his two francs and I three or four francs,
and we would buy bread, potatoes, milk and cheese, and make soup over my
spirit lamp. We had a saucepan and a coffee-bowl and one spoon; every day
there was a polite squabble as to who should eat out of the saucepan and
who out of the coffee-bowl (the saucepan held more), and every day, to my
secret anger, Boris gave in first and had the saucepan. Sometimes we had
more bread in the evening, sometimes not. Our linen was getting filthy, and
it was three weeks since I had had a bath; Boris, so he said, had not had a
bath for months. It was tobacco that made everything tolerable. We had
plenty of tobacco, for some time before Boris had met a soldier (the
soldiers are given their tobacco free) and bought twenty or thirty packets
at fifty centimes each.

All this was far worse for Boris than for me. The walking and sleeping
on the floor kept his leg and back in constant pain, and with his vast
Russian appetite he suffered torments of hunger, though he never seemed to
grow thinner. On the whole he was surprisingly gay, and he had vast
capacities for hope. He used to say seriously that he had a PATRON saint
who watched over him, and when things were very bad he would search the
gutter for money, saying that the saint often dropped a two-franc piece
there. One day we were waiting in the rue Royale; there was a Russian
restaurant near by, and we were going to ask for a job there. Suddenly,
Boris made up his mind to go into the Madeleine and bum a fifty-centime
candle to his PATRON saint. Then, coming out, he said that he would be on
the safe side, and solemnly put a match to a fifty-centime stamp, as a
sacrifice to the immortal gods. Perhaps the gods and the saints did not get
on together; at any rate, we missed the job.

On some mornings Boris collapsed in the most utter despair. He would
lie in bed almost weeping, cursing the Jew with whom he lived. Of late the
Jew had become restive about paying the daily two francs, and, what was
worse, had begun putting on intolerable airs of PATRONage. Boris said that
I, as an Englishman, could not conceive what torture it was to a Russian of
family to be at the mercy of a Jew.

'A Jew, MON AMI, a veritable Jew! And he hasn't even the decency to be
ashamed of it. To think that I, a captain in the Russian Army--have I
ever told you, MON AMI, that I was a captain in the Second Siberian Rifles?
Yes, a captain, and my father was a colonel. And here I am, eating the
bread of a Jew. A Jew...

'I will tell you what Jews are like. Once, in the early months of the
war, we were on the march, and we had halted at a village for the night. A
horrible old Jew, with a red beard like Judas Iscariot, came sneaking up to
my billet. I asked him what he wanted. "Your honour," he said, "I have
brought a girl for you, a beautiful young girl only seventeen. It will only
be fifty francs." "Thank you," I said, "you can take her away again. I
don't want to catch any diseases." "Diseases!" cried the Jew, "MAIS,
MONSIEUR LE CAPITAINE, there's no fear of that. It's my own daughter!" That
is the Jewish national character for you.

'Have I ever told you, MON AMI, that in the old Russian Army it was
considered bad form to spit on a Jew? Yes, we thought a Russian officer's
spittle was too precious to be wasted on Jews...' etc. etc.

On these days Boris usually declared himself too ill to go out and
look for work. He would lie till evening in the greyish, verminous sheets,
smoking and reading old newspapers. Sometimes we played chess. We had no
board, but we wrote down the moves on a piece of paper, and afterwards we
made a board from the side of a packing--case, and a set of men from
buttons, Belgian coins and the like. Boris, like many Russians, had a
passion for chess. It was a saying of his that the rules of chess are the
same as the rules of love and war, and that if you can win at one you can
win at the others. But he also said that if you have a chessboard you do
not mind being hungry, which was certainly not true in my case.




VII



My money oozed away--to eight francs, to four francs, to one franc,
to twenty-five centimes; and twenty-five centimes is useless, for it will
buy nothing except a newspaper. We went several days on dry bread, and then
I was two and a half days with nothing to eat whatever. This was an ugly
experience. There are people who do fasting cures of three weeks or more,
and they say that fasting is quite pleasant after the fourth day; I do not
know, never having gone beyond the third day. Probably it seems different
when one is doing it voluntarily and is not underfed at the start.

The first day, too inert to look for work, I borrowed a rod and went
fishing in the Seine, baiting with bluebottles. I hoped to catch enough for
a meal, but of course I did not. The Seine is full of dace, but they grew
cunning during the siege of Paris, and none of them has been caught since,
except in nets. On the second day I thought of pawning my overcoat, but it
seemed too far to walk to the pawnshop, and I spent the day in bed, reading
the MEMOIRS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. It was all that I felt equal to, without
food. Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more
like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though one
had been turned into a jellyfish, or as though all one's blood had been
pumped out and luke-wann water substituted. Complete inertia is my chief
memory of hunger; that, and being obliged to spit very frequently, and the
spittle being curiously white and flocculent, like cuckoo-spit. I do not
know the reason for this, but everyone who has gone hungry several days has
noticed it.

On the third morning I felt very much better. I realized that I must
do something at once, and I decided to go and ask Boris to let me share his
two francs, at any rate for a day or two. When I arrived I found Boris in
bed, and furiously angry. As soon as I came in he burst out, almost
choking:

'He has taken it back, the dirty thief! He has taken it back!'

'Who's taken what?' I said.

'The Jew! Taken my two francs, the dog, the thief! He robbed me in my
sleep!'

It appeared that on the previous night the Jew had flatly refused to
pay the daily two francs. They had argued and argued, and at last the Jew
had consented to hand over the money; he had done it, Boris said, in the
most offensive manner, making a little speech about how kind he was, and
extorting abject gratitude. And then in the morning he had stolen the money
back before Boris was awake.

This was a blow. I was horribly disappointed, for I had allowed my
belly to expect food, a great mistake when one is hungry. However, rather
to my surprise, Boris was far from despairing. He sat up in bed, lighted
his pipe and reviewed the situation.

'Now listen, MON AMI, this is a tight comer. We have only twenty-five
centimes between us, and I don't suppose the Jew will ever pay my two
francs again. In any case his behaviour is becoming intolerable. Will you
believe it, the other night he had the indecency to bring a woman in here,
while I was there on the floor. The low animal! And I have a worse thing to
tell you. The Jew intends clearing out of here. He owes a week's rent, and
his idea is to avoid paying that and give me the slip at the same time. If
the Jew shoots the moon I shall be left without a roof, and the PATRON will
take my suitcase in lieu of rent, curse him! We have got to make a vigorous
move.'

'All right. But what can we do? It seems to me that the only thing is
to pawn our overcoats and get some food.'

'We'll do that, of course, but I must get my possessions out of this
house first. To think of my photographs being seized! Well, my plan is
ready. I'm going to forestall the Jew and shoot the moon myself. F----
LE CAMP--retreat, you understand. I think that is the correct move, eh?'

'But, my dear Boris, how can you, in daytime? You're bound to be
caught.'

'Ah well, it will need strategy, of course. Our PATRON is on the watch
for people slipping out without paying their rent; he's been had that way
before. He and his wife take it in turns all day to sit in the office--
what misers, these Frenchmen! But I have thought of a way to do it, if you
will help.'

I did not feel in a very helpful mood, but I asked Boris what his plan
was. He explained it carefully.

'Now listen. We must start by pawning our overcoats. First go back to
your room and fetch your overcoat, then come back here and fetch mine, and
smuggle it out under cover of yours. Take them to the pawnshop in the rue
des Francs Bourgeois. You ought to get twenty francs for the two, with
luck. Then go down to the Seine bank and fill your pockets with stones, and
bring them back and put them in my suitcase. You see the idea? I shall wrap
as many of my things as I can carry in a newspaper, and go down and ask the
PATRON the way to the nearest laundry. I shall be very brazen and casual,
you understand, and of course the PATRON will think the bundle is nothing
but dirty linen. Or, if he does suspect anything, he will do what he always
does, the mean sneak; he will go up to my room and feel the weight of my
suitcase. And when he feels the weight of stones he will think it is still
full. Strategy, eh? Then afterwards I can come back and carry my other
things out in my pockets.'

