Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell

shop and get your deposit back? Starving, with three

francs fifty staring you in the face! Imbecile!'

  "I can hardly believe now that in all those five days

I had never once thought of taking the

bidon back to the

shop. As good as three francs fifty in hard cash, and it

had never occurred to me! I sat up in bed. 'Quick!' I

shouted to Maria, 'you take it for me. Take it to the

grocer's at the corner-run like the devil. And bring

back food!

   Maria didn't need to be told. She grabbed the bidon

and went clattering down the stairs like a herd of

elephants, and in three minutes she was back with two

pounds of bread under one arm and a half-litre bottle

of wine under the other. I didn't stop to thank her; I

just seized the bread and sank my teeth in it. Have you

noticed how bread tastes when you have been hungry

for a long time? Cold, wet, doughy-like putty almost.

But, Jesus Christ, how good it was! As for the wine, I

sucked it all down in one draught, and it seemed to go

straight into my veins and flow round my body like

new blood. Ah, that made a difference!

   "I wolfed the whole two pounds of bread without

stopping to take breath. Maria stood with her hands on

her hips, watching me eat. 'Well, you feel better, eh?'

she said when I had finished.

   " 'Better!' I said. 'I feel perfect! I'm not the same

man as I was five minutes ago. There's only one thing

in the world I need now-a cigarette.'

   "Maria put her hand in her apron pocket. 'You can't

have it,' she said. 'I've no money. This is all I had left

out of your three francs fifty-seven sous. It's no good;

the cheapest cigarettes are twelve sous a packet.'

   " 'Then I can have them!' I said. 'Jesus Christ, what

a piece of luck! I've got five sous-it's just enough.'

   "Maria took the twelve sous and was starting out to the

tobacconist's. And then something I had forgotten all

this time came into my head. There was that cursed

Sainte Éloise! I had promised her a candle if she sent

me money; and really, who could say that the prayer

hadn't come true? 'Three or four francs,' I had said;

and the next moment along came three francs fifty.

There was no getting away from it. I should have to

spend my twelve sous on a candle.

   "I called Maria back. 'It's no use,' I said; 'there is

Sainte Éloise-I have promised her a candle. The twelve

sous will have to go on that. Silly, isn't it? I can't have

my cigarettes after all.'

   « 'Sainte Éloise?' said Maria. 'What about Sainte

Éloise?'

   " 'I prayed to her for money and promised her a

candle,' I said. 'She answered the prayer-at any rate,

the money turned up. I shall have to buy that candle.

It's a nuisance, but it seems to me I must keep my

promise.'

   " 'But what put Sainte Éloise into your head?' said

Maria.

   " 'It was her picture,' I said, and I explained the

whole thing. 'There she is, you see,' I said, and I pointed

to the picture on the wall.

   "Maria looked at the picture, and then to my surprise

she burst into shouts of laughter. She laughed more and

more, stamping about the room and holding her fat sides

as though they would burst. I thought she had gone mad.

It was two minutes before she could speak.

   " 'Idiot!' she cried at last.

'T'es fou! T'es fou! Do you

mean to tell me you really knelt down and prayed to that

picture? Who told you it was Sainte Éloise?'

   " 'But I made sure it was Sainte Éloise!' I said.

   " 'Imbecile! It isn't Sainte Éloise at all. Who do you

think it is?'

   " 'Who?' I said.

" 'It is Suzanne May, the woman this hotel is called

after.'

   "I had been praying to Suzanne May, the famous

prostitute of the Empire. . . .

   "But, after all, I wasn't sorry. Maria and I had a good

laugh, and then we talked it over, and we made out that I

didn't owe Sainte Éloise anything. Clearly it wasn't she

who had answered the prayer, and there was no need to

buy her a candle. So I had my packet of cigarettes after

all."

                        XVI

TIME went on and the Auberge de Jehan Cottard showed

no signs of opening. Boris and I went down there one

day during our afternoon interval and found that none of

the alterations had been done, except the indecent

pictures, and there were three duns instead of two. The

patron

greeted us with his usual blandness,

and the next instant turned to me (his prospective

dishwasher) and borrowed five francs. After that I felt

certain that the restaurant would never get beyond talk.

The

patron, however, again named the opening for

"exactly a fortnight from to-day," and introduced us to

the woman who was to do the cooking, a Baltic Russian

five feet tall and a yard across the hips. She told us that

she had been a singer before she came down to cooking,

and that she was very artistic and adored English

literature, especially

La Case de l'Oncle Tom.

