George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

first time would have thought himself in a den of

maniacs. It was only later, when I understood the

working of a hotel, that I saw order in all this chaos.

At half-past eight the work stopped very suddenly.

We were not free till nine, but we used to throw our-

selves full length on the floor, and lie there resting our

legs, too lazy even to go to the ice cupboard for a drink.

Sometimes the

chef du personnel would come in with

bottles of beer, for the hotel stood us an extra beer when

we had had a hard day. The food we were given was no

more than eatable, but the

patron was not mean about

drink; he allowed us two litres of wine a day each,

knowing that if a

plongeur is not given two litres he will

steal three. We had the heeltaps of bottles as well, so

that we often drank too much-a good thing, for one

seemed to work faster when partially drunk.

Four days of the week passed like this; of the other

two working days, one was better and one worse. After

a week of this life I felt in need of a holiday. It was

Saturday night, so the people in our

bistro were busy

getting drunk, and with a free day ahead of me I was

ready to join them. We all went to bed, drunk, at two in

the morning, meaning to sleep till noon. At half-past

five I was suddenly awakened. A night-watchman,

sent from the hotel, was standing at my bedside. He

stripped the clothes back and shook me roughly.

"Get up!" he said. «

Tu t'es bien saoulé la gueule, eh?

Well, never mind that, the hotel's a man short. You've

got to work to-day."

"Why should I work?" I protested. "This is my day

off."

"Day off, nothing! The work's got to be done. Get

up!»

I got up and went out, feeling as though my back

were broken and my skull filled with hot cinders. I did

not think that I could possibly do a day's work. And yet,

after only an hour in the basement, I found that I was

perfectly well. It seemed that in the heat of those

cellars, as in a turkish bath, one could sweat out almost

any quantity of drink.

Plongeurs know this, and count on

it. The power of swallowing quarts of wine, and then

sweating it out before it can do much damage, is one of

the compensations of their life.

XII

BY far my best time at the hotel was when I went to help

the waiter on the fourth floor. We worked in a small

pantry which communicated with the cafeterie by

service lifts. It was delightfully cool after the cellars,

and the work was chiefly polishing silver and glasses,

which is a humane job. Valenti, the waiter, was a decent

sort, and treated me almost as an equal when we were

alone, though he had to speak roughly when there was

anyone else present, for it does not do for a waiter to be

friendly with plongeurs. He used sometimes to tip me five

francs when he had had a good day. He was a comely

youth, aged twenty-four but looking eighteen,

and, like most waiters, he carried himself well and knew

how to wear his clothes. With his black tail-coat and

white tie, fresh face and sleek brown hair, he looked just

like an Eton boy; yet he had earned his living since he

was twelve, and worked his way up literally from the

gutter. Crossing the Italian frontier without a passport,

and selling chestnuts from a barrow on the northern

boulevards, and being given fifty days' imprisonment in

London for working without a permit, and being made

love to by a rich old woman in a hotel, who gave him a

diamond ring and afterwards accused him of stealing it,

were among his experiences. I used to enjoy talking to

him, at slack times when we sat smoking down the lift

shaft.

My bad day was when I washed up for the diningroom.

I had not to wash the plates, which were done in the

kitchen, but only the other crockery, silver, knives and

glasses; yet, even so, it meant thirteen hours' work, and

I used between thirty and forty dishcloths during the

day. The antiquated methods used in France double the

work of washing up. Plate-racks are unheard-of, and

there are no soap-flakes, only the treacly soft soap,

which refuses to lather in the hard, Paris water. I worked

in a dirty, crowded little den, a pantry and scullery

combined, which gave straight on the diningroom.

Besides washing up, I had to fetch the waiters' food and

serve them at table; most of them were intolerably

insolent, and I had to use my fists more than once to get

common civility. The person who normally washed up

was a woman, and they made her life a misery.

It was amusing to look round the filthy little scullery

and think that only a double door was between us and

the dining-room. There sat the customers in all their

splendour-spotless table-cloths, bowls of flowers,

mirrors and gilt cornices and painted cherubim; and

here, just a few feet away, we in our disgusting filth. For

it really was disgusting filth. There was no time to

sweep the floor till evening, and we slithered about in a

compound of soapy water, lettuce-leaves, torn paper and

trampled food. A dozen waiters with their coats off,

showing their sweaty armpits, sat at the table mixing

salads and sticking their thumbs into the cream pots. The

room had a dirty, mixed smell of food and sweat.

