George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

women; then the apprentice waiters, who received no

tips, but were paid seven hundred and fifty francs a

month; then the

plongeurs , also at seven hundred and fifty

francs; then the chambermaids, at five or six hundred

francs a month; and lastly the cafetiers, at five hundred a

month. We of the cafeterie were the very dregs of the

hotel, despised and tutoied by everyone.

There were various others-the office employees,

called generally couriers, the storekeeper, the cellarman,

some porters and pages, the ice man, the bakers, the

night-watchman, the doorkeeper. Different jobs were

done by different races. The office employees and the

cooks and sewing-women were French, the waiters

Italians and Germans (there is hardly such a thing as a

French waiter in Paris), the

plongeurs of every race in

Europe, beside Arabs and negroes. French was the lingua

franca, even the Italians speaking it to one another.

All the departments had their special perquisites.

In all Paris hotels it is the custom to sell the broken

bread to bakers for eight sous a pound, and the kitchen

scraps to pigkeepers for a trifle, and to divide the pro-

ceeds of this among the

plongeurs . There was much

pilfering, too. The waiters all stole food-in fact, I

seldom saw a waiter trouble to eat the rations provided

for him by the hotel-and the cooks did it on a larger

scale in the kitchen, and we in the cafeterie swilled

illicit tea and coffee. The cellarman stole brandy. By a

rule of the hotel the waiters were not allowed to keep

stores of spirits, but had to go to the cellarman for each

drink as it was ordered. As the cellarman poured out the

drinks he would set aside perhaps a teaspoonful from

each glass, and he amassed quantities in this way. He

would sell you the stolen brandy for five sous a swig if

he thought he could trust you.

There were thieves among the staff, and if you left

money in your coat pockets it was generally taken. The

doorkeeper, who paid our wages and searched us for

stolen food, was the greatest thief in the hotel. Out of

my five hundred francs a month, this man actually

managed to cheat me of a hundred and fourteen francs in

six weeks. I had asked to be paid daily, so the door-

keeper paid me sixteen francs each evening, and, by not

paying for Sundays (for which of course payment was

due), pocketed sixty-four francs. Also, I sometimes

worked on a Sunday, for which, though I did not know

it, I was entitled to an extra twenty-five francs. The

doorkeeper never paid me this either, and so made away

with another seventy-five francs. I only realised during

my last week that I was being cheated, and, as I could

prove nothing, only twenty-five francs were refunded.

The doorkeeper played similar tricks on any employee

who was fool enough to be taken in. He called

himself a Greek, but in reality he was an Armenian.

After knowing him I saw the force of the proverb

"Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek,

but don't trust an Armenian."

There were queer characters among the waiters. One

was a gentleman-a youth who had been educated at a

university, and had had a well-paid job in a business

office. He had caught a venereal disease, lost his job,

drifted, and now considered himself lucky to be a

waiter. Many of the waiters had slipped into France

without passports, and one or two of them were spies --it

is a common profession for a spy to adopt. One day

there was a fearful row in the waiters' dining-room

between Morandi, a dangerous-looking man with eyes

set too far apart, and another Italian. It appeared that

Morandi had taken the other man's mistress. The other

man, a weakling and obviously frightened of Morandi,

was threatening vaguely.

Morandi jeered at him. "Well, what are you going to

do about it? I've slept with your girl, slept with her three

times. It was fine. What can you do, eh?"

"I can denounce you to the secret police. You are an

Italian spy."

Morandi did not deny it. He simply produced a razor

from his tail pocket and made two swift strokes in the

air, as though slashing a man's cheeks open. Whereat the

other waiter took it back.

The queerest type I ever saw in the hotel was an

"extra." He had been engaged at twenty-five francs for

the day to replace the Magyar, who was ill. He was a

Serbian, a thick-set nimble fellow of about twenty-five,

speaking six languages, including English. He seemed to

know all about hotel work, and up till midday he worked

like a slave. Then, as soon as it had struck twelve, he

turned sulky, shirked his work, stole wine,

and finally crowned all by loafing about openly with a

pipe in his mouth. Smoking, of course, was forbidden

under severe penalties. The manager himself heard of it

and came down to interview the Serbian, fuming with

rage.

"What the devil do you mean by smoking here?" he

cried.

"What the devil do you mean by having a face like

that?" answered the Serbian, calmly.

I cannot convey the blasphemy of such a remark. The

head cook, if a

plongeur had spoken to him like that,

would have thrown a saucepan of hot soup in his face.

