Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell

to, so long as he can talk about himself. He declaims

like an orator on a barricade, rolling the words on his

tongue and gesticulating with his short arms. His

small, rather piggy eyes glitter with enthusiasm. He is,

somehow, profoundly disgusting to see.

   He is talking of love, his favourite subject.

   «

Ah, l'amour, l'amour! Ah, que les femmes m'ont tué!

Alas, messieurs et dames,

women have been my ruin,

beyond all hope my ruin. At twenty-two I am utterly

worn out and finished. But what things I have learned,

what abysses of wisdom have I not plumbed! How

great a thing it is to have acquired the true wisdom, to

have become in the highest sense of the word a

civilised man, to have become

raffiné, vicieux, » etc. etc.

   "

Messieurs et dames, I perceive that you are sad. Ah,

mais la vie est belle-you must not be sad. Be more gay, I

beseech you!

"

Fill high ze bowl vid Saurian vine, Ve

vill not sink of semes like zese!

   « Ah, que la vie est belle

! Listen,

messieurs et dames, out

of the fullness of my experience I will discourse to you

of love. I will explain to you what is the true meaning

of love-what is the true sensibility, the higher, more

refined pleasure which is known to civilised men alone.

I will tell you of the happiest day of my life. Alas, but I

am past the time when I could know such happiness as

that. It is gone for ever-the very possibility, even the

desire for it, are gone.

   "Listen, then. It was two years ago; my brother was

in Paris-he is a lawyer-and my parents had told him to

find me and take me out to dinner. We hate each other,

my brother and I, but we preferred not to disobey my

parents. We dined, and at dinner he grew very drunk

upon three bottles of Bordeaux. I took him back to his

hotel, and on the way I bought a bottle of brandy, and

when we had arrived I made my brother drink a

tumberful of it-I told him it was something to make

him sober. He drank it, and immediately he fell down

like somebody in a fit, dead drunk. I lifted him up and

propped his back against the bed; then I went through

his pockets. I found eleven hundred francs, and with

that I hurried down the stairs, jumped into a taxi, and

escaped. My brother did not know my address -I was

safe.

   "Where does a man go when he has money? To the

bordels

, naturally. But you do not suppose that I was

going to waste my time on some vulgar debauchery fit

only for navvies? Confound it, one is a civilised man! I

was fastidious, exigeant, you understand, with a

thousand francs in my pocket. It was midnight before I

found what I was looking for. I had fallen in with a very

smart youth of eighteen, dressed en smoking and with his

hair cut

à l'américaine, and we were talking in a quiet

bistro

away from the boulevards. We understood one

another well, that youth and I. We talked of this and

that, and discussed ways of diverting oneself. Presently

we took a taxi together and were driven away.

   "The taxi stopped in a narrow, solitary street with a

single gas-lamp flaring at the end. There were dark

puddles among the stones. Down one side ran the high,

blank wall of a convent. My guide led me to a tall,

ruinous house with shuttered windows, and knocked

several times at the door. Presently there was a sound of

footsteps and a shooting of bolts, and the door opened a

little. A hand came round the edge of it; it was a large,

crooked hand, that held itself palm upwards under our

noses, demanding money.

   "My guide put his foot between the door and the step.

'How much do you want?' he said.

   " 'A thousand francs,' said a woman's voice. 'Pay up

at once or you don't come in.'

   "I put a thousand francs into the hand and gave the

remaining hundred to my guide: he said good night and

left me. I could hear the voice inside counting the notes,

and then a thin old crow of a woman in a black dress

put her nose out and regarded me suspiciously before

letting me in. It was very dark inside: I could see

nothing except a flaring gas jet that illuminated a patch

of plaster wall, throwing everything else into

deeper shadow. There was a smell of rats and dust.

Without speaking, the old woman lighted a candle at the

gas jet, then hobbled in front of me down a stone

passage to the top of a flight of stone steps.

   " '

Voilà!' she said; 'go down into the cellar there and

do what you like. I shall see nothing, hear nothing, know

nothing. You are free, you understand-perfectly free.'

   "Ha,

messieurs, need I describe to you

forcément, you

know it yourselves-that shiver, half of terror and half of

joy, that goes through one at these moments? I crept

down, feeling my way; I could hear my breathing and the

scraping of my shoes on the stones, otherwise all was

silence. At the bottom of the stairs my hand met an

electric switch. I turned it, and a great electrolier of

twelve redglobes flooded the cellarwith a red light. And

behold, I was not in a cellar, but in a bedroom, a great,

rich, garish bedroom, coloured blood red from top to

bottom. Figure it to yourselves,

messieurs et dames! Red

carpet on the floor, red paper on the walls, red plush on

the chairs, even the ceiling red; everywhere red, burning

into the eyes. It was a heavy, stifling red, as though the

light were shining through bowls of blood. At the far end

stood a huge, square bed, with quilts red like the rest,

and on it a girl was lying, dressed in a frock of red velvet.