'But what about the suitcase?'

'Oh, that? We shall have to abandon it. The miserable thing only cost
about twenty francs. Besides, one always abandons something in a retreat.
Look at Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his whole army.'

Boris was so pleased with this scheme (he called it UNE RUSE DE GUERRE)
that he almost forgot being hungry. Its main weakness--that he would have
nowhere to sleep after shooting the moon--he ignored.

At first the RUSE DE GUERRE worked well. I went home and fetched my
overcoat (that made already nine kilometres, on an empty belly) and
smuggled Boris's coat out successfully. Then a hitch occurred. The receiver
at the pawnshop, a nasty, sour-faced, interfering, little man--a typical
French official--refused the coats on the ground that they were not
wrapped up in anything. He said that they must be put either in a valise or
a cardboard box. This spoiled everything, for we had no box of any kind,
and with only twenty-five centimes between us we could not buy one.

I went back and told Boris the bad news. 'MERDE!' he said, 'that makes
it awkward. Well, no matter, there is always a way. We'll put the overcoats
in my suitcase.'

'But how are we to get the suitcase past the PATRON? He's sitting
almost in the door of the office. It's impossible!'

'How easily you despair, MON AMI! Where is that English obstinacy that
I have read of? Courage! We'll manage it.'

Boris thought for a little while, and then produced another cunning
plan. The essential difficulty was to hold the PATRON's attention for
perhaps five seconds, while we could slip past with the suitcase. But, as
it happened, the PATRON had just one weak spot--that he was interested in
LE SPORT, and was ready to talk if you approached him on this subject.
Boris read an article about bicycle races in an old copy of the PETIT
PARISIEN, and then, when he had reconnoitred the stairs, went down and
managed to set the PATRON talking. Meanwhile, I waited at the foot of the
stairs, with the overcoats under one arm and the suitcase under the other.
Boris was to give a cough when he thought the moment favourable. I waited
trembling, for at any moment the PATRON'S wife might come out of the door
opposite the office, and then the game was up. However, presently Boris
coughed. I sneaked rapidly past the office and out into the street,
rejoicing that my shoes did not creak. The plan might have failed if Boris
had been thinner, for his big shoulders blocked the doorway of the office.
His nerve was splendid, too; he went on laughing and talking in the most
casual way, and so loud that he quite covered any noise I made. When I was
well away he came and joined me round the corner, and we bolted.

And then, after all our trouble, the receiver at the pawnshop again
refused the overcoats. He told me (one could see his French soul revelling
in the pedantry of it) that I had not sufficient papers of identification;
my CARTE D'IDENTITE was not enough, and I must show a passport or addressed
envelopes. Boris had addressed envelopes by the score, but his CARTE
D'IDENTITE was out of order (he never renewed it, so as to avoid the tax),
so we could not pawn the overcoats in his name. All we could do was to
trudge up to my room, get the necessary papers, and take the coats to the
pawnshop in the Boulevard Port Royal.

I left Boris at my room and went down to the pawnshop. When I got
there I found that it was shut and would not open till four in the
afternoon. It was now about half-past one, and I had walked twelve
kilometres and had no food for sixty hours. Fate seemed to be playing a
series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.

Then the luck changed as though by a miracle. I was walking home
through the Rue Broca when suddenly, glittering on the cobbles, I saw a
five-sou piece. I pounced on it, hurried home, got our other five-sou piece
and bought a pound of potatoes. There was only enough alcohol in the stove
to parboil them, and we had no salt, but we wolfed them, skins and all.
After that we felt like new men, and sat playing chess till the pawnshop
opened.

At four o'clock I went back to the pawnshop. I was not hopeful, for if
I had only got seventy francs before, what could I expect for two shabby
overcoats in a cardboard suitcase? Boris had said twenty francs, but I
thought it would be ten francs, or even five. Worse yet, I might be refused
altogether, like poor NUMERO 83 on the previous occasion. I sat on the
front bench, so as not to see people laughing when the clerk said five
francs.

At last the clerk called my number: 'NUMERO 117!'

'Yes,' I said, standing up.

'Fifty francs?'

It was almost as great a shock as the seventy francs had been the time
before. I believe now that the clerk had mixed my number up with someone
else's, for one could not have sold the coats outright for fifty francs. I
hurried home and walked into my room with my hands behind my back, saying
nothing. Boris was playing with the chessboard. He looked up eagerly.

'What did you get?' he exclaimed. 'What, not twenty francs? Surely you
got ten francs, anyway? NOM DE DIEU, five francs--that is a bit too
thick. MON AMI, DON'T say it was five francs. If you say it was five francs
I shall really begin to think of suicide.'

I threw the fifty-franc, note on to the table. Boris turned white as
chalk, and then, springing up, seized my hand and gave it a grip that
almost broke the bones. We ran out, bought bread and wine, a piece of meat
and alcohol for the stove, and gorged.

After eating, Boris became more optimistic than I had ever known him.
'What did I tell you?' he said. 'The fortune of war! This morning with five
sous, and now look at us. I have always said it, there is nothing easier to
get than money. And that reminds me, I have a friend in the rue Fondary
whom we might go and see. He has cheated me of four thousand francs, the
thief. He is the greatest thief alive when he is sober, but it is a curious
thing, he is quite honest when he is drunk. I should think he would be
drunk by six in the evening. Let's go and find him. Very likely he will pay
up a hundred on account. MERDE! He might pay two hundred. ALLONS-Y!'

We went to the rue Fondary and found the man, and he was drunk, but we
did not get our hundred francs. As soon as he and Boris met there was a
terrible altercation on the pavement. The other man declared that he did
not owe Boris a penny, but that on the contrary Boris owed HIM four
thousand francs, and both of them kept appealing to me for my opinion. I
never understood the rights of the matter. The two argued and argued, first
in the street, then in a BISTRO, then in a PRIX FIXE restaurant where we
went for dinner, then in another BISTRO. Finally, having called one another
thieves for two hours, they went off together on a drinking bout that
finished up the last sou of Boris's money.

Boris slept the night at the house of a cobbler, another Russian
refugee, in the Commerce quarter. Meanwhile, I had eight francs left, and
plenty of cigarettes, and was stuffed to the eyes with food and drink. It
was a marvellous change for the better after two bad days.




VIII



We had now twenty-eight francs in hand, and could start looking for
work once more. Boris was still sleeping, on some mysterious terms, at the
house of the cobbler, and he had managed to borrow another twenty francs
from a Russian friend. He had friends, mostly ex-officers like himself,
here and there all over Paris. Some were waiters or dishwashers, some drove
taxis, a few lived on women, some had managed to bring money away from
Russia and owned garages or dancing-halls. In general, the Russian refugees
in Paris are hard-working people, and have put up with/their bad luck far
better than one can imagine Englishmen of the same class doing. There are
exceptions, of course. Boris told me of an exiled Russian duke whom he had
once met, who frequented expensive restaurants. The duke would find out if
there was a Russian officer among the waiters, and, after he had dined,
call him in a friendly way to his table.

'Ah,' the duke would say, 'so you are an old soldier, like myself?
These are bad days, eh? Well, well, the Russian soldier fears nothing. And
what was your regiment?'

'The so-and-so, sir,' the waiter would answer.

'A very gallant regiment! I inspected them in 1912. By the way, I have
unfortunately left my notecase at home. A Russian officer will, I know,
oblige me with three hundred francs.'

If the waiter had three hundred francs he would hand it over, and, of
course, never see it again. The duke made quite a lot in this way. Probably
the waiters did not mind being swindled. A duke is a duke, even in exile.

It was through one of these Russian refugees that Boris heard of
something which seemed to promise money. Two days after we had pawned the
overcoats, Boris said to me rather mysteriously:

'Tell me, MON AMI, have you any political opinions?'

'No,'I said.

