Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell

the end of my money, and my rent was several days

overdue. We loafed about the dismal empty restaurant,

too hungry even to get on with the work that remained.

Only Boris now believed that the restaurant would

open. He had set his heart on being

maitre d'hôtel, and

he invented a theory that the

patron's money was tied

up in shares and he was waiting a favourable moment

for selling. On the tenth day I had nothing to eat or

smoke, and I told the

patron that I could not continue

working without an advance on my wages. As blandly

as usual, the

patron promised the advance, and then,

according to his custom, vanished. I walked part of

the way home, but I did not feel equal to a scene with

Madame F. over the rent, so I passed the night on a

bench on the boulevard. It was very uncomfortable-the

arm of the seat cuts into your back-and much colder

than I had expected. There was plenty of time, in the

long boring hours between dawn and work, to think

what a fool I had been to deliver myself into the hands

of these Russians.

   Then, in the morning, the luck changed. Evidently

the

patron had come to an understanding with his

creditors, for he arrived with money in his pockets, set

the alterations going, and gave me my advance. Boris

and I bought macaroni and a piece of horse's liver, and

had our first hot meal in ten days.

   The workmen were brought in and the alterations

made, hastily and with incredible shoddiness. The

tables, for instance, were to be covered with baize, but

when the

patron found that baize was expensive he

bought instead disused army blankets, smelling incor-

rigibly of sweat. The table-cloths (they were check, to go

with the "Norman" decorations) would cover them, of

course. On the last night we were at work till two in the

morning, getting things ready. The crockery did not

arrive till eight, and, being new, had all to be washed.

The cutlery did not arrive till the next morning, nor the

linen either, so that we had to dry the crockery with a

shirt of the

patron's and an old pillowslip belonging to

the concierge. Boris and I did all the work. Jules was

skulking, and the

patron and his wife sat in the bar with

a dun and some Russian friends, drinking success to

the restaurant. The cook was in the kitchen with her

head on the table, crying, because she was expected to

cook for fifty people, and there were not pots and pans

enough for ten. About midnight there was a fearful

interview with some duns, who came intending to

seize eight copper saucepans which the

patron had

obtained on credit. They were bought off with half a

bottle of brandy.

   Jules and I missed the last Metro home and had to

sleep on the floor of the restaurant. The first thing we

saw in the morning were two large rats sitting on the

kitchen table, eating from a ham that stood there. It

seemed a bad omen, and I was surer than ever that the

Auberge de Jehan Cottard would turn out a failure.

                         XX

THE

patron had engaged me as kitchen

plongeur; that is,

my job was to wash up, keep the kitchen clean, prepare

vegetables, make tea, coffee and sandwiches, do the

simpler cooking, and run errands. The terms were, as

usual, five hundred francs a month and food, but I had

no free day and no fixed working hours. At the Hôtel X. I

had seen catering at its best, with unlimited money and

good organisation. Now, at the Auberge, I learned how

things are done in a thoroughly bad restaurant. It is

worth describing, for there are hundreds of similar

restaurants in Paris, and every visitor feeds in one of

them occasionally.

   I should add, by the way, that the Auberge was not

the ordinary cheap eating-house frequented by students

and workmen. We did not provide an adequate meal at

less than twenty-five francs, and we were picturesque

and artistic, which sent up our social standing. There

were the indecent pictures in the bar, and the Norman

decorations-sham beams on the walls, electric lights

done up as candlesticks, "peasant" pottery, even a

mounting-block at the door-and the

patron and the head

waiter were Russian officers, and many of the

customers titled Russian refugees. In short, we were

decidedly chic.

   Nevertheless, the conditions behind the kitchen door

were suitable for a pigsty. For this is what our service

arrangements were like.

   The kitchen measured fifteen feet long by eight

broad, and half this space was taken up by the stoves

and tables. All the pots had to be kept on shelves out of

reach, and there was only room for one dustbin. This

dustbin used to be crammed full by midday, and the

floor was normally an inch deep in a compost of

trampled food.

   For firing we had nothing but three gas-stoves,

without ovens, and all joints had to be sent out to the

bakery.

   There was no larder. Our substitute for one was a

half-roofed shed in the yard, with a tree growing in the

middle of it. The meat, vegetables and so forth lay there

on the bare earth, raided by rats and cats.

