Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell

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 economised. 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 meal-

times 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 reaon 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 em-

ployees 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 lun-

cheon the head cook at the Hôtel 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 côtelette de veau » (or

whatever it was) unfailingly. He was an insufferable

bully, but he was also an artist. It is for their punctu-

ality, and not for any superiority in technique, that men

cooks are 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 conver

sation, 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 cafés

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, " I said, "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

enough money, I shall be able to imitate that man." He is

ministering to a kind of pleasure he thoroughly

understands and admires. And that is why waiters are

seldom Socialists, have no effective trade union, and

will work twelve hours a day-they work fifteen hours,

seven days a week, in many cafés. They are snobs, and

they find the servile nature of their work rather con-

genial.

   The

plongeurs, again, have a different outlook. Theirs

is a job which offers no prospects, is intensely exhaust-

ing, and at the same time has not a trace of skill or

interest; the sort of job that would always be done by

women if women were strong enough. All that is re-

quired of them is to be constantly on the run, and to put

up with long hours and a stuffy atmosphere. They have

no way of escaping from this life, for they cannot save a

penny from their wages, and working from sixty to a

hundred hours a week leaves them no time to train for

anything else. The best they can hope for is to find a

slightly softer job as night-watchman or lavatory

attendant.

   And yet the

plongeurs, low as they are, also have a

kind of pride. It is the pride of the drudge-the man who

is equal to no matter what quantity of work. At that

level, the mere power to go on working like an ox is

about the only virtue attainable.

Débrouillard is what

every plongeur wants to be called. A

débrouillard is a man

who, even when he is told to do the impossible, will

se

débrouille

r-get it done somehow. One of the kitchen

plongeurs at the Hôtel X., a German, was well known as

a

débrouillard. One night an English lord came to the

hotel, and the waiters were in despair, for the lord had

asked for peaches, and there were none in stock; it was

late at night, and the shops would be shut. "Leave it to

me," said the German. He went out, and in ten minutes

he was back with four peaches. He had gone into a

neighbouring restaurant and stolen them. That is what is

meant by a

débrouillard. The English lord paid for the

peaches at twenty francs each.

   Mario, who was in charge of the cafeterie, had the

typical drudge mentality. All he thought of was getting

through the «

boulot, » and he defied you to give him

too much of it. Fourteen years underground had

left him with about as much natural laziness as a piston

rod. «

Faut étre dur, » he used to say when anyone

complained. You will often hear plongeurs boast, «

Je suis

dur

"-as though they were soldiers, not male charwomen.

   Thus everyone in the hotel had his sense of honour,

and when the press of work came we were all ready for a

grand concerted effort to get through it. The constant

war between the different departments also made for

efficiency, for everyone clung to his own privileges and

tried to stop the others idling and pilfering.

   This is the good side of hotel work. In a hotel a huge

and complicated machine is kept running by an inade-

quate staff, because every man has a well-defined job

and does it scrupulously. But there is a weak point, and

it is this-that the job the staff are doing is not necessarily

what the customer pays for. The customer pays, as he

sees it, for good service; the employee is paid, as he sees

it, for the boulot-meaning, as a rule, an imitation of good

service. The result is that, though hotels are miracles of

punctuality, they are worse than the worst private houses

in the things that matter.

   Take cleanliness, for example. The dirt in the Hôtel

X., as soon as one penetrated into the service quarters,

was revolting. Our cafeterie had year-old filth in all the

dark corners, and the bread-bin was infested with cock-

roaches. Once I suggested killing these beasts to Mario.

"Why kill the poor animals?" he said reproachfully. The

others laughed when I wanted to wash my hands before

touching the butter. Yet we were clean where we

recognised cleanliness as part of the boulot. We

scrubbed the tables and polished the brasswork regu-

larly, because we had orders to do that; but we had no

orders to be genuinely clean, and in any case we had no

time for it. We were simply carrying out our duties;

and as our first duty was punctuality, we saved time by

being dirty.

   In the kitchen the dirt was worse. It is not a figure of

speech, it is a mere statement of fact to say that a

French cook will spit in the soup-that is, if he is not

going to drink it himself. He is an artist, but his art is

not cleanliness. To a certain extent he is even dirty

because he is an artist, for food, to look smart, needs

dirty treatment. When a steak, for instance, is brought

up for the head cook's inspection, he does not handle it

with a fork. He picks it up in his fingers and slaps it

down, runs his thumb round the dish and licks it to

taste the gravy, runs it round and licks again, then

steps back and contemplates the piece of meat like an

artist judging a picture, then presses it lovingly into

place with his fat, pink fingers, every one of which he

has licked a hundred times that morning. When he is

satisfied, he takes a cloth and wipes his fingerprints

from the dish, and hands it to the waiter. And the

waiter, of course, dips his fingers into the gravy-his

nasty, greasy fingers which he is for ever running