'Neither have I. Of course, one is always a patriot; but still--Did
not Moses say something about spoiling the Egyptians? As an Englishman you
will have read the Bible. What I mean is, would you object to earning money
from Communists?'

'No, of course not.'

'Well, it appears that there is a Russian secret society in Paris who
might do something for us. They are Communists; in fact they are agents for
the Bolsheviks. They act as a friendly society, get in touch with exiled
Russians, and try to get them to turn Bolshevik. My friend has joined their
society, and he thinks they would help us if we went to them.'

'But what can they do for us? In any case they won't help me, as I'm
not a Russian.'

'That is just the point. It seems that they are correspondents for a
Moscow paper, and they want some articles on English politics. If we got to
them at once they may commission you to write the articles.'

'Me? But I don't know anything about politics.'

'MERDE! Neither do they. Who DOES know anything about politics? It's
easy. All you have to do is to copy it out of the English papers. Isn't
there a Paris DAILY MAIL? Copy it from that.'

'But the DAILY MAIL is a Conservative paper. They loathe the
Communists.'

'Well, say the opposite of what the DAILY MAIL says, then you can't be
wrong. We mustn't throw this chance away, MON AMI. It might mean hundreds
of francs.'

I did not like the idea, for the Paris police are very hard on
Communists, especially if they are foreigners, and I was already under
suspicion. Some months before, a detective had seen me come out of the
office of a Communist weekly paper, and I had had a great deal of trouble
with the police. If they caught me going to this secret society, it might
mean deportation. However, the chance seemed too good to be missed. That
afternoon Boris's friend, another waiter, came to take us to the
rendezvous. I cannot remember the name of the street--it was a shabby
street running south from the Seine bank, somewhere near the Chamber of
Deputies. Boris's friend insisted on great caution. We loitered casually
down the street, marked the doorway we were to enter--it was a laundry--
and then strolled back again, keeping an eye on all the windows and cafes.
If the place were known as a haunt of Communists it was probably watched,
and we intended to go home if we saw anyone at all like a detective. I was
frightened, but Boris enjoyed these conspiratorial proceedings, and quite
forgot that he was about to trade with the slayers of his parents.

When we were certain that the coast was clear we dived quickly into
the doorway. In the laundry was a Frenchwoman ironing clothes, who told us
that 'the Russian gentlemen' lived up a staircase across the courtyard. We
went up several flights of dark stairs and emerged on to a landing. A
strong, surly-looking young man, with hair growing low on his head, was
standing at the top of the stairs. As I came up he looked at me
suspiciously, barred the way with his arm and said something in Russian.

'MOT D'ORDRE!' he said sharply when I did not answer.

I stopped, startled. I had not expected passwords.

'MOT D'ORDRE!' repeated the Russian.

Boris's friend, who was walking behind, now came forward and said
something in Russian, either the password or an explanation. At this, the
surly young man seemed satisfied, and led us into a small, shabby room with
frosted windows. It was like a very poverty-stricken office, with
propaganda posters in Russian lettering and a huge, crude picture of Lenin
tacked on the walls. At the table sat an unshaven Russian in shirt sleeves,
addressing newspaper wrappers from a pile in front of him. As I came in he
spoke to me in French, with a bad accent.

'This is very careless!' he exclaimed fussily. 'Why have you come here
without a parcel of washing?'

'Washing?'

'Everybody who comes here brings washing. It looks as though they were
going to the laundry downstairs. Bring a good, large bundle next time. We
don't want the police on our tracks.'

This was even more conspiratorial than I had expected. Boris sat down
in the only vacant chair, and there was a great deal of talking in Russian.
Only the unshaven man talked; the surly one leaned against the wall with
his eyes on me, as though he still suspected me. It was queer, standing in
the little secret room with its revolutionary posters, listening to a
conversation of which I did not understand a word. The Russians talked
quickly and eagerly, with smiles and shrugs of the shoulders. I wondered
what it was all about. They would be calling each other 'little father', I
thought, and 'little dove', and 'Ivan Alexandrovitch', like the characters
in Russian novels. And the talk would be of revolutions. The unshaven man
would be saying firmly, 'We never argue. Controversy is a bourgeois
pastime. Deeds are our arguments.' Then I gathered that it was not this
exactly. Twenty francs was being demanded, for an entrance fee apparently,
and Boris was promising to pay it (we had just seventeen francs in the
world). Finally Boris produced our precious store of money and paid five
francs on account.

At this the surly man looked less suspicious, and sat down on the edge
of the table. The unshaven one began to question me in French, making notes
on a slip of paper. Was I a Communist? he asked. By sympathy, I answered; I
had never joined any organization. Did I understand the political situation
in England? Oh, of course, of course. I mentioned the names of various
Ministers, and made some contemptuous remarks about the Labour Party. And
what about LE SPORT? Could I do articles on LE SPORT? (Football and
Socialism have some mysterious connexion on the Continent.) Oh, of course,
again. Both men nodded gravely. The unshaven one said:

'EVIDEMMENT, you have a thorough knowledge of conditions in England.
Could you undertake to write a series of articles for a Moscow weekly
paper? We will give you the particulars.'

'Certainly.'

'Then, comrade, you will hear from us by the first post tomorrow. Or
possibly the second post. Our rate of pay is a hundred and fifty francs an
article. Remember to bring a parcel of washing next time you come.
AU REVOIR, comrade.'

We went downstairs, looked carefully out of the laundry to see if
there was anyone in the street, and slipped out. Boris was wild with joy.
In a sort of sacrificial ecstasy he rushed into the nearest tobacconist's
and spent fifty centimes on a cigar. He came out thumping his stick on the
pavement and beaming.

'At last! At last! Now, MON AMI, out fortune really is made. You took
them in finely. Did you hear him call you comrade? A hundred and fifty
francs an article--NOM DE DIEU, what luck!'

Next morning when I heard the postman I rushed down to the BISTRO for
my letter; to my disappointment, it had not come. I stayed at home for the
second post; still no letter. When three days had gone by and I had not
heard from the secret society, we gave up hope, deciding that they must
have found somebody else to do their articles.

Ten days later we made another visit to the office of the secret
society, taking care to bring a parcel that looked like washing. And the
secret society had vanished! The woman in the laundry knew nothing--she
simply said that 'CES MESSIEURS' had left some days ago, after trouble
about the rent. What fools we looked, standing there with our parcel! But
it was a consolation that we had paid only five francs instead of twenty.

And that was the last we ever heard of the secret society. Who or what
they really were, nobody knew. Personally I do not think they had anything
to do with the Communist Party; I think they were simply swindlers, who
preyed upon Russian refugees by extracting entrance fees to an imaginary
society. It was quite safe, and no doubt they are still doing it in some
other city. They were clever fellows, and played their part admirably.
Their office looked exactly as a secret Communist office should look, and
as for that touch about bringing a parcel of washing, it was genius.




IX



For three more days we continued traipsing about looking for work,
coming home for diminishing meals of soup and bread in my bedroom. There
were now two gleams of hope. In the first place, Boris had heard of a
possible job at the Hotel X, near the Place de la Concorde, and in the
second, the PATRON of the new restaurant in the rue du Commerce had at last
come back. We went down in the afternoon and saw him. On the way Boris
talked of the vast fortunes we should make if we got this job, and on the
importance of making a good impression on the PATRON.

'Appearance--appearance is everything, MON AMI. Give me a new suit
and I will borrow a thousand francs by dinner-time. What a pity I did not
buy a collar when we had money. I turned my collar inside out this morning;
but what is the use, one side is as dirty as the other. Do you think I look
hungry, MON AMI?'

'You look pale.'

'Curse it, what can one do on bread and potatoes? It is fatal to look
hungry. It makes people want to kick you. Wait.'

He stopped at a jeweller's window and smacked his cheeks sharply to
bring the blood into them. Then, before the flush had faded, we hurried
into the restaurant and introduced ourselves to the PATRON.

