Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell
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up, chop this celery. No, not like that, you fool, like this.
There! Look at you letting those peas boil over! Now get
to work and scale these herrings. Look, do you call this
plate clean? Wipe it on your apron. Put that salad on the
floor. That's right, put it where I'm bound to step in it!
Look out, that pot's boiling over! Get me down that
saucepan. No, the other one. Put this on the grill. Throw
those potatoes away. Don't waste time, throw them on
the floor. Tread them in.' Now throw down some sawdust;
this floor's like a skating-rink. Look, you fool, that
steak's burning!
Mon Dieu, why did they send me an idiot
for a
plongeur? Who are you talking to? Do you realise that
my aunt was a Russian countess?" etc. etc. etc.
This went on till three o'clock without much variation,
except that about eleven the cook usually had a
crise de
nerfs
and a flood of tears. From three to five was a fairly
slack time for the waiters, but the cook was still busy,
and I was working my fastest, for there was a pile of dirty
plates waiting, and it was a race to get them done, or
partly done, before dinner began. The washing up was
doubled by the primitive conditions-
a cramped draining-board, tepid water, sodden cloths,
and a sink that got blocked once in an hour. By five the
cook and I were feeling unsteady on our feet, not having
eaten or sat down since seven. We used to collapse, she
on the dustbin and I on the floor, drink a bottle of beer,
and apologise for some of the things we had said in the
morning. Tea was what kept us going. We took care to
have a pot always stewing, and drank pints during the
day.
At half-past five the hurry and quarrelling began
again, and now worse than before, because everyone was
tired out. The cook had a
crise de nerfs at six and another
at nine; they came on so regularly that one could have
told the time by them. She would flop down on the
dustbin, begin weeping hysterically, and cry out that
never, no, never had she thought to come to such a life as
this; her nerves would not stand it; she had studied
music at Vienna; she had a bedridden husband to
support, etc. etc. At another time one would have been
sorry for her, but, tired as we all were, her whimpering
voice merely infuriated us. Jules used. to stand in the
doorway and mimic her weeping. The
patron's wife nagged,
and Boris and Jules quarrelled all day, because Jules
shirked his work, and Boris, as head waiter, claimed the
larger share of the tips. Only the second day after the
restaurant opened, they came to blows in the kitchen over
a two-franc tip, and the cook and I had to separate them.
The only person who never forgot his manners was the
patron
. He kept the same hours as the rest of us, but he
had no work to do, for it was his wife who really managed
things. His sole job, besides ordering the supplies, was to
stand in the bar smoking cigarettes and looking
gentlemanly, and he did that to perfection.
The cook and I generally found time to eat our
dinner between ten and eleven o'clock. At midnight the
cook would steal a packet of food for her husband, stow
it under her clothes, and make off, whimpering that
these hours would kill her and she would give notice in
the morning. Jules also left at midnight, usually after a
dispute with Boris, who had to look after the bar till two.
Between twelve and half-past I did what I could to finish
the washing up. There was no time to attempt doing the
work properly, and I used simply to rub the grease off
the plates with tablenapkins. As for the dirt on the floor,
I let it lie, or swept the worst of it out of sight under the
stoves.
At half-past twelve I would put on my coat and hurry
out. The
patron, bland as ever, would stop me as I went
down the alley-way past the bar. «
Mais, mon cher
monsieur
, how tired you look! Please do me the favour of
accepting this glass of brandy."
He would hand me the glass of brandy as courteously
as though I had been a Russian duke instead of a
plongeur. He treated all of us like this. It was our com-
pensation for working seventeen hours a day.
As a rule the last Metro was almost empty-a great
advantage, for one could sit down and sleep for a
quarter of an hour. Generally I was in bed by halfpast
one. Sometimes I missed the train and had to sleep on
the floor of the restaurant, but it hardly mattered, for I
could have slept on cobblestones at that time.
XXI
THIS life went on for about a fortnight, with a slight
increase of work as more customers came to the restaur-
ant. I could have saved an hour a day by taking a
room near the restaurant, but it seemed impossible to
find time to change lodgings-or, for that matter, to get
my hair cut, look at a newspaper, or even undress
completely. After ten days I managed to find a free
quarter of an hour, and wrote to my friend B. in London
asking him if he could get me a job of some sort-
anything, so long as it allowed more than five hours
sleep. I was simply not equal to going on with a
seventeen-hour day, though there are plenty of people
who think nothing of it. When one is overworked, it is a
good cure for self-pity to think of the thousands of
people in Paris restaurants who work such hours, and
will go on doing it, not for a few weeks, but for years.