Everywhere in the cupboards, behind the piles of

crockery, were squalid stores of food that the waiters

had stolen. There were only two sinks, and no washing

basin, and it was nothing unusual for a waiter to wash

his face in the water in which clean crockery was

rinsing. But the customers saw nothing of this. There

were a coco-nut mat and a mirror outside the dining-

room door, and the waiters used to preen themselves up

and go in looking the picture of cleanliness.

It is an instructive sight to see a waiter going into a

hotel dining-room. As he passes the door a sudden

change comes over him. The set of his shoulders alters;

all the dirt and hurry and irritation have dropped off in

an instant. He glides over the carpet, with a solemn

priest-like air. I remember our assistant maitre d'hôtel, a

fiery Italian, pausing at the dining-room door to address

an apprentice who had broken a bottle of wine. Shaking

his fist above his head he yelled (luckily the door was

more or less soundproof)

«

Tu me fais -----

Do you call yourself a waiter, you

young bastard? You a waiter! You're not fit to scrub

floors in the brothel your mother came from.

Maquereau! »

Words failing him, he turned to the door; and as he

opened it he delivered a final insult in the same manner

as Squire Western in

Tom Jones .

Then he entered the dining-room and sailed across it

dish in hand, graceful as a swan. Ten seconds later he

was bowing reverently to a customer. And you could

not help thinking, as you saw him bow and smile, with

that benign smile of the trained waiter, that the cus-

tomer was put to shame by having such an aristocrat to

serve him.

This washing up was a thoroughly odious job-not

hard, but boring and silly beyond words. It is dreadful

to think that some people spend their whole decades at

such occupations. The woman whom I replaced was

quite sixty years old, and she stood at the sink thirteen

hours a day, six days a week, the year round; she was,

in addition, horribly bullied by the waiters. She gave

out that she had once been an actress-actually, I

imagine, a prostitute; most prostitutes end as char-

women. It was strange to see that in spite of her age and

her life she still wore a bright blonde wig, and darkened

her eyes and painted her face like a girl of twenty. So

apparently even a seventy-eight-hour week can leave

one with some vitality.

XIII

ON my third day at the hotel the

chef du personnel , who

had generally spoken to me in quite a pleasant tone,

called me up and said sharply:

"Here, you, shave that moustache off at once!

Nom de

Dieu

, who ever heard of a

plongeur with a moustache?"

I began to protest, but he cut me short. "A

plongeur

with a moustache-nonsense! Take care I don't see you

with it to-morrow."

On the way home I asked Boris what this meant.

He shrugged his shoulders. "You must do what he says,

mon ami

. No one in the hotel wears a moustache, except

the cooks. I should have thought you would have

noticed it. Reason? There is no reason. It is the

custom."

I saw that it was an etiquette, like not wearing a white

tie with a dinner jacket, and shaved off my moustache.

Afterwards I found out the explanation of the custom,

which is this: waiters in good hotels do not wear

moustaches, and to show their superiority they decree

that

plongeurs shall not wear them either; and the cooks

wear their moustaches to show their contempt for the

waiters.

This gives some idea of the elaborate caste system

existing in a hotel. Our staff, amounting to about a

hundred and ten, had their prestige graded as accurately

as that of soldiers, and a cook or waiter was as much

above a

plongeur as a captain above a private. Highest of

all came the manager, who could sack anybody, even the

cooks. We never saw the

patron , and all we knew of him

was that his meals had to be prepared more carefully than

that of the customers; all the discipline of the hotel

depended on the manager. He was a conscientious man,

and always on the lookout for slackness, but we were too

clever for him. A system of service bells ran through the

hotel, and the whole staff used these for signalling to one

another. A long ring and a short ring, followed by two

more long rings, meant that the manager was coming,

and when we heard it we took care to look busy.

Below the manager came the

maitre d'hôtel . He did not

serve at table, unless to a lord or someone of that kind,

but directed the other waiters and helped with the

catering. His tips, and his bonus from the champagne

companies (it was two francs for each cork he

returned to them), came to two hundred francs a day. He

was in a position quite apart from the rest of the staff,

and took his meals in a private room, with silver on the

table and two apprentices in clean white jackets to serve

him. A little below the head waiter came the head cook,

drawing about five thousand francs a month; he dined in

the kitchen, but at a separate table, and one of the

apprentice cooks waited on him. Then came the

chef du

personnel

; he drew only fifteen hundred francs a month,

but he wore a black coat and did no manual work, and he

could sack

plongeurs and fine waiters. Then came the other

cooks, drawing anything between three thousand and

seven hundred and fifty francs a month; then the waiters,

making about seventy francs a day in tips, besides a

small retaining fee; then the laundresses and sewing