The PATRON was a short, fattish, very dignified man with wavy grey
hair, dressed in a smart, double-breasted flannel suit and smelling of
scent. Boris told me that he too was an ex-colonel of the Russian Army. His
wife was there too, a horrid, fat Frenchwoman with a dead-white face and
scarlet lips, reminding me of cold veal and tomatoes. The PATRON greeted
Boris genially, and they talked together in Russian for a few minutes. I
stood in the background, preparing to tell some big lies about my
experience as a dish-washer.

Then the PATRON came over towards me. I shuffled uneasily, trying to
look servile. Boris had rubbed it into me that a PLONGEUR is a slave's
slave, and I expected the PATRON. to treat me like dirt. To my
astonishment, he seized me warmly by the hand.

'So you are an Englishman!' he exclaimed. 'But how charming! I need
not ask, then, whether you are a golfer?'

'MAIS CERTAINEMENT,' I said, seeing that this was expected of me.

'All my life I have wanted to play golf. Will you, my dear MONSIEUR,
be so kind as to show me a few of the principal strokes?'

Apparently this was the Russian way of doing business. The PATRON
listened attentively while I explained the difference between a driver and
an iron, and then suddenly informed me that it was all ENTENDU; Boris was
to be MAITRE D'HOTEL when the restaurant opened, and I PLONGEUR, with a
chance of rising to lavatory attendant if trade was good. When would the
restaurant open? I asked. 'Exactly a fortnight from today,' the PATRON
answered grandly (he had a manner of waving his hand and flicking off his
cigarette ash at the same time, which looked very grand), 'exactly a
fortnight from today, in time for lunch.' Then, with obvious pride, he
showed us over the restaurant.

It was a smallish place, consisting of a bar, a dining-room, and a
kitchen no bigger than the average bathroom. The PATRON was decorating it
in a trumpery 'picturesque' style (he called it 'LE NORMAND'; it was a
matter of sham beams stuck on the plaster, and the like) and proposed to
call it the Auberge de Jehan Cottard, to give a medieval effect. He had a
leaflet printed, full of lies about the historical associations of the
quarter, and this leaflet actually claimed, among other things, that there
had once been an inn on the site of the restaurant which was frequented by
Charlemagne. The PATRON was very pleased with this touch. He was also
having the bar decorated with indecent pictures by an artist from the
Salon. Finally he gave us each an expensive cigarette, and after some more
talk he went home.

I felt strongly that we should never get any good from this
restaurant. The PATRON had looked to me like a cheat, and, what was worse,
an incompetent cheat, and I had seen two unmistakable duns hanging about
the back door. But Boris, seeing himself a MAITRE D'HOTEL once more, would
not be discouraged.

'We've brought it off--only a fortnight to hold out. What is a
fortnight? JE M'EN F----. To think that in only three weeks I shall have my
mistress! Will she be dark or fair, I wonder? I don't mind, so long as she
is not too thin.'

Two bad days followed. We had only sixty centimes left, and we spent
it on half a pound of bread, with a piece of garlic to rub it with. The
point of rubbing garlic on bread is that the taste lingers and gives one
the illusion of having fed recently. We sat most of that day in the Jardin
des Plantes. Boris had shots with stones at the tame pigeons, but always
missed them, and after that we wrote dinner menus on the backs of
envelopes. We were too hungry even to try and think of anything except
food. I remember the dinner Boris finally selected for himself. It was: a
dozen oysters, bortch soup (the red, sweet, beetroot soup with cream on
top), crayfishes, a young chicken en CASSEROLE, beef with stewed plums, new
potatoes, a salad, suet pudding and Roquefort cheese, with a litre of
Burgundy and some old brandy. Boris had international tastes in food. Later
on, when we were prosperous, I occasionally saw him eat meals almost as
large without difficulty.

When our money came to an end I stopped looking for work, and was
another day without food. I did not believe that the Auberge de Jehan
Cottard was really going to open, and I could see no other prospect, but I
was too lazy to do anything but lie in bed. Then the luck changed abruptly.
At night, at about ten o'clock, I heard an eager shout from the street. I
got up and went to the window. Boris was there, waving his stick and
beaming. Before speaking he dragged a bent loaf from his pocket and threw
it up to me.

'MON AMI, MON CHER AMI, we're saved! What do you think?'

'Surely you haven't got a job!'

'At the Hotel X, near the Place de la Concorde--five hundred francs
a month, and food. I have been working there today. Name of Jesus Christ,
how I have eaten!'

After ten or twelve hours' work, and with his game leg, his first
thought had been to walk three kilometres to my hotel and tell me the good
news! What was more, he told me to meet him in the Tuileries the next day
during his afternoon interval, in case he should be able to steal some food
for me. At the appointed time I met Boris on a public bench. He undid his
waistcoat and produced a large, crushed, newspaper packet; in it were some
minced veal, a wedge of Gamembert cheese, bread and an eclair, all jumbled
together.

'VOILA!' said Boris, 'that's all I could smuggle out for you. The
doorkeeper is a cunning swine.'

It is disagreeable to eat out of a newspaper on a public seat,
especially in the Tuileries, which are generally full of pretty girls, but
I was too hungry to care. While I ate, Boris explained that he was working
in the cafeterie of the hotel--that is, in English, the stillroom. It
appeared that the cafeterie was the very lowest post in the hotel, and a
dreadful come-down for a waiter, but it would do until the Auberge de Jehan
Gottard opened. Meanwhile I was to meet Boris every day in the Tuileries,
and he would smuggle out as much food as he dared. For three days we
continued with this arrangement, and I lived entirely on the stolen food.
Then all our troubles came to an end, for one of the PLONGEURS left the
Hotel X, and on Boris's recommendation I was given a job there myself.




X



The Hotel X was a vast, grandiose place with a classical facade, and
at one side a little, dark doorway like a rat-hole, which was the service
entrance. I arrived at a quarter to seven in the morning. A stream of men
with greasy trousers were hurrying in and being checked by a doorkeeper who
sat in a tiny office. I waited, and presently the CHEF DU PERSONNEL, a sort
of assistant manager, arrived and began to question me. He was an Italian,
with a round, pale face, haggard from overwork. He asked whether I was an
experienced dishwasher, and I said that I was; he glanced at my hands and
saw that I was lying, but on hearing that I was an Englishman he changed
his tone and engaged me.

'We have been looking for someone to practise our English on,' he
said. 'Our clients are all Americans, and the only English we know is----'
He repeated something that little boys write on the walls in London. 'You
may be useful. Come downstairs.'

He led me down a winding staircase into a narrow passage, deep
underground, and so low that I had to stoop in places. It was stiflingly
hot and very dark, with only dim, yellow bulbs several yards apart. There
seemed to be miles of dark labyrinthine passages--actually, I suppose, a
few hundred yards in all--that reminded one queerly of the lower decks of
a liner; there were the same heat and cramped space and warm reek of food,
and a humming, whirring noise (it came from the kitchen furnaces) just like
the whir of engines. We passed doorways which let out sometimes a shouting
of oaths, sometimes the red glare of a fire, once a shuddering draught from
an ice chamber. As we went along, something struck me violently in the
back. It was a hundred-pound block of ice, carried by a blue-aproned
porter. After him came a boy with a great slab of veal on his shoulder, his
cheek pressed into the damp, spongy flesh. They shoved me aside with a cry
of 'SAUVE-TOI, IDIOT!' and rushed on. On the wall, under one of the lights,
someone had written in a very neat hand: 'Sooner will you find a cloudless
sky in winter, than a woman at the Hotel X who has her maidenhead.' It
seemed a queer sort of place.

One of the passages branched off into a laundry, where an old,
skull-faced woman gave me a blue apron and a pile of dishcloths. Then the
CHEF DU PERSONNEL took me to a tiny underground den--a cellar below a
cellar, as it were--where there were a sink and some gas-ovens. It was
too low for me to stand quite upright, and the temperature was perhaps 110
degrees Fahrenheit. The CHEF DU PERSONNEL explained that my job was to
fetch meals for the higher hotel employees, who fed in a small dining-room
above, clean their room and wash their crockery. When he had gone, a
waiter, another Italian, thrust a fierce, fuzzy head into the doorway and
looked down at me.

