Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell

the mob results quite naturally. The educated man

pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty

to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work

minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory.

"Anything," he thinks, "any injustice,

sooner than let that mob loose." He does not see that

since there is no difference between the mass of rich and

poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The

mob is in fact loose now, and-in the shape of rich men-is

using its power to set up enormous treadmills of

boredom, such as "smart" hotels.

   To sum up. A

plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave,

doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at

work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he

would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated

people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the

process, because they know nothing about him and

consequently are afraid of him. I say this of the

plongeur

because it is his case I have been considering; it would

apply equally to numberless other types of worker. These

are only my own ideas about the basic facts of a

plongeur's

life, made without reference to immediate economic

questions, and no doubt largely platitudes. I present

them as a sample of the thoughts that are put into one's

head by working in a hotel.

                          XXIII

As soon as I left the Auberge de Jehan Cottard I went to

bed and slept the clock round, all but one hour. Then I

washed my teeth for the first time in a fortnight, bathed

and had my hair cut, and got my clothes out of pawn. I

had two glorious days of loafing. I even went in my best

suit to the Auberge, leant against the bar and spent five

francs on a bottle of English beer. It is a curious

sensation, being a customer where you have been a slave's

slave. Boris was sorry that I had left the restaurant just at

the moment when we were lancés and there was a. chance

of making money. I have heard

from him since, and he tells me that he is making a

hundred francs a day and has set up a girl who is trés

serieuse and never smells of garlic.

   I spent a day wandering about our quarter, saying

good-bye to everyone. It was on this day that Charlie

told me about the death of old Roucolle the miser, who

had once lived in the quarter. Very likely Charlie was

lying as usual, but it was a good story.

   Roucolle died, aged seventy-four, a year or two

before I went to Paris, but the people in the quarter still

talked of him while I was there. He never equalled

Daniel Dancer or anyone of that kind, but he was an

interesting character. He went to Les Halles every

morning to pick up damaged vegetables, and ate cat's

meat, and wore newspaper instead of underclothes, and

used the wainscoting of his room for firewood, and

made himself a pair of trousers out of a sack-all this

with half a million francs invested. I should like very

much to have known him.

   Like many misers, Roucolle came to a bad end

through putting his money into a wildcat scheme. One

day a Jew appeared in the quarter, an alert, businesslike

young chap who had a first-rate plan for smuggling

cocaine into England. It is easy enough, of course, to buy

cocaine in Paris, and the smuggling would be quite

simple in itself, only there is always some spy who

betrays the plan to the customs or the police. It is said

that this is often done by the very people who sell the

cocaine, because the smuggling trade is in the hands of a

large combine, who do not want competition. The Jew,

however, swore that there was no danger. He knew a way

of getting cocaine direct from Vienna, not through the

usual channels, and there would be no blackmail to pay.

He had got into touch with Roucolle through a young

Pole, a student at the Sorbonne, who

was going to put four thousand francs into the scheme if

Roucolle would put six thousand. For this they could buy

ten pounds of cocaine, which would be worth a small

fortune in England.

   The Pole and the Jew had a tremendous struggle to

get the money from between old Roucolle's claws. Six

thousand francs was not much-he had more than that

sewn into the mattress in his room-but it was agony for

him to part with a sou. The Pole and the Jew were at him

for weeks on end, explaining, bullying, coaxing, arguing,

going down on their knees and imploring him to produce

the money. The old man was half frantic between greed

and fear. His bowels yearned at the thought of getting,

perhaps, fifty thousand francs' profit, and yet he could

not bring himself to risk the money. He used to sit in a

corner with his head in his hands, groaning and

sometimes yelling out in agony, and often he would kneel

down (he was very pious) and pray for strength, but still

he couldn't do it. But at last, more from exhaustion than

anything else, he gave in quite suddenly; he slit open the

mattress where his money was concealed and handed

over six thousand francs to the Jew.

   The Jew delivered the cocaine the same day, and

promptly vanished. And meanwhile, as was not sur-

prising after the fuss Roucolle had made, the affair had

been noised all over the quarter. The very next morning

the hotel was raided and searched by the police.

   Roucolle and the Pole were in agonies. The police were

downstairs, working their way up and searching every

room in turn, and there was the great packet of cocaine

on the table, with no place to hide it and no chance of

escaping down the stairs. The Pole was for throwing the

stuff out of the window, but Roucolle

would not hear of it. Charlie told me that he had been

present at the scene. He said that when they tried to

take the packet from Roucolle he clasped it to his

breast and struggled like a madman, although he was

seventy-four years old. He was wild with fright, but he

would go to prison rather than throw his money away.

