Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell

Numéro 97!"

   "Yes," I said, standing up.

   "Seventy francs?"

   Seventy francs for ten pounds' worth of clothes! But it

was no use arguing; I had seen someone else attempt to

argue, and the clerk had instantly refused the pledge. I

took the money and the pawnticket and walked out. I

had now no clothes except what I stood up in-the coat

badly out at the elbow-an overcoat, moderately pawnable,

and one spare shirt. Afterwards, when it was too late, I

learned that it was wiser to go to a pawnshop in the

afternoon. The clerks are French, and, like most French

people, are in a bad temper till they have eaten their

lunch.

   When I got home, Madame F. was sweeping the

bistro floor. She came up the steps to meet me. I could

see in her eye that she was uneasy about my rent.

   "Well," she said, "what did you get for your clothes?

Not much, eh?"

   "Two hundred francs," I said promptly.

   "

Tiens!" she said, surprised; "well, that's not bad.

How expensive those English clothes must be!"

   The lie saved a lot of trouble, and, strangely enough, it

came true. A few days later I did receive exactly two

hundred francs due to me for a newspaper article, and,

though it hurt to do it, I at once paid every penny of it in

rent. So, though I came near to starving in the following

weeks, I was hardly ever without a roof.

   It was now absolutely necessary to find work, and I

remembered a friend of mine, a Russian waiter named

Boris, who might be able to help me. I had first met him

in the public ward of a hospital, where he was being

treated for arthritis in the left leg. He had told me to come

to him if I were ever in difficulties.

   I must say something about Boris, for he was a

curious character and my close friend for a long time. He

was a big, soldierly man of about thirty-five, and had

been good-looking, but since his illness he had grown im-

mensely fat from lying in bed. Like most Russian

refugees, he had had an adventurous life. His parents,

killed in the Revolution, had been rich people, and he had

served through the war in the Second Siberian Rifles,

which, according to him, was the best regiment in the

Russian Army. After the war he had first worked in a

brush factory, then as a porter at Les Halles, then had

become a dishwasher, and had finally worked his way up

to be a waiter. When he fell ill he was at the Hôtel Scribe,

and taking a hundred francs a day in tips. His ambition

was to become a maitre d'hdtel, save fifty thousand

francs, and set up a small, select restaurant on the Right

Bank.

   Boris always talked of the war as the happiest time

0f his life. War and soldiering were his passion; he

had read innumerable books 0f strategy and military

history, and could tell you all about the theories 0f

Napoleon, Kutuzof, Clausewitz, Moltke and Foch.

Anything to do with soldiers pleased him. His favourite

café was the Closerie des Lilas in Montparnasse,

simply because the statue 0f Marshal Ney stands

outside it. Later 0n, Boris and I sometimes went to the

Rue du Commerce together. If we went by Metro, Boris

always got out at Cambronne station instead 0f

Commerce, though Commerce was nearer; he liked the

association with General Cambronne, who was called

on to surrender at Waterloo, and answered simply,

«

Merde! »

   The only things left to Boris by the Revolution were

his medals and some photographs of his old regiment;

he had kept these when everything else went to the

pawnshop. Almost every day he would spread the

photographs out on the bed and talk about them:

   "

Voila, mon ami! There you see me at the head 0f my

company. Fine big men, eh? Not like these little rats 0f

Frenchmen. A captain at twenty-not bad, eh? Yes, a

captain in the Second Siberian Rifles; and my father

was a colonel.

   «

Ah, mais, mon ami, the ups and downs of life! A

captain in the Russian Army, and then, piff! the Revo-

lution-every penny gone. In 1916 I stayed a week at the

Hotel Édouard Sept; in 1920 I was trying for a job as

night watchman there. I have been night watchman,

cellarman, floor scrubber, dishwasher, porter, lavatory

attendant. I have tipped waiters, and I have been

tipped by waiters.

   « Ah, but I have known what it is to live like a

gentleman,

mon ami. I do not say it to boast, but the

other day I was trying to compute how many

mistresses I have had in my life, and I made it out to

be over two hundred. Yes, at least two hundred . . . Ah, well,

ca reviendra

. Victory is to him who fights the longest.

Courage!" etc. etc.

   Boris had a queer, changeable nature. He always

wished himself back in the army, but he had also been

a waiter long enough t0 acquire the waiter's outlook.

Though he had never saved more than a few thousand

francs, he took it for granted that in the end he would

be able to set up his own restaurant and grow rich. All

waiters, I afterwards found, talk and think of this; it is

what reconciles them to being waiters. Boris used to

talk interestingly about hotel life:

   "Waiting is a gamble," he used to say; "you may die

poor, you may make your fortune in a year. You are

not paid wages, you depend on tips-ten per cent. of the

bill, and a commission from the wine companies on

champagne corks. Sometimes the tips are enormous.