'English, eh?' he said. 'Well, I'm in charge here. If you work well'
--he made the motion of up-ending a bottle and sucked noisily. 'If you
don't'--he gave the doorpost several vigorous kicks. 'To me, twisting
your neck would be no more than spitting on the floor. And if there's any
trouble, they'll believe me, not you. So be careful.'

After this I set to work rather hurriedly. Except for about an hour, I
was at work from seven in the morning till a quarter past nine at night;
first at washing crockery, then at scrubbing the tables and floors of the
employees' dining-room, then at polishing glasses and knives, then at
fetching meals, then at washing crockery again, then at fetching more meals
and washing more crockery. It was easy work, and I got on well with it
except when I went to the kitchen to fetch meals. The kitchen was like
nothing I had ever seen or imagined--a stifling, low-ceilinged inferno of
a cellar, red-lit from the fires, and deafening with oaths and the clanging
of pots and pans. It was so hot that all the metal-work except the stoves
had to be covered with cloth. In the middle were furnaces, where twelve
cooks skipped to and fro, their faces dripping sweat in spite of their
white caps. Round that were counters where a mob of waiters and PLONGEURS
clamoured with trays. Scullions, naked to the waist, were stoking the fires
and scouring huge copper saucepans with sand. Everyone seemed to be in a
hurry and a rage. The head cook, a fine, scarlet man with big moustachios,
stood in the middle booming continuously, 'CA MARCHE DEUX AUFS BROUILLES!
CA MARCHE UN CHATEAUBRIAND AUX POMMES SAUTEES!' except when he broke off to
curse at a PLONGEUR. There were three counters, and the first time I went
to the kitchen I took my tray unknowingly to the wrong one. The head cook
walked up to me, twisted his moustaches, and looked me up and down. Then he
beckoned to the breakfast cook and pointed at me.

'Do you see THAT? That is the type of PLONGEUR they send us nowadays.
Where do you come from, idiot? From Charenton, I suppose?' (There is a
large lunatic asylum at Charenton.)

'From England,' I said.

'I might have known it. Well, MAN CHER MONSIEUR L'ANGLAIS, may I
inform you that you are the son of a whore? And now--the camp to the
other counter, where you belong.'

I got this kind of reception every time I went to the kitchen, for I
always made some mistake; I was expected to know the work, and was cursed
accordingly. From curiosity I counted the number of times I was called
MAQUEREAU during the day, and it was thirty-nine.

At half past four the Italian told me that I could stop working, but
that it was not worth going out, as we began at five. I went to the
lavatory for a smoke; smoking was strictly forbidden, and Boris had warned
me that the lavatory was the only safe place. After that I worked again
till a quarter past nine, when the waiter put his head into the doorway and
told me to leave the rest of the crockery. To my astonishment, after
calling me pig, mackerel, etc., all day, he had suddenly grown quite
friendly. I realized that the curses I had met with were only a kind of
probation.

'That'll do, MAN P'TIT,' said the waiter. 'TU N'ES PAS DEBROUILLARD,
but you work all right. Come up and have your dinner. The hotel allows us
two litres of wine each, and I've stolen another bottle. We'll have a fine
booze.'

We had an excellent dinner from the leavings of the higher employees.
The waiter, grown mellow, told me stories about his love-affairs, and about
two men whom he had stabbed in Italy, and about how he had dodged Us
military service. He was a good fellow when one got to know him; he
reminded me of Benvenuto Cellini, somehow. I was tired and drenched with
sweat, but I felt a new man after a day's solid food. The work did not seem
difficult, and I felt that this job would suit me. It was not certain,
however, that it would continue, for I had been engaged as an 'extra' for
the day only, at twenty-five francs. The sour-faced doorkeeper counted out
the money, less fifty centimes which he said was for insurance (a lie, I
discovered afterwards). Then he stepped out into the passage, made me take
off my coat, and carefully prodded me all over, searching for stolen food.
After this the CHEF DU PERSONNEL appeared and spoke to me. Like the waiter,
he had grown more genial on seeing that I was willing to work.

'We will give you a permanent job if you like,' he said. 'The head
waiter says he would enjoy calling an Englishman names. Will you sign on
for a month?'

Here was a job at last, and I was ready to jump at it. Then I
remembered the Russian restaurant, due to open in a fortnight. It seemed
hardly fair to promise working a month, and then leave in the middle. I
said that I had other work in prospect--could I be engaged for a
fortnight? But at that the CHEF DU PERSONNEL shrugged his shoulders and
said that the hotel only engaged men by the month. Evidently I had lost my
chance of a job.

Boris, by arrangement, was waiting for me in the Arcade of the Rue de
Rivoli. When I told him what had happened, he was furious. For the first
time since I had known him he forgot his manners and called me a fool.

'Idiot! Species of idiot! What's the good of my finding you a job when
you go and chuck it up the next moment? How could you be such a fool as to
mention the other restaurant? You'd only to promise you would work for a
month.'

'It seemed more honest to say I might have to leave,' I objected.

'Honest! Honest! Who ever heard of a PLONGEUR being honest? MON AMI'
--suddenly he seized my lapel and spoke very earnestly--'MON AMI, you
have worked here all day. You see what hotel work is like. Do you think a
PLONGEUR can afford a sense of honour?'

'No, perhaps not.'

'Well, then, go back quickly and tell the CHEF DU PERSONNEL you are
quite ready to work for a month. Say you will throw the other job over.
Then, when our restaurant opens, we have only to walk out.'

'But what about my wages if I break my contract?

'Boris banged his stick on the pavement and cried out at such
stupidity. 'Ask to be paid by the day, then you won't lose a sou. Do you
suppose they would prosecute a PLONGEUR for breaking Us contract? A
PLONGEUR is too low to be prosecuted.'

I hurried back, found the CHEF DU PERSONNEL, and told him that I would
work for a month, whereat he signed me on. Ibis was my first lesson in
PLONGEUR morality. Later I realized how foolish it had been to have any
scruples, for the big hotels are quite merciless towards their employees.
They engage or discharge men as the work demands, and they all sack ten per
cent or more of their staff when the season is over. Nor have they any
difficulty in replacing a man who leaves at short notice, for Paris is
thronged by hotel employees out of work.




XI



As it turned out, I did not break my contract, for it was six weeks
before the Auberge de Jehan Cottard even showed signs of opening. In the
meantime I worked at the Hotel X, four days a week in the cafeterie, one
day helping the waiter on the fourth floor, and one day replacing the woman
who washed up for the dining-room. My day off, luckily, was Sunday, but
sometimes another man was ill and I had to work that day as well. The hours
were from seven in the morning till two in the afternoon, and from five in
the evening till nine--eleven hours; but it was a fourteen-hour day when
I washed up for the dining-room. By the ordinary standards of a Paris
PLONGEUR, these are exceptionally short hours. The only hardship of life
was the fearful heat and stuffiness of these labyrinthine cellars. Apart
from this the hotel, which was large and well organized, was considered a
comfortable one.

Our cafeterie was a murky cellar measuring twenty feet by seven by
eight high, and so crowded with coffee-urns, breadcutters and the like that
one could hardly move without banging against something. It was lighted by
one dim electric bulb, and four or five gas-fires that sent out a fierce
red breath. There was a thermometer there, and the temperature never fell
below 110 degrees Fahrenheit--it neared 130 at some times of the day. At
one end were five service lifts, and at the other an ice cupboard where we
stored milk and butter. When you went into the ice cupboard you dropped a
hundred degrees of temperature at a single step; it used to remind me of
the hymn about Greenland's icy mountains and India's coral strand. Two men
worked in the cafeterie besides Boris and myself. One was Mario, a huge,
excitable Italian--he was like a city policeman with operatic gestures--
and the other, a hairy, uncouth animal whom we called the Magyar; I think
he was a Transylvanian, or something even more remote. Except the Magyar we
were all big men, and at the rush hours we collided incessantly.

