Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell

and a rage. The head cook, a fine, scarlet man with big

moustachios, stood in the middle booming

continuously, «

Ça marche deux ouefs brouillés!

Ca marche

un Chateau-briand aux pommes sautées!

» 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,

mon 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 ex-

pected 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 again 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 realised that the curses I had met with

were only a kind of probation.

   "That'll do,

mon p'tit," said the waiter. «

Tu n'es pas

débrouillard

, 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

his 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 his 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. This was my first lesson in

plongeur morality.

Later I realised 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 Hôtel X., four days a week in the cafe-

terie, 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 organised, 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 11o

degrees Fahrenheit-it neared 13o 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 defeu."

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 burns, and having to re-

member 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