Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell

nasty, greasy fingers which he is for ever running

through his brilliantined hair. Whenever one pays more

than, say, ten francs for a dish of meat in Paris, one may

be certain that it has been fingered in this manner. In

very cheap restaurants it is different; there, the same

trouble is not taken over the food, and it is just forked

out of the pan and flung on to a plate, without handling.

Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more

sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.

   Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants,

because sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and

smartness. The hotel employee is too busy getting food

ready to remember that it is meant to be eaten. A meal

is simply «

une commande » to him, just as a man dying of

cancer is simply "

a case" to the doctor. A customer

orders, for example, a piece of toast. Somebody, pressed

with work in a cellar deep underground, has to prepare it.

How can he stop and say to himself, "This toast is to be

eaten-I must make it eatable"? All he knows is that it must

look right and must be ready in three minutes. Some large

drops of sweat fall from his forehead on to the toast. Why

should he worry? Presently the toast falls among the filthy

sawdust on the floor. Why trouble to make a new piece? It

is much quicker to wipe the sawdust off. On the way

upstairs the toast falls again, butter side down. Another

wipe is all it needs. And so with everything. The only food

at the Hôtel X. which was ever prepared cleanly was the

staff's, and the

patron's. The maxim, repeated by everyone,

was: "Look out for the

patron, and as for the clients,

s'en f--

pas mal

! » Everywhere in the service quarters dirt festered-a

secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel

like the intestines through a man's body.

   Apart from the dirt, the

patron swindled the customers

wholeheartedly. For the most part the materials of the food

were very bad, though the cooks knew how to serve it up in

style. The meat was at best ordinary, and as to the

vegetables, no good housekeeper would have looked at

them in the market. The cream, by a standing order, was

diluted with milk. The tea and coffee were of inferior sorts,

and the jam was synthetic stuff out of vast, unlabelled tins.

All the cheaper wines, according to Boris, were corked vin

ordinaire. There was a rule that employees must pay for

anything they spoiled, and in consequence damaged things

were seldom thrown away. Once the waiter on the third

floor dropped a roast chicken down the shaft of our service

lift, where it fell into a litter of broken bread, torn paper

and so forth at the bottom. We simply wiped it with a cloth and

sent it up again. Upstairs there were dirty tales of once-used

sheets not being washed, but simply damped, ironed and put back

on the beds. The patron was as mean to us as to the

customers. Throughout the vast hotel there was not,

for instance, such a thing as a brush and pan; one had

to manage with a broom and a piece of cardboard. And

the staff lavatory was worthy of Central Asia, and there

was no place to wash one's hands, except the sinks

used for washing crockery.

   In spite of all this the Hôtel X. was one of the dozen

most expensive hotels in Paris, and the customers paid

startling prices. The ordinary charge for a night's

lodging, not including breakfast, was two hundred

francs. All wine and tobacco were sold at exactly double

shop prices, though of course the patron bought at the

wholesale price. If a customer had a title, or was

reputed to be a millionaire, all his charges went up

automatically. One morning on the fourth floor an

American who was on diet wanted only salt and hot

water for his breakfast. Valenti was furious. "Jesus

Christ!" he said, "what about my ten per cent.? Ten per

cent. of salt and water!" And he charged twentyfive

francs for the breakfast. The customer paid without a

murmur.

   According to Boris, the same kind of thing went on

in all Paris hotels, or at least in all the big, expensive

ones. But I imagine that the customers at the Hotel X.

were especially easy to swindle, for they were mostly

Americans, with a sprinkling of English-no Frenchand

seemed to know nothing whatever about good food.

They would stuff themselves with disgusting American

"cereals," and eat marmalade at tea, and drink ver-

mouth after dinner, and order a poulet à la reine at a

hundred francs and then souse it in Worcester sauce.

One customer, from Pittsburg, dined every night in his

bedroom on grape-nuts, scrambled eggs and cocoa.

Perhaps it hardly matters whether such people are

swindled or not.

                       XV

HEARD queer tales in the hotel. There were tales of

dope fiends, of old debauchees who frequented hotels in

search of pretty page boys, of thefts and blackmail.

Mario told me of a hotel in which he had been, where a

chambermaid stole a priceless diamond ring from an

American lady. For days the staff were searched as they

left work, and two detectives searched the hotel from

top to bottom, but the ring was never found. The

chambermaid had a lover in the bakery, and he had

baked the ring into a roll, where it lay unsuspected

until the search was over.