The work in the cafeterie was spasmodic. We were never idle, but the
real work only came in bursts of two hours at a time--we called each
burst 'UN COUP DE FEU'. The first COUP DE FEU came at eight, when the
guests upstairs began to wake up and demand breakfast. At eight a sudden
banging and yelling would break out all through the basement; bells rang on
all sides, blue-aproned men rushed through the passages, our service lifts
came down with a simultaneous crash, and the waiters on all five floors
began shouting Italian oaths down the shafts. I don't remember all our
duties, but they included making tea, coffee and chocolate, fetching meals
from the kitchen, wines from the cellar and fruit and so forth from the
dining-room, slicing bread, making toast, rolling pats of butter, measuring
jam, opening milk-cans, counting lumps of sugar, boiling eggs, cooking
porridge, pounding ice, grinding coffee--all this for from a hundred to
two hundred customers. The kitchen was thirty yards away, and the
dining-room sixty or seventy yards. Everything we sent up in the service
lifts had to be covered by a voucher, and the vouchers had to be carefully
filed, and there was trouble if even a lump of sugar was lost. Besides
this, we had to supply the staff with bread and coffee, and fetch the meals
for the waiters upstairs. All in all, it was a complicated job.

I calculated that one had to walk and run about fifteen miles during
the day, and yet the strain of the work was more mental than physical.
Nothing could be easier, on the face of it, than this stupid scullion work,
but it is astonishingly hard when one is in a hurry. One has to leap to and
fro between a multitude of jobs--it is like sorting a pack of cards
against the clock. You are, for example, making toast, when bang! down
comes a service lift with an order for tea, rolls and three different kinds
of jam, and simultaneously bang! down comes another demanding scrambled
eggs, coffee and grapefruit; you run to the kitchen for the eggs and to the
dining-room for the fruit, going like lightning so as to be back before
your toast bums, and having to remember about the tea and coffee, besides
half a dozen other orders that are still pending; and at the same time some
waiter is following you and making trouble about a lost bottle of
soda-water, and you are arguing with him. It needs more brains than one
might think. Mario said, no doubt truly, that it took a year to make a
reliable cafetier.

The time between eight and half past ten was a sort of delirium.
Sometimes we were going as though we had only five minutes to live;
sometimes there were sudden lulls when the orders stopped and everything
seemed quiet for a moment. Then we swept up the litter from the floor,
threw down fresh sawdust, and swallowed gallipots of wine or coffee or
water--anything, so long as it was wet. Very often we used to break off
chunks of ice and suck them while we worked. The heat among the gas-fires
was nauseating; we swallowed quarts of drink during the day, and after a
few hours even our aprons were drenched with sweat. At times we were
hopelessly behind with the work, and some of the customers would have gone
without their breakfast, but Mario always pulled us through. He had worked
fourteen years in the cafeterie, and he had the skill that never wastes a
second between jobs. The Magyar was very stupid and I was inexperienced,
and Boris was inclined to shirk, partly because of his lame leg, partly
because he was ashamed of working in the cafeterie after being a waiter;
but Mario was wonderful. The way he would stretch his great arms right
across the cafeterie to fill a coffee-pot with one hand and boil an egg
with the other, at the same time watching toast and shouting directions to
the Magyar, and between whiles singing snatches from RIGOLETTO, was beyond
all praise. The PATRON knew his value, and he was paid a thousand francs a
month, instead of five hundred like the rest of us.

The breakfast pandemonium stopped at half past ten. Then we scrubbed
the cafeterie tables, swept the floor and polished the brasswork, and, on
good mornings, went one at a time to the lavatory for a smoke. This was our
slack time--only relatively slack, however, for we had only ten minutes
for lunch, and we never got through it uninterrupted. The customers'
luncheon hour, between twelve and two, was another period of turmoil like
the breakfast hour. Most of our work was fetching meals from the kitchen,
which meant constant ENGUEULADES from the cooks. By this time the cooks had
sweated in front of their furnaces for four or five hours, and their
tempers were all warmed up.

At two we were suddenly free men. We threw off our aprons and put on
our coats, hurried out of doors, and, when we had money, dived into the
nearest BISTRO. It was strange, coming up into the street from those
firelit cellars. The air seemed blindingly clear and cold, like arctic
summer; and how sweet the petrol did smell, after the stenches of sweat and
food! Sometimes we met some of our cooks and waiters in the BISTROS, and
they were friendly and stood us drinks. Indoors we were their slaves, but
it is an etiquette in hotel life that between hours everyone is equal, and
the ENGUEULADES do not count.

At a quarter to five we went back to the hotel. Till half-past six
there were no orders, and we used this time to polish silver, clean out the
coffee-urns, and do other odd jobs. Then the grand turmoil of the day
started--the dinner hour. I wish I could be Zola for a little while, just
to describe that dinner hour. The essence of the situation was that a
hundred or two hundred people were demanding individually different meals
of five or six courses, and that fifty or sixty people had to cook and
serve them and clean up the mess afterwards; anyone with experience of
catering will know what that means. And at this time when the work was
doubled, the whole staff was tired out, and a number of them were drunk. I
could write pages about the scene without giving a true idea of it. The
chargings to and fro in the narrow passages, the collisions, the yells, the
struggling with crates and trays and blocks of ice, the heat, the darkness,
the furious festering quarrels which there was no time to fight out--they
pass description. Anyone coming into the basement for the first time would
have thought himself in a den of maniacs. It was only later, when I
understood the working of a hotel, that I saw order in all this chaos.

At half past eight the work stopped very suddenly. We were not free
till nine, but we used to throw ourselves full length on the floor, and lie
there resting our legs, too lazy even to go to the ice cupboard for a
drink. Sometimes the CHEF DU PERSONNEL would come in with bottles of beer,
for the hotel stood us an extra beer when we had had a hard day. The food
we were given was no more than eatable, but the PATRON was not mean about
drink; he allowed us two litres of wine a day each, knowing that if a
PLONGEUR is not given two litres he will steal three. We had the heeltaps
of bottles as well, so that we often drank too much--a good thing, for
one seemed to work faster when partially drunk.

Four days of the week passed like this; of the other two working days,
one was better and one worse. After a week of this life I felt in need of a
holiday. It was Saturday night, so the people in our BISTRO were busy
getting drunk, and with a free day ahead of me I was ready to join them. We
all went to bed, drunk, at two in the morning, meaning to sleep till noon.
At half past five I was suddenly awakened. A night-watchman, sent from the
hotel, was standing at my bedside. He stripped the clothes back and shook
me roughly.

'Get up!' he said. 'TU T'ES BIEN SAOULE LA GNEULE, EH? Well, never
mind that, the hotel's a man short. You've got to work today.'

'Why should I work?' I protested. 'This is my day off.'

'Day off, nothing! The work's got to be done. Get up!'

I got up and went out, feeling as though my back were broken and my
skull filled with hot cinders. I did not think that I could possibly do a
day's work. And yet, after only an hour in the basement, I found that I was
perfectly well. It seemed that in the heat of those cellars, as in a
turkish bath, one could sweat out almost any quantity of drink. PLONGEURS
know this, and count on it. The power of swallowing quarts of wine, and
then sweating it out before it can do much damage, is one of the
compensations of their life.




XII



By far my best time at the hotel was when I went to help the waiter on
the fourth floor. We worked in a small pantry which communicated with the
cafeterie by service lifts. It was delightfully cool after the cellars, and
the work was chiefly polishing silver and glasses, which is a humane job.
Valenti, the waiter, was a decent sort, and treated me almost as an equal
when we were alone, though he had to speak roughly when there was anyone
else present, for it does not do for a waiter to be friendly with
PLONGEURS. He used sometimes to tip me five francs when he had had a good
day. He was a comely youth, aged twenty-four but looking eighteen, and,
like most waiters, he carried himself well and knew how to wear his
clothes. With his black tail-coat and white tie, fresh face and sleek brown
hair, he looked just like an Eton boy; yet he had earned his living since
he was twelve, and worked his way up literally from the gutter. Grossing
the Italian frontier without a passport, and selling chestnuts from a
barrow on the northern boulevards, and being given fifty days' imprisonment
in London for working without a permit, and being made love to by a rich
old woman in a hotel, who gave him a diamond ring and afterwards accused
him of stealing it, were among his experiences. I used to enjoy talking to
him, at slack times when we sat smoking down the lift shaft.

