George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

Then I remembered the Russian restaurant, due to open

in a fortnight. It seemed hardly fair to promise working a

month, and then leave in the middle. I said that I had

other work in prospect-could I be engaged for a

fortnight? But at that the

chef du personnel shrugged his

shoulders and said that the hotel only engaged men by

the month. Evidently I had lost my chance of a job.

Boris, by arrangement, was waiting for me in the

Arcade of the Rue de Rivoli. When I told him what had

happened, he was furious. For the first time since I had

known him he forgot his manners and called me a fool.

"Idiot! Species of idiot! What's the good of my

finding you a job when you go and chuck it up the next

moment? How could you be such a fool as to mention

the other restaurant? You'd only to promise you would

work for a month."

"It seemed more honest to say I might have to leave,"

I objected.

"Honest! Honest! Who ever heard of a

plongeur being

honest?

Mon ami "-suddenly he seized my lapel and

spoke very earnestly-"

mon ami , you have worked

here all day. You see what hotel work is like. Do you

think a

plongeur can afford a sense of honour?"

"No, perhaps not."

"Well, then, go back quickly and tell the

chef du

personnel

you are quite ready to work for a month. Say

you will throw the other job over. Then, when our

restaurant opens, we have only to walk out."

"But what about my wages if I break my contract?"

Boris banged his stick on the pavement and cried out

at such stupidity. "Ask to be paid by the day, then you

won't lose a sou. Do you suppose they would prosecute

a

plongeur for breaking his contract? 'A

plongeur is too low

to be prosecuted."

I hurried back, found the

chef du personnel , and told

him that I would work for a month, whereat he signed

me on. This was my first lesson in

plongeur morality.

Later I realised how foolish it had been to have any

scruples, for the big hotels are quite merciless towards

their employees. They engage or discharge men as the

work demands, and they all sack ten per cent. or more

of their staff when the season is over. Nor have they

any difficulty in replacing a man who leaves at short

notice, for Paris is thronged by hotel employees out of

work.

XI

AS it turned out, I did not break my contract, for it

was six weeks before the Auberge de Jehan Cottard

even showed signs of opening. In the meantime I

worked at the Hôtel X., four days a week in the cafe-

terie, one day helping the waiter on the fourth floor,

and one day replacing the woman who washed up for

the dining-room. My day off, luckily, was Sunday, but

sometimes another man was ill and I had to work that

day as well. The hours were from seven in the

morning till two in the afternoon, and from five in the

evening till nine-eleven hours; but it was a fourteen-

hour day when I washed up for the dining-room. By the

ordinary standards of a Paris

plongeur , these are

exceptionally short hours. The only hardship of life was

the fearful heat and stuffiness of these labyrinthine

cellars. Apart from this the hotel, which was large and

well organised, was considered a comfortable one.

Our cafeterie was a murky cellar measuring twenty

feet by seven by eight high, and so crowded with coffee-

urns, breadcutters and the like that one could hardly

move without banging against something. It was lighted

by one dim electric bulb, and four or five gas-fires that

sent out a fierce red breath. There was a thermometer

there, and the temperature never fell below 11o

degrees Fahrenheit-it neared 13o at some times of the

day. At one end were five service lifts, and at the other

an ice cupboard where we stored milk and butter.

When you went into the ice cupboard you dropped a

hundred degrees of temperature at a single step; it

used to remind me of the hymn about Greenland's icy

mountains and India's coral strand. Two men worked

in the cafeterie besides Boris and myself. One was

Mario, a huge, excitable Italian-he was like a city

policeman with operatic gestures-and the other, a

hairy, uncouth animal whom we called the Magyar; I

think he was a Transylvanian, or something even more

remote. Except the Magyar we were all big men, and at

the rush hours we collided incessantly.

The work in the cafeterie was spasmodic. We were

never idle, but the real work only came in bursts of two

hours at a time-we called each burst «

un coup defeu ."

The first

coup de feu came at eight, when the guests

upstairs began to wake up and demand breakfast. At

eight a sudden banging and yelling would break out all through

the basement; bells rang on all sides, blue-aproned men

rushed through the passages, our service lifts came

down with a simultaneous crash, and the waiters on all

five floors began shouting Italian oaths down the

shafts. I don't remember all our duties, but they

included making tea, coffee and chocolate, fetching

meals from the kitchen, wines from the cellar and fruit

and so forth from the dining-room, slicing bread,

making toast, rolling pats of butter, measuring jam,

opening milk-cans, counting lumps of sugar, boiling

eggs, cooking porridge, pounding ice, grinding coffee-

all this for from a hundred to two hundred customers.