   In a fortnight I had got so used to the routine of a

plongeur's

life that I could hardly imagine anything

different. It was a life without much variation. At a

quarter to six one woke with a sudden start, tumbled into

grease-stiffened clothes, and hurried out with dirty face

and protesting muscles. It was dawn, and the windows

were dark except for the workmen's cafés. The sky was

like a vast flat wall of cobalt, with roofs and spires of

black paper pasted upon it. Drowsy men were sweeping

the pavements with ten-foot besoms, and ragged families

picking over the dustbins. Workmen, and girls with a

piece of chocolate in one hand and a croissant in the

other, were pouring into the Metro stations. Trams, filled

with more workmen, boomed gloomily past. One

hastened down to the station, fought for a place-one does

literally have to fight on the Paris Metro at six in the

morning-and stood jammed in the swaying mass of

passengers, nose to nose with some hideous French face,

breathing sour wine and garlic. And then one descended

into the labyrinth of the hotel basement, and forgot

daylight till two o'clock, when the sun was hot and the

town black with people and cars.

   After my first week at the hotel I always spent the

afternoon interval in sleeping, or, when I had money,

in a

bistro. Except for a few ambitious waiters who went

to English classes, the whole staff wasted their leisure in

this way; one seemed too lazy after the morning's work

to do anything better. Sometimes half a dozen

plongeurs

would make up a party and go to an abominable brothel

in the Rue de Sieyès, where the charge was only five

francs twenty-five centimes-tenpence half-penny. It was

nicknamed «

le prix fixe, » and they used to describe

their experiences there as a great joke. It was a favourite

rendezvous of hotel workers. The

plongeurs' wages did

not allow them to marry, and no doubt work in the

basement does not encourage fastidious feelings.

   For another four hours one was in the cellars, and

then one emerged, sweating, into the cool street. It was

lamplight-that strange purplish gleam of the Paris lamps-

and beyond the river the Eiffel Tower flashed from top

to bottom with zigzag skysigns, like enormous snakes of

fire. Streams of cars glided silently to and fro, and

women, exquisite-looking in the dim light, strolled up

and down the arcade. Sometimes a woman would glance

at Boris or me, and then, noticing our greasy clothes,

look hastily away again. One fought another battle in the

Metro and was home by ten. Generally from ten to

midnight I went to a little

bistro in our street, an

underground place frequented by Arab navvies. It was a

bad place for fights, and I sometimes saw bottles thrown,

once with fearful effect, but as a rule the Arabs fought

among themselves and let Christians alone. Raki, the

Arab drink, was very cheap, and the bistro was open at

all hours, for the Arabs-lucky men-had the power of

working all day and drinking all night.

   It was the typical life of a

plongeur, and it did not

seem a bad life at the time. I had no sensation of

poverty, for even after paying my rent and setting aside

enough for tobacco and journeys and my food on

Sundays, I still had four francs a day for drinks, and four

francs was wealth. There was-it is hard to express it-a

sort of heavy contentment, the contentment a well-fed

beast might feel, in a life which had become so simple.

For nothing could be simpler than the life of a

plongeur.

He lives in a rhythm between work and sleep, without

time to think, hardly conscious of the exterior world; his

Paris has shrunk to the hotel, the Metro, a few bistros

and his bed. If he goes afield, it is only a few streets

away, on a trip with some servantgirl who sits on his

knee swallowing oysters and beer. On his free day he

lies in bed till noon, puts on a clean shirt, throws dice for

drinks, and after lunch goes back to bed again. Nothing

is quite real to him but the

boulot, drinks and sleep; and

of these sleep is the most important.

   One night, in the small hours, there was a murder just

beneath my window. I was woken by a fearful uproar,

and, going to the window, saw a man lying flat on the

stones below; I could see the murderers, three of them,

flitting away at the end of the street. Some of us went

down and found that the man was quite dead, his skull

cracked with a piece of lead piping. I remember the

colour of his blood, curiously purple, like wine; it was

still on the cobbles when I came home that evening, and

they said the schoolchildren had come from miles round

to see it. But the thing that strikes me in looking back is

that I was in bed and asleep within three minutes of the

murder. So were most of the people in the street; we just

made sure that the man was done for, and went straight

back to bed. We were working people, and where was

the sense of wasting sleep over a murder?

   Work in the hotel taught me the true value of sleep,

just as being hungry had taught me the true value of

food. Sleep had ceased to be a mere physical necessity; it

was something voluptuous, a debauch more than a relief.

I had no more trouble with the bugs. Mario had told me

of a sure remedy for them, namely pepper, strewed thick

over the bedclothes. It made me sneeze, but the bugs all

hated it, and emigrated to other rooms.

                          XVII

WITH thirty francs a week to spend on drinks I could

take part in the social life of the quarter. We had some

jolly evenings, on Saturdays, in the little bistro at the foot