My bad day was when I washed up for the dining-room. I had not to wash
the plates, which were done in the kitchen, but only the other crockery,
silver, knives and glasses; yet, even so, it meant thirteen hours' work,
and I used between thirty and forty dishcloths during the day. The
antiquated methods used in France double the work of washing up.
Plate-racks are unheard-of, and there are no soap-flakes, only the treacly
soft soap, which refuses to lather in the hard, Paris water. I worked in a
dirty, crowded little den, a pantry and scullery combined, which gave
straight on the dining-room. Besides washing up, I had to fetch the
waiters' food and serve them at table; most of them were intolerably
insolent, and I had to use my fists more than once to get common civility.
The person who normally washed up was a woman, and they made her life a
misery.

It was amusing to look round the filthy little scullery and think that
only a double door was between us and the dining-room. There sat the
customers in all their splendour--spotless table-cloths, bowls of
flowers, mirrors and gilt cornices and painted cherubim; and here, just a
few feet away, we in our disgusting filth. For it really was disgusting
filth. There was no time to sweep the floor till evening, and we slithered
about in a compound of soapy water, lettuce-leaves, torn paper and trampled
food. A dozen waiters with their coats off, showing their sweaty armpits,
sat at the table mixing salads and sticking their thumbs into the cream
pots. The room had a dirty, mixed smell of food and sweat. Everywhere in
the cupboards, behind the piles of crockery, were squalid stores of food
that the waiters had stolen. There were only two sinks, and no washing
basin, and it was nothing unusual for a waiter to wash his face in the
water in which clean crockery was rinsing. But the customers saw nothing of
this. There were a coco-nut mat and a mirror outside the dining-room door,
and the waiters used to preen themselves up and go in looking the picture
of cleanliness.

It is an instructive sight to see a waiter going into a hotel
dining-room. As he passes the door a sudden change comes over him. The set
of his shoulders alters; all the dirt and hurry and irritation have dropped
off in an instant. He glides over the carpet, with a solemn priest-like
air. I remember our assistant MAITRE D'HOTEL, a fiery Italian, pausing at
the dining-room door to address an apprentice who had broken a bottle of
wine. Shaking his fist above his head he yelled (luckily the door was more
or less soundproof):

'TU ME FAIS--Do you call yourself a waiter, you young bastard? You a
waiter! You're not fit to scrub floors in the brothel your mother came
from. MAQUEREAU!'

Words failing him, he turned to the door; and as he opened it he
delivered a final insult in the same manner as Squire Western in TOM JONES.

Then he entered the dining-room and sailed across it dish in hand,
graceful as a swan. Ten seconds later he was bowing reverently to a
customer. And you could not help thinking, as you saw him bow and smile,
with that benign smile of the trained waiter, that the customer was put to
shame by having such an aristocrat to serve him.

This washing up was a thoroughly odious job--not hard, but boring
and silly beyond words. It is dreadful to think that some people spend
their whole decades at such occupations. The woman whom I replaced was
quite sixty years old, and she stood at the sink thirteen hours a day, six
days a week, the year round; she was, in addition, horribly bullied by the
waiters. She gave out that she had once been an actress--actually, I
imagine, a prostitute; most prostitutes end as charwomen. It was strange to
see that in spite of her age and her life she still wore a bright blonde
wig, and darkened her eyes and painted her face like a girl of twenty. So
apparently even a seventy-eight-hour week can leave one with some vitality.




XIII



On my third day at the hotel the CHEF DU PERSONNEL, who had generally
spoken to me in quite a pleasant tone, called me up and said sharply:

'Here, you, shave that moustache off at once! NOM DE DIEU, who ever
heard of a PLONGEUR with a moustache?'

I began to protest, but he cut me short. 'A PLONGEUR with a moustache
--nonsense! Take care I don't see you with it tomorrow.'

On the way home I asked Boris what this meant. He shrugged his
shoulders. 'You must do what he says, MON AMI. No one in the hotel wears a
moustache, except the cooks. I should have thought you would have noticed
it. Reason? There is no reason. It is the custom.'

I saw that it was an etiquette, like not wearing a white tie with a
dinner-jacket, and shaved off my moustache. Afterwards I found out the
explanation of the custom, which is this: waiters in good hotels do not
wear moustaches, and to show their superiority they decree that PLONGEURS
shall not wear them either; and the cooks wear their moustaches to show
their contempt for the waiters.

This gives some idea of the elaborate caste system existing in a
hotel. Our staff, amounting to about a hundred and ten, had their prestige
graded as accurately as that of soldiers, and a cook or waiter was as much
above a PLONGEUR as a captain above a private. Highest of all came the
manager, who could sack anybody, even the cooks. We never saw the PATRON,
and all we knew of him was that his meals had to be prepared more carefully
than that of the customers; all the discipline of the hotel depended on the
manager. He was a conscientious man, and always on the lookout for
slackness, but we were too clever for him. A system of service bells ran
through the hotel, and the whole staff used these for signalling to one
another. A long ring and a short ring, followed by two more long rings,
meant that the manager was coming, and when we heard it we took care to
look busy.

Below the manager came the MAITRE D'HOTEL. He did not serve at table,
unless to a lord or someone of that kind, but directed the other waiters
and helped with the catering. His tips, and his bonus from the champagne
companies (it was two francs for each cork he returned to them), came to
two hundred francs a day. He was in a position quite apart from the rest of
the staff, and took his meals in a private room, with silver on the table
and two apprentices in clean white jackets to serve him. A little below the
head waiter came the head cook, drawing about five thousand francs a month;
he dined in the kitchen, but at a separate table, and one of the apprentice
cooks waited on him. Then came the CHEF DU PERSONNEL; he drew only fifteen
hundred francs a month, but he wore a black coat and did no manual work,
and he could sack PLONGEURS and fine waiters. Then came the other cooks,
drawing anything between three thousand and seven hundred and fifty ^
francs a month; then the waiters, making about seventy francs a day in
tips, besides a small retaining fee; then the laundresses and sewing women;
then the apprentice waiters, who received no tips, but were paid seven
hundred and fifty francs a month; then the PLONGEURS, also at seven hundred
and fifty francs; then the chambermaids, at five or six hundred francs a
month; and lastly the cafetiers, at five hundred a month. We of the
cafeterie were the very dregs of the hotel, despised and TUTOIED by
everyone.

There were various others--the office employees, called generally
couriers, the storekeeper, the cellarman, some porters and pages, the ice
man, the bakers, the night-watchman, the doorkeeper. Different jobs were
done by different races. The office employees and the cooks and
sewing-women were French, the waiters Italians and Germans (there is hardly
such a thing as a French waiter in Paris), the PLONGEURS of every race in
Europe, beside Arabs and Negroes. French was the lingua franca, even the
Italians speaking it to one another.

All the departments had their special perquisites. In all Paris hotels
it is the custom to sell the broken bread to bakers for eight sous a pound,
and the kitchen scraps to pigkeepers for a trifle, and to divide the
proceeds of this among the PLONGEURS. There was much pilfering, too. The
waiters all stole food--in fact, I seldom saw a waiter trouble to eat the
rations provided for him by the hotel--and the cooks did it on a larger
scale in the kitchen, and we in the cafeterie swilled illicit tea and
coffee. The cellarman stole brandy. By a rule of the hotel the waiters were
not allowed to keep stores of spirits, but had to go to the cellarman for
each drink as it was ordered. As the cellarman poured out the drinks he
would set aside perhaps a teaspoonful from each glass, and he amassed
quantities in this way. He would sell you the stolen brandy for five sous a
swig if he thought he could trust you.