At the sight of me she shrank away and tried to hide her

knees under the short dress.

   "I had halted by the door. 'Come here, my chicken,' I

called to her.

   "She gave a whimper of fright. With a bound I was

beside the bed; she tried to elude me, but I seized her by

the throat-like this, do you see?-tight! She struggled, she

began to cry out for mercy, but I held her fast, forcing

back her head and staring down into her face. She was

twenty years old, perhaps; her face was the

broad, dull face of a stupid child, but it was coated

with paint and powder, and her blue, stupid eyes,

shining in the red light, wore that shocked, distorted

look that one sees nowhere save in the eyes of these

women. She was some peasant girl, doubtless, whom

her parents had sold into slavery.

   "Without another word I pulled her off the bed and

threw her on to the floor. And then I fell upon her like

a tiger! Ah, the joy, the incomparable rapture of that

time! There,

messieurs et dames, is what I would expound to

you;

voilà (amour! There is the true love, there is the only

thing in the world worth striving for; there is the thing

beside which all your arts and ideals, all your

philosophies and creeds, all your fine words and high

attitudes, are as pale and profitless as ashes. When

one has experienced love-the true love-what is there in

the world that seems more than a mere ghost of joy?

   "More and more savagely I renewed the attack.

Again and again the girl tried to escape; she cried out

for mercy anew, but I laughed at her.

   " 'Mercy!' I said, 'do you suppose I have come here

to show mercy? Do you suppose I have paid a

thousand francs for that?' I swear to you, messieurs et

dames, that if it were not for that accursed law that robs

us of our liberty, I would have murdered her at that

moment.

   « Ah, how she screamed, with what bitter cries of

agony. But there was no one to hear them; down there

under the streets of Paris we were as secure as at the

heart of a pyramid. Tears streamed down the girl's

face, washing away the powder in long, dirty smears.

Ah, that irrecoverable time! You,

messieurs et dames, you

who have not cultivated the finer sensibilities of love,

for you such pleasure is almost beyond conception.

And I too, now that my youth is gone-ah, youth!-

shall never again see life so beautiful as that. It

is finished.

   « Ah yes, it is gone-gone for ever. Ah, the poverty,

the shortness, the disappointment of human joy! For

in reality-car

en réalité, what is the duration of the

supreme moment of love? It is nothing, an instant, a

second perhaps. A second of ecstasy, and after that-

dust, ashes, nothingness.

   "And so, just for one instant, I captured the

supreme happiness, the highest and most refined

emotion to which human beings can attain. And in the

same moment it was finished, and I was left-to what?

All my savagery, my passion, were scattered like the

petals of a rose. I was left cold and languid, full. of

vain regrets; in my revulsion I even felt a kind of pity

for the weeping girl on the floor. Is it not nauseous,

that we should be the prey of such mean emotions? I

did not look at the girl again; my sole thought was to

get away. I hastened up the steps of the vault and out

into the street. It was dark and bitterly cold, the

streets were empty, the stones echoed under my heels

with a hollow, lonely ring. All my money was gone, I

had not even the price of a taxi fare. I walked back

alone to my cold, solitary room.

   "But there,

messieurs et dames, that is what I promised

to expound to you. That is Love. That was the happiest

day of my life."

   He was a curious specimen, Charlie. I describe

him, just to show what diverse characters could be

found flourishing in the Coq d'Or quarter.

                       III

I

  L I V E D in the Coq d'Or quarter for about a year

and a half. One day, in summer, I found that I had just

four hundred and fifty francs left, and beyond this

nothing but thirty-six francs a week, which I earned by giving

English lessons. Hitherto I had not thought about the

future, but I now realised that I must do something at

once. I decided to start looking for a job, and-very

luckily, as it turned out-I took the precaution of paying

two hundred francs for a month's rent in advance. With

the other two hundred and fifty francs, besides the

English lessons, I could live a month, and in a month I

should probably find work. I aimed at becoming a guide

to one of the tourist companies, or perhaps an

interpreter. However, a piece of bad luck prevented this.

   One day there turned up at the hotel a young Italian

who called himself a compositor. He was rather an am-

biguous person, for he wore side whiskers, which are