The barman at Maxim's, for instance, makes five

hundred francs a day. More than five hundred, in the

season. . . . I have made two hundred francs a day

myself. It was at a hotel in Biarritz, in the season. The

whole staff, from the manager down to the

plongeurs,

was working twenty-one hours a day. Twenty-one

hours' work and two and a half hours in bed, for a

month on end. Still, it was worth it, at two hundred

francs a day.

   "You never know when a stroke of luck is coming.

Once when I was at the Hôtel Royal an American

customer sent for me before dinner and ordered

twentyfour brandy cocktails. I brought them all

together on a tray, in twenty-four glasses. 'Now,

garcon

,' said the customer (he was drunk), 'I'll drink

twelve and you'll drink twelve, and if you can walk to

the door afterwards you get a hundred francs.' I

walked to the door, and he gave me a hundred francs.

And every night for six days he did the same thing; twelve

brandy

  cocktails, then a hundred francs. A few months later

I heard he had been extradited by the American

Governmentembezzlement. There is something fine, do

you not think, about these Americans?"

   I liked Boris, and we had interesting times together,

playing chess and talking about war and hotels. Boris

used often to suggest that I should become a waiter.

"The life would suit you," he used to say; "when you are

in work, with a hundred francs a day and a nice mistress,

it's not bad. You say you go in for writing. Writing is

bosh. There is only one way to make money at writing,

and that is to marry a publisher's daughter. But you

would make a good waiter if you shaved that moustache

off. You are tall and you speak English those are the

chief things a waiter needs. Wait till I can bend this

accursed leg,

mon ami. And then, if you are ever out of

a job, come to me."

   Now that I was short of my rent, and getting hungry,

I remembered Boris's promise, and decided to look him

up at once. I did not hope to become a waiter so easily

as he had promised, but of course I knew how to scrub

dishes, and no doubt he could get me a job in the

kitchen. He had said that dishwashing jobs were to be

had for the asking during the summer. It was a great

relief to remember that I had after all one influential

friend to fall back on.

                           V

A SHORT time before, Boris had given me an address

in the Rue du Marché des Blancs Manteaux. All he had

said in his letter was that "things were not marching too

badly," and I assumed that he was back

at the Hôtel Scribe, touching his hundred francs a

day. I was full of hope, and wondered why I had been

fool enough not to go to Boris before. I saw myself in a

cosy restaurant, with jolly cooks singing love-songs as

they broke eggs into the pan, and five solid meals a day.

I even squandered two francs-fifty on a packet of

Gaulois Bleu, in anticipation of my wages.

   In the morning I walked down to the Rue du Marché

des Blancs Manteaux; with a shock, I found it a slummy

back street as bad as my own. Boris's hotel was the

dirtiest hotel in the street. From its dark doorway there

came out a vile, sour odour, a mixture of slops and

synthetic soup-it was Bouillon Zip, twenty-five

centimes a packet. A misgiving came over me. People

who drink Bouillon Zip are starving, or near it. Could

Boris possibly be earning a hundred francs a day? A

surly patron, sitting in the office, said to me, Yes, the

Russian was at home-in the attic. I went up six flights of

narrow, winding stairs, the Bouillon Zip growing

stronger as one got higher. Boris did not answer when I

knocked at his door, so I opened it and went in.

   The room was an attic, ten feet square, lighted only

by a skylight, its sole furniture a narrow iron bedstead, a

chair, and a washhand-stand with one game leg. A long

S-shaped chain of bugs marched slowly across the wall

above the bed. Boris was lying asleep, naked, his large

belly making a mound under the grimy sheet. His chest

was spotted with insect bites. As I came in he woke up,

rubbed his eyes, and groaned deeply.

   "Name of Jesus Christ!" he exclaimed, "oh, name of

Jesus Christ, my back! Curse it, I believe my back is

broken!"

   "What's the matter?" I exclaimed.

   "My back is broken, that is all. I have spent the night

on the floor. Oh, name of Jesus Christ! If you knew

what my back feels like!"

   "My dear Boris, are you ill?"

   "Not ill, only starving-yes, starving to death if this

goes on much longer. Besides sleeping on the floor, I

have lived on two francs a day for weeks past. It is

fearful. You have come at a bad moment, mon ami. »

   It did not seem much use to ask whether Boris still

had his job at the Hôtel Scribe. I hurried downstairs

and bought a loaf of bread. Boris threw himself on the

bread and ate half of it, after which he felt better, sat

up in bed, and told me what was the matter with him.

He had failed to get a job after leaving the hospital,

because he was still very lame, and he had spent all

his money and pawned everything, and finally starved

for several days. He had slept a week on the quay

under the Pont d'Austerlitz, among some empty wine

barrels. For the past fortnight he had been living in

this room, together with a Jew, a mechanic. It -

appeared (there was some complicated explanation)