The manager said instantly, "You're sacked!" and at two

o'clock the Serbian was given his twenty-five francs and

duly sacked. Before he went out Boris asked him in

Russian what game he was playing. He said the Serbian

answered

"Look here,

mon vieux , they've got to pay me a day's

wages if I work up to midday, haven't they? That's the

law. And where's the sense of working after I get my

wages? So I'll tell you what I do. I go to a hotel and get

a job as an extra, and up to midday I work hard. Then,

the moment it's struck twelve, I start raising such hell

that they've no choice but to sack me. Neat, eh? Most

days I'm sacked by half-past twelve; to-day it was two

o'clock; but I don't care, I've saved four hours' work.

The only trouble is, one can't do it at the same hotel

twice."

It appeared that he had played this game at half the

hotels and restaurants in Paris. It is probably quite an

easy game to play during the summer, though the hotels

protect themselves against it as well as they can by

means of a black list.

XIV

IN a few days I had grasped the main principles on

which the hotel was run. The thing that would astonish

anyone coming for the first time into the service

quarters of a hotel would be the fearful noise and

disorder during the rush hours. It is something so

different from the steady work in a shop or a factory

that it looks at first sight like mere bad management.

But it is really quite unavoidable, and for this reason.

Hotel work is not particularly hard, but by its nature it

comes in rushes and cannot be economised. You cannot,

for instance, grill a steak two hours before it is wanted;

you have to wait till the last moment, by which time a

mass of other work has accumulated, and then do it all

together, in frantic haste. The result is that at meal-

times everyone is doing two men's work, which is

impossible without noise and quarrelling. Indeed the

quarrels are a necessary part of the process, for the pace

would never be kept up if everyone did not accuse

everyone else of idling. It was for this reaon that during

the rush hours the whole staff raged and cursed like

demons. At those times there was scarcely a verb in the

hotel except foutre. A girl in the bakery, aged sixteen,

used oaths that would have defeated a cabman. (Did not

Hamlet say "cursing like a scullion"? No doubt

Shakespeare had watched scullions at work.) But we are

not losing our heads and wasting time; we were just

stimulating one another for the effort of packing four

hours' work into two hours.

What keeps a hotel going is the fact that the em-

ployees take a genuine pride in their work, beastly and

silly though it is. If a man idles, the others soon find him

out, and conspire against him to get him sacked.

Cooks, waiters and

plongeurs differ greatly in outlook,

but they are all alike in being proud of their efficiency.

Undoubtedly the most workmanlike class, and the

least servile, are the cooks. They do not earn quite so

much as waiters, but their prestige is higher and their

employment steadier. The cook does not look upon

himself as a servant, but as a skilled workman; he is

generally called «

un ouvrier , » which a waiter never is.

He knows his power-knows that he alone makes or mars

a restaurant, and that if he is five minutes late

everything is out of gear, He despises the whole non-

cooking staff, and makes it a point of honour to insult

everyone below the head waiter. And he takes a genuine

artistic pride in his work, which demands very great

skill. It is not the cooking that is so difficult, but the

doing everything to time. Between breakfast and lun-

cheon the head cook at the Hôtel X. would receive

orders for several hundred dishes, all to be served at

different times; he cooked few of them himself, but he

gave instructions about all of them and inspected them

before they were sent up. His memory was wonderful.

The vouchers were pinned on a board, but the head cook

seldom looked at them; everything was stored in his

mind, and exactly to the minute, as each dish fell due,

he would call out, «

Faites marcher une côtelette de veau » (or

whatever it was) unfailingly. He was an insufferable

bully, but he was also an artist. It is for their punctu-

ality, and not for any superiority in technique, that men

cooks are preferred to women.

The waiter's outlook is quite different. He too is

proud in a way of his skill, but his skill is chiefly in

being servile. His work gives him the mentality, not of a

workman, but of a snob. He lives perpetually in sight of

rich people, stands at their tables, listens to their conver

sation, sucks up to them with smiles and discreet little

jokes. He has the pleasure of spending money by proxy.

Moreover, there is always the chance that he may

become rich himself, for, though most waiters die poor,

they have long runs of luck occasionally. At some cafés

on the Grand Boulevard there is so much money to be

made that the waiters actually pay the

patron for their

employment. The result is that between constantly

seeing money, and hoping to get it, the waiter comes to

identify himself to some extent with his employers. He

will take pains to serve a meal in style, because he feels

that he is participating in the meal himself.

I remember Valenti telling me of some banquet at

Nice at which he had once served, and of how it cost

two hundred thousand francs and was talked of for

months afterwards. "It was splendid,

mon p'tit, mais

magnifique

! Jesus Christ! The champagne, the silver, the

orchids-I have never seen anything like them, and I have