The kitchen was thirty yards away, and the dining-

room sixty or seventy yards. Everything. we sent up in

the service lifts had to be covered by a voucher, and the

vouchers had to be carefully filed, and there was

trouble if even a lump of sugar was lost. Besides this,

we had to supply the staff with bread and coffee, and

fetch the meals for the waiters upstairs. All in all, it

was a complicated job.

I calculated that one had to walk and run about

fifteen miles during the day, and yet the strain of the

work was more mental than physical. Nothing could be

easier, on the face of it, than this stupid scullion work,

but it is astonishingly hard when one is in a hurry. One

has to leap to and fro between a multitude of jobs -it is

like sorting a pack of cards against the clock. You are,

for example, making toast, when bang! down comes a

service lift with an order for tea, rolls and three

different kinds of jam, and simultaneously bang! down

comes another demanding scrambled eggs, coffee and

grapefruit; you run to the kitchen for the eggs and to

the dining-room for the fruit, going like lightning so as

to be back before your toast burns, and having to re-

member about the tea and coffee, besides half a dozen

other orders that are still pending; and at the same time

some waiter is following you and making trouble about

a lost bottle of soda-water, and you are arguing with

him. It needs more brains than one might think. Mario

said, no doubt truly, that it took a year to make a

reliable cafetier.

The time between eight and half-past ten was a sort

of delirium. Sometimes we were going as though we

had only five minutes to live; sometimes there were

sudden lulls when the orders stopped and everything

seemed quiet for a moment. Then we swept up the litter

from the floor, threw down fresh sawdust, and

swallowed gallipots of wine or coffee or water-any-

thing, so long as it was wet. Very often we used to

break off chunks of ice and suck them while we

worked. The heat among the gas-fires was nauseating;

we swallowed quarts of drink during the day, and after

a few hours even our aprons were drenched with sweat.

At times we were hopelessly behind with the work, and

some of the customers would have gone without their

breakfast, but Mario always pulled us through. He had

worked fourteen years in the cafeterie, and he had the

skill that never wastes a second between jobs. The

Magyar was very stupid and I was inexperienced, and

Boris was inclined to shirk, partly because of his lame

leg, partly because he was ashamed of working in the

cafeterie after being a waiter; but Mario was wonderful.

The way he would stretch his great arms right across

the cafeterie to fill a coffee-pot with one hand and boil

an egg with the other, at the same time watching toast

and shouting directions to the Magyar, and between

whiles singing snatches from

Rigoletto , was beyond all

praise. The

patron knew his value, and he was paid a

thousand francs a month, instead of five hundred like

the rest of us.

The breakfast pandemonium stopped at half-past ten.

Then we scrubbed the cafeterie tables, swept the floor

and polished the brasswork, and, on good mornings,

went one at a time to the lavatory for a smoke. This was

our slack time-only relatively slack, however, for we

had only ten minutes for lunch, and we never got

through it uninterrupted. The customers' luncheon hour,

between twelve and two, was another period of turmoil

like the breakfast hour. Most of our work was fetching

meals from the kitchen, which meant constant

engueulades

from the cooks. By this time the cooks had

sweated in front of their furnaces for four or five hours,

and their tempers were all warmed up.

At two we were suddenly free men. We threw off our

aprons and put on our coats, hurried out of doors, and,

when we had money, dived into the nearest

bistro . It was

strange, coming up into the street from those firelit

cellars. The air seemed blindingly clear and cold, like

arctic summer; and how sweet the petrol did smell, after

the stenches of sweat and food! Sometimes we met

some of our cooks and waiters in the bistros, and they

were friendly and stood us drinks. Indoors we were their

slaves, but it is an etiquette in hotel life that between

hours everyone is equal, and the

engueulades do not

count.

At a quarter to five we went back to the hotel. Till

half-past six there were no orders, and we used this time

to polish silver, clean out the coffee-urns, and do other

odd jobs. Then the grand turmoil of the day started-the

dinner hour. I wish I could be Zola for a little while, just

to describe that dinner hour. The essence of the situation

was that a hundred or two hundred people were

demanding individually different meals of five or six

courses, and that fifty or sixty people had to cook and

serve them and clean up the mess

afterwards; anyone with experience of catering will

know what that means. And at this time when the work

was doubled, the whole staff was tired out, and a

number of them were drunk. I could write pages about

the scene without giving a true idea of it. The chargings

to and fro in the narrow passages, the collisions, the

yells, the struggling with crates and trays and blocks of

ice, the heat, the darkness, the furious festering quarrels

which there was no time to fight out-they pass

description. Anyone coming into the basement for the