There was a girl in a
bistro near my hotel who worked
from seven in the morning till midnight for a whole year,
only sitting down to her meals. I remember once asking
her to come to a dance, and she laughed and said that
she had not been further than the street corner for
several months. She was consumptive, and died about
the time I left Paris.
After only a week we were all neurasthenic with
fatigue, except Jules, who skulked persistently. The
quarrels, intermittent at first, had now become con-
tinuous. For hours one would keep up a drizzle of
useless nagging, rising into storms of abuse every few
minutes. "Get me down that saucepan, idiot!' the cook
would cry (she was not tall enough to reach the shelves
where the saucepans were kept). "Get it down yourself,
you old whore," I would answer. Such remarks seemed to
be generated spontaneously from the air of the kitchen.
We quarrelled over things of inconceivable pettiness.
The dustbin, for instance, was an unending source of
quarrels-whether it should be put where I wanted it,
which was in the cook's way, or where she wanted it,
which was between me and the sink. Once she nagged
and nagged until at last, in pure spite, I lifted the
dustbin up and put it out in the middle of the floor,
where she was bound to trip over it.
"Now, you cow," I said, "move it yourself."
Poor old woman, it was too heavy for her to lift, and
she sat down, put her head on the table and burst out
crying. And I jeered at her. This is the kind of effect that
fatigue has upon one's manners.
After a few days the cook had ceased talking about
Tolstoi and her artistic nature, and she and I were not
on speaking terms, except for the purposes of work, and
Boris and Jules were not on speaking terms, and neither
of them was on speaking terms with the cook. Even
Boris and I were barely on speaking terms. We had
agreed beforehand that the
engueulades of working hours
did not count between times; but we had called each
other things too bad to be forgotten-and besides, there
were no between times. Jules grew lazier and lazier, and
he stole food constantly-from a sense of duty, he said.
He called the rest of us
jaune-blackleg-when we would
not join with him in stealing. He had a curious,
malignant spirit. He told me, as a matter of pride, that
he had sometimes wrung a dirty dishcloth into a
customer's soup before taking it in, just to be revenged
upon a member of the bourgeoisie.
The kitchen grew dirtier and the rats bolder, though
we trapped a few of them. Looking round that filthy
room, with raw meat lying among refuse on the floor,
and cold, clotted saucepans sprawling everywhere, and
the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used to
wonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world
as bad as ours. But the other three all said that they
had been in dirtier places. Jules took a positive pleasure
in seeings things dirty. In the afternoon, when 8
he had not much to do, he used to stand in the kitchen
doorway jeering at us for working too hard:
"Fool! Why do you wash that plate? Wipe it on your
trousers. Who cares about the customers?
They don't
know what's going on. What is restaurant work? You
are carving a chicken and it falls on the floor. You
apologise, you bow, you go out; and in five minutes you
come back by another door-with the same chicken. That
is restaurant work," etc.
And, strange to say, in spite of all this filth and in-
competence, the Auberge de Jehan Cottard was actually
a success. For the first few days all our customers were
Russians, friends of the
patron, and these were followed
by Americans and other foreigners-no Frenchmen.
Then one night there was tremendous excitement,
because our first Frenchman had arrived. For a moment
our quarrels were forgotten and we all united in the
effort to serve a good dinner. Boris tiptoed into the
kitchen, jerked his thumb over his shoulder and
whispered conspiratorially:
"
Sh! Attention, un Français! »
A moment later the patron's wife came and
whispered:
"
Attention, un Français! See that he gets a double
portion of all vegetables."
While the Frenchman ate, the
patron's wife stood
behind the grille of the kitchen door and watched the
expression of his face. Next night the Frenchman came
back with two other Frenchmen. This meant that we
were earning a good name; the surest sign of a bad
restaurant is to be frequented only by foreigners. Pro-
bably part of the reason for our success was that the
patron, with the sole gleam of sense he had shown in
fitting out the restaurant, had bought very sharp table-
knives. Sharp knives, of course, are the secret of a
successful restaurant. I am glad that this happened, for
it destroyed one of my illusions, namely, the idea that
Frenchmen know good food when they see it. Or
perhaps we were a fairly good restaurant by Paris
standards; in which case the bad ones must be past
imagining.
In a very few days after I had written to B. he replied