   There was no hot water laid on. Water for washing up

had to be heated in pans, and, as there was no room for

these on the stoves when meals were cooking, most of

the plates had to be washed in cold water. This, with

soft soap and the hard Paris water, meant scraping the

grease off with bits of newspaper.

   We were so short of saucepans that I had to wash

each one as soon as it was done with, instead of leaving

them till the evening. This alone wasted probably an

hour a day.

   Owing to some scamping of expense in the installa-

tion, the electric light usually fused at eight in the

evening. The patron would only allow us three candles

in the kitchen, and the cook said three were unlucky, so

we had only two.

   Our coffee-grinder was borrowed from a

bistro near

by, and our dustbin and brooms from the concierge.

After the first week a quantity of linen did not come back

from the wash, as the bill was not paid. We were in

trouble with the inspector of labour, who had discovered

that the staff included no Frenchmen; he had several

private interviews with the

patron, who, I believe, was

obliged to bribe him. The electric company was still

dunning us, and when the duns found that we would

buy them off with

apéritifs, they came every morning. We

were in debt at the grocery, and credit would have been

stopped, only the grocer's wife (a moustachio'd woman of

sixty) had taken a fancy to Jules, who was sent every

morning to cajole her. Similarly I had to waste an hour

every day haggling over vegetables in the Rue du

Commerce, to save a few centimes.

   These are the results of starting a restaurant on in-

sufficient capital. And in these conditions the cook and I

were expected to serve thirty or forty meals a day, and

would later on be serving a hundred. From the first day

it was too much for us. The cook's working hours were

from eight in the morning till midnight, and mine from

seven in the morning till half-past twelve the next

morning-seventeen and a half hours, almost without a

break. We never had time to sit down till five in the

afternoon, and even then there was no seat except the

top of the dustbin. Boris, who lived near by and had not

to catch the last Metro home, worked from eight in the

morning till two the next morning-eighteen hours a day,

seven days a week. Such hours, though not usual, are

nothing extraordinary in Paris.

   Life settled at once into a routine that made the Hôtel

X. seem like a holiday. Every morning at six I drove

myself out of bed, did not shave, sometimes washed,

hurried up to the Place d'Italie and fought for

a place on the Metro. By seven I was in the desolation of

the cold, filthy kitchen, with the potato skins and bones

and fishtails littered on the floor, and a pile of plates,

stuck together in their grease, waiting from overnight. I

could not start on the plates yet, because the water was

cold, and I had to fetch milk and make coffee, for the

others arrived at eight and expected to find coffee ready.

Also, there were always several copper saucepans to

clean. Those copper saucepans are the bane of a

plongeur's

life. They have to be scoured with sand and

bunches of chain, ten minutes to each one, and then

polished on the outside with Brasso. Fortunately, the art

of making them has been lost and they are gradually

vanishing from French kitchens, though one can still

buy them second-hand.

   When I had begun on the plates the cook would take

me away from the plates to begin skinning onions, and

when I had begun on the onions the

patron would arrive

and send me out to buy cabbages. When I came back

with the cabbages the

patron's wife would tell me to go to

some shop half a mile away and buy a pot of rouge; by

the time I came back there would be more vegetables

waiting, and the plates were still not done. In this way

our incompetence piled one job on another throughout

the day, everything in arrears.

   Till ten, things went comparatively easily, though we

were working fast, and no one lost his temper. The cook

would find time to talk about her artistic nature, and say

did I not think Tolstoi was

épatant, and sing in a fine

soprano voice as she minced beef on the board. But at

ten the waiters began clamouring for their lunch, which

they had early, and at eleven the first customers would

be arriving. Suddenly everything became hurry and bad

temper. There was not the same furious rushing and

yelling as at the Hôtel X., but an atmosphere of

muddle, petty spite and exasperation. Discomfort was at

the bottom of it. It was unbearably cramped in the

kitchen, and dishes had to be put on the floor, and one

had to be thinking constantly about not stepping on

them. The cook's vast buttocks banged against me as she

moved to and fro. A ceaseless, nagging chorus of orders

streamed from her:

   "Unspeakable idiot! How many times have I told you

not to bleed the beetroots? Quick, let me get to the sink!

Put those knives away; get on with the potatoes. What

have you done with my strainer? Oh, leave those

potatoes alone. Didn't I tell you to skim the

bouillon? Take

that can of water off the stove. Never mind the washing