Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell

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-any-

thing, 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 our-

selves 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 saoulé la gueule, eh?

Well, never mind that, the hotel's a man short. You've

got to work to-day."

   "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. Crossing 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 diningroom.

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 diningroom.

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'hôtel, 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