   Once Valenti, at a slack time, told me a story about

himself.

   "You know,

mon p'tit, this hotel life is all very well,

but it's the devil when you're out of work. I expect you

know what it is to go without eating, eh?

Forcément,

otherwise you wouldn't be scrubbing dishes. Well, I'm

not a poor devil of a

plongeur; I'm a waiter, and I went

five days without eating, once. Five days without even a

crust of bread Jesus Christ!

   "I tell you, those five days were the devil. The only

good thing was, I had my rent paid in advance. I was

living in a dirty, cheap little hotel in the Rue Sainte

Éloise up in the Latin quarter. It was called the Hotel

Suzanne May, after some famous prostitute of the time

of the Empire. I was starving, and there was nothing I

could do; I couldn't even go to the cafés where the hotel

proprietors come to engage waiters, because I

hadn't the price of a drink. All I could do was to lie in

bed getting weaker and weaker, and watching the bugs

running about the ceiling. I don't want to go through

that again, I can tell you.

   "In the afternoon of the fifth day I went half mad; at

least, that's how it seems to me now. There was an old

faded print of a woman's head hanging on the wall of

my room, and I took to wondering who it could be; and

after about an hour I realised that it must be Sainte

Éloise, who was the patron saint of the quarter. I had

never taken any notice of the thing before, but now, as I

lay staring at it, a most extraordinary idea came into my

head.

   "

'Écoute, mon cher,' I said to myself, 'you'll be

starving to death if this goes on much longer. You've

got to do something. Why not try a prayer to Sainte

Éloise? Go down on your knees and ask her to send you

some money. After all, it can't do any harm. Try it!'

   "Mad, eh? Still, a man will do anything when he's

hungry. Besides, as I said, it couldn't do any harm. I got

out of bed and began praying. I said:

   " 'Dear Sainte Éloise, if you exist, please send me

some money. I don't ask for much just enough to buy

some bread and a bottle of wine and get my strength

back. Three or four francs would do. You don't know

how grateful I'll be, Sainte Éloise, if you help me this

once. And be sure, if you send me anything, the first

thing I'll do will be to go and burn a candle for you, at

your church down the street. Amen.'

   "I put in that about the candle, because I had heard

that saints like having candles burnt in their honour. I

meant to keep my promise, of course. But I am an

atheist and I didn't really believe that anything would

come of it.

   "Well, I got into bed again, and five minutes later

there came a bang at the door. It was a girl called Maria,

a big fat peasant girl who lived at our hotel. She was a

very stupid girl, but. a good sort, and I didn't much care

for her to see me in the state I was in.

   "She cried out at the sight of me.

'Nom de Dieu!' she

said, 'what's the matter with you? What are you doing

in bed at this time of day?

Quelle mine que tu as! You look

more like a corpse than a man.'

   "Probably I did look a sight. I had been five days

without food, most of the time in bed, and it was three

days since I had had a wash or a shave. The room was a

regular pigsty, too.

   " 'What's the matter?' said Maria again.

   " 'The matter!' I said; 'Jesus Christ! I'm starving. I

haven't eaten for five days. That's what's the matter.'

   "Maria was horrified. 'Not eaten for five days?' she

said. 'But why? Haven't you any money, then?'

   " 'Money!' I said. 'Do you suppose I should be

starving if I had money? I've got just five sous in the

world, and I've pawned everything. Look round the

room and see if there's anything more I can sell or

pawn. If you can find anything that will fetch fifty

centimes, you're cleverer than I am.'

   "Maria began looking round the room. She poked

here and there among a lot of rubbish that was lying

about, and then suddenly she got quite excited. Her

great thick mouth fell open with astonishment.

   " 'You idiot!' she cried out. 'Imbecile! What's

this,

then?'

   "I saw that she had picked up an empty oil

bidon that

had been lying in the corner. I had bought it weeks

before, for an oil lamp I had before I sold my things.

   " 'That?' I said. 'That's an oil

bidon. What about it?'

   " 'Imbecile! Didn't you pay three francs fifty

deposit on it?'

   "Now, of course I had paid the three francs fifty.

They always make you pay a deposit on the

bidon, and

you get it back when the

bidon is returned. But I'd for-

gotten all about it.

   " 'Yes---' I began.

   " 'Idiot!' shouted Maria again. She got so excited

that she began to dance about until I thought her

sabots would go through the floor. 'Idiot!

T'es fou!T'es

fou

! What have you got to do but take it back to the

shop and get your deposit back? Starving, with three