   At last, when the police were searching only one floor

below, somebody had an idea. A man on Roucolle's floor

had a dozen tins of face-powder which he was selling on

commission; it was suggested that the cocaine could be

put into the tins and passed off as face-powder. The

powder was hastily thrown out of the window and the

cocaine substituted, and the tins were put openly on

Roucolle's table, as though there there were nothing to

conceal. A few minutes later the police came to search

Roucolle's room. They tapped the walls and looked up the

chimney and turned out the drawers and examined the

floorboards, and then, just as they were about to give it

up, having found nothing, the inspector noticed the tins

on the table.

   "

Tiens," he said, "have a look at those tins. I hadn't

noticed them. What's in them, eh?"

   "Face-powder," said the Pole as calmly as he could

manage. But at the same instant Roucolle let out a loud

groaning noise, from alarm, and the police became

suspicious immediately. They opened one of the tins and

tipped out the contents, and after smelling it, the

inspector said that he believed it was cocaine. Roucolle

and the Pole began swearing on the names of the saints

that it was only face-powder; but it was no use, the more

they protested the more suspicious the police became.

The two men were arrested and led off to the police

station, followed by half the quarter.

   At the station, Roucolle and the Pole were inter

rogated by the Commissaire while a tin of the cocaine

was sent away to be analysed. Charlie said that the

scene Roucolle made was beyond description. He wept,

prayed, made contradictory statements and denounced

the Pole all at once, so loud that he could be heard half

a street away. The policemen almost burst with

laughing at him.

   After an hour a policeman came back with the tin of

cocaine and a note from the analyst. He was laughing.

   "This is not cocaine, monsieur," he said.

   "What, not cocaine?" said the Commissaire. "

Mais,

alors

-what is it, then?"

   "It is face-powder."

   Roucolle and the Pole were released at once, entirely

exonerated but very angry. The Jew had doublecrossed

them. Afterwards, when the excitement was over, it

turned out that he had played the same trick on two

other people in the quarter.

   The Pole was glad enough to escape, even though he

had lost his four thousand francs, but poor old

Roucolle was utterly broken down. He took to his bed at

once, and all that day and half the night they could

hear him thrashing about, mumbling, and sometimes

yelling out at the top of his voice:

   "Six thousand francs!

Nom de Jesus-Christ! Six

thousand francs!"

   Three days later he had some kind of stroke, and in

a fortnight he was dead-of a broken heart, Charlie said.

                     XXIV

I TRAVELLED to England third class via Dunkirk and

Tilbury, which is the cheapest and not the worst way of

crossing the Channel. You had to pay extra for

a cabin, so I slept in the saloon, together with most of

the third-class passengers. I find this entry in my diary

for that day:

   "Sleeping in the saloon, twenty-seven men, sixteen

women. Of the women, not a single one has washed her

face this morning. The men mostly went to the bathroom;

the women merely produced vanity cases and covered the

dirt with powder.

Q,. A secondary sexual difference?"

  On the journey I fell in with a couple of Roumanians,

mere children, who were going to England on their

honeymoon trip. They asked innumerable questions

about England, and I told them some startling lies. I was

so pleased to be getting home, after being hard up for

months in a foreign city, that England seemed to me a

sort of Paradise. There are, indeed, many things in

England that make you glad to get home; bathrooms,

armchairs, mint sauce, new potatoes properly cooked,

brown bread, marmalade, beer made with veritable hops-

they are all splendid, if you can pay for them. England is

a very good country when you are not poor; and, of

course, with a tame imbecile to look after, I was not

going to be poor. The thought of not being poor made me

very patriotic. The more questions the Roumanians

asked, the more I praised England; the climate, the

scenery, the art, the literature, the laws-everything in

England was perfect.

   Was the architecture in England good? the Rou-

manians asked. "Splendid!" I said. "And you should just

see the London statues! Paris is vulgar-half grandiosity

and half slums. But London-"

   Then the boat drew alongside Tilbury pier. The first

building we saw on the waterside was one of those huge

hotels, all stucco and pinnacles, which stare from the

English coast like idiots staring over an asylum

wall. I saw the Roumanians, too polite to say anything,

cocking their eyes at the hotel. "Built by French

architects," I assured them; and even later, when the

train was crawling into London through the eastern