There were thieves among the staff, and if you left money in your coat
pockets it was generally taken. The doorkeeper, who paid our wages and
searched us for stolen food, was the greatest thief in the hotel. Out of my
five hundred francs a month, this man actually managed to cheat me of a
hundred and fourteen francs in six weeks. I had asked to be paid daily, so
the doorkeeper paid me sixteen francs each evening, and, by not paying for
Sundays (for which of course payment was due), pocketed sixty-four francs.
Also, I sometimes worked on a Sunday, for which, though I did not know it,
I was entitled to an extra twenty-five francs. The doorkeeper never paid me
this either, and so made away with another seventy-five francs. I only
realized during my last week that I was being cheated, and, as I could
prove nothing, only twenty-five francs were refunded. The doorkeeper played
similar tricks on any employee who was fool enough to be taken in. He
called himself a Greek, but in reality he was an Armenian. After knowing
him I saw the force of the proverb 'Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew
before a Greek, but don't trust an Armenian.'

There were queer characters among the waiters. One was a gentleman--
a youth who had been educated at a university, and had had a well-paid job
in a business office. He had caught a venereal disease, lost his job,
drifted, and now considered himself lucky to be a waiter. Many of the
waiters had slipped into France without passports, and one or two of them
were spies--it is a common profession for a spy to adopt. One day there
was a fearful row in the waiters' dining-room between Morandi, a
dangerous-looking man with eyes set too far apart, and another Italian. It
appeared that Morandi had taken the other man's mistress. The other man, a
weakling and obviously frightened of Morandi, was threatening vaguely.

Morandi jeered at him. 'Well, what are you going to do about it? I've
slept with your girl, slept with her three times. It was fine. What can you
do, eh?'

'I can denounce you to the secret police. You are an Italian spy.'

Morandi did not deny it. He simply produced a razor from his tail
pocket and made two swift strokes in the air, as though slashing a man's
cheeks open. Whereat the other waiter took it back.

The queerest type I ever saw in the hotel was an 'extra'. He had been
engaged at twenty-five francs for the day to replace the Magyar, who was
ill. He was a Serbian, a thick-set nimble fellow of about twenty-five,
speaking six languages, including English. He seemed to know all about
hotel work, and up till midday he worked like a slave. Then, as soon as it
had struck twelve, he turned sulky, shirked Us work, stole wine, and
finally crowned all by loafing about openly with a pipe in his mouth.
Smoking, of course, was forbidden under severe penalties. The manager
himself heard of it and came down to interview the Serbian, fuming with
rage.

'What the devil do you mean by smoking here?' he cried.

'What the devil do you mean by having a face like that?' answered the
Serbian, calmly.

I cannot convey the blasphemy of such a remark. The head cook, if a
PLONGEUR had spoken to him like that, would have thrown a saucepan of hot
soup in his face. The manager said instantly, 'You're sacked!' and at two
o'clock the Serbian was given his twenty-five francs and duly sacked.
Before he went out Boris asked him in Russian what game he was playing. He
said the Serbian answered:

'Look here, MON VIEUX, they've got to pay me a day's wages if I work
up to midday, haven't they? That's the law. And where's the sense of
working after I get my wages? So I'll tell you what I do. I go to a hotel
and get a job as an extra, and up to midday I work hard. Then, the moment
it's struck twelve, I start raising such hell that they've no choice but to
sack me. Neat, eh? Most days I'm sacked by half past twelve; today it was
two o'clock; but I don't care, I've saved four hours' work. The only
trouble is, one can't do it at the same hotel twice.'

It appeared that he had played this game at half the hotels and
restaurants in Paris. It is probably quite an easy game to play during the
summer, though the hotels protect themselves against it as well as they can
by means of a black list.




XIV



In a few days I had grasped the main principles on which the hotel was
run. The thing that would astonish anyone coming for the first time into
the service quarters of a hotel would be the fearful noise and disorder
during the rush hours. It is something so different from the steady work in
a shop or a factory that it looks at first sight like mere bad management.
But it is really quite unavoidable, and for this reason. Hotel work is not
particularly hard, but by its nature it comes in rushes and cannot be
economized. You cannot, for instance, grill a steak two hours before it is
wanted; you have to wait till the last moment, by which time a mass of
other work has accumulated, and then do it all together, in frantic haste.
The result is that at mealtimes everyone is doing two men's work, which is
impossible without noise and quarrelling. Indeed the quarrels are a
necessary part of the process, for the pace would never be kept up if
everyone did not accuse everyone else of idling. It was for this reason
that during the rush hours the whole staff raged and cursed like demons. At
those times there was scarcely a verb in the hotel except FOUTRE. A girl in
the bakery, aged sixteen, used oaths that would have defeated a cabman.
(Did not Hamlet say 'cursing like a scullion'? No doubt Shakespeare had
watched scullions at work.) But we are not losing our heads and wasting
time; we were just stimulating one another for the effort of packing four
hours' work into two hours.

What keeps a hotel going is the fact that the employees take a genuine
pride in their work, beastly and silly though it is. If a man idles, the
others soon find him out, and conspire against him to get him sacked.
Cooks, waiters and PLONGEURS differ greatly in outlook, but they are all
alike in being proud of their efficiency.

Undoubtedly the most workmanlike class, and the least servile, are the
cooks. They do not earn quite so much as waiters, but their prestige is
higher and their employment steadier. The cook does not look upon himself
as a servant, but as a skilled workman; he is generally called 'UN OUVRIER'
which a waiter never is. He knows his power--knows that he alone makes or
mars a restaurant, and that if he is five minutes late everything is out of
gear. He despises the whole non-cooking staff, and makes it a point of
honour to insult everyone below the head waiter. And he takes a genuine
artistic pride in his work, which demands very great skill. It is not the
cooking that is so difficult, but the doing everything to time. Between
breakfast and luncheon the head cook at the Hotel X would receive orders
for several hundred dishes, all to be served at different times; he cooked
few of them himself, but he gave instructions about all of them and
inspected them before they were sent up. His memory was wonderful. The
vouchers were pinned on a board, but the head cook seldom looked at them;
everything was stored in his mind, and exactly to the minute, as each dish
fell due, he would call out, 'FAITES MARCHER UNE COTELETTE DE VEAU' (or
whatever it was) unfailingly. He was an insufferable bully, but he was also
an artist. It is for their punctuality, and not for any superiority in
technique, that men cooks arc preferred to women.

The waiter's outlook is quite different. He too is proud in a way of
his skill, but his skill is chiefly in being servile. His work gives him
the mentality, not of a workman, but of a snob. He lives perpetually in
sight of rich people, stands at their tables, listens to their
conversation, sucks up to them with smiles and discreet little jokes. He
has the pleasure of spending money by proxy. Moreover, there is always the
chance that he may become rich himself, for, though most waiters die poor,
they have long runs of luck occasionally. At some cafes on the Grand
Boulevard there is so much money to be made that the waiters actually pay
the PATRON for their employment. The result is that between constantly
seeing money, and hoping to get it, the waiter comes to identify himself to
some extent with his employers. He will take pains to serve a meal in
style, because he feels that he is participating in the meal himself.

I remember Valenti telling me of some banquet at Nice at which he had
once served, and of how it cost two hundred thousand francs and was talked
of for months afterwards. 'It was splendid, MON P'TIT, MAIS MAGNIFIQUE!
Jesus Christ! The champagne, the silver, the orchids--I have never seen
anything like them, and I have seen some things. Ah, it was glorious!'

'But,' Isaid, 'you were only there to wait?'

'Oh, of course. But still, it was splendid.'

The moral is, never be sorry for a waiter. Sometimes when you sit in a
restaurant, still stuffing yourself half an hour after closing time, you
feel that the tired waiter at your side must surely be despising you. But
he is not. He is not thinking as he looks at you, 'What an overfed lout';
he is thinking, 'One day, when I have saved enou