George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

seen some things. Ah, it was glorious!"

"But, " I said, "you were only there to wait?"

"Oh, of course. But still, it was splendid."

The moral is, never be sorry for a waiter. Sometimes

when you sit in a restaurant, still stuffing yourself half

an hour after closing time, you feel that the tired waiter

at your side must surely be despising you. But he is not.

He is not thinking as he looks at you, "What an overfed

lout"; he is thinking, "One day, when I have saved

enough money, I shall be able to imitate that man." He is

ministering to a kind of pleasure he thoroughly

understands and admires. And that is why waiters are

seldom Socialists, have no effective trade union, and

will work twelve hours a day-they work fifteen hours,

seven days a week, in many cafés. They are snobs, and

they find the servile nature of their work rather con-

genial.

The

plongeurs , again, have a different outlook. Theirs

is a job which offers no prospects, is intensely exhaust-

ing, and at the same time has not a trace of skill or

interest; the sort of job that would always be done by

women if women were strong enough. All that is re-

quired of them is to be constantly on the run, and to put

up with long hours and a stuffy atmosphere. They have

no way of escaping from this life, for they cannot save a

penny from their wages, and working from sixty to a

hundred hours a week leaves them no time to train for

anything else. The best they can hope for is to find a

slightly softer job as night-watchman or lavatory

attendant.

And yet the

plongeurs , low as they are, also have a

kind of pride. It is the pride of the drudge-the man who

is equal to no matter what quantity of work. At that

level, the mere power to go on working like an ox is

about the only virtue attainable.

Débrouillard is what

every plongeur wants to be called. A

débrouillard is a man

who, even when he is told to do the impossible, will

se

débrouille

r-get it done somehow. One of the kitchen

plongeurs at the Hôtel X., a German, was well known as

a

débrouillard . One night an English lord came to the

hotel, and the waiters were in despair, for the lord had

asked for peaches, and there were none in stock; it was

late at night, and the shops would be shut. "Leave it to

me," said the German. He went out, and in ten minutes

he was back with four peaches. He had gone into a

neighbouring restaurant and stolen them. That is what is

meant by a

débrouillard . The English lord paid for the

peaches at twenty francs each.

Mario, who was in charge of the cafeterie, had the

typical drudge mentality. All he thought of was getting

through the «

boulot , » and he defied you to give him

too much of it. Fourteen years underground had

left him with about as much natural laziness as a piston

rod. «

Faut étre dur , » he used to say when anyone

complained. You will often hear plongeurs boast, «

Je suis

dur

"-as though they were soldiers, not male charwomen.

Thus everyone in the hotel had his sense of honour,

and when the press of work came we were all ready for a

grand concerted effort to get through it. The constant

war between the different departments also made for

efficiency, for everyone clung to his own privileges and

tried to stop the others idling and pilfering.

This is the good side of hotel work. In a hotel a huge

and complicated machine is kept running by an inade-

quate staff, because every man has a well-defined job

and does it scrupulously. But there is a weak point, and

it is this-that the job the staff are doing is not necessarily

what the customer pays for. The customer pays, as he

sees it, for good service; the employee is paid, as he sees

it, for the boulot-meaning, as a rule, an imitation of good

service. The result is that, though hotels are miracles of

punctuality, they are worse than the worst private houses

in the things that matter.

Take cleanliness, for example. The dirt in the Hôtel

X., as soon as one penetrated into the service quarters,

was revolting. Our cafeterie had year-old filth in all the

dark corners, and the bread-bin was infested with cock-

roaches. Once I suggested killing these beasts to Mario.

"Why kill the poor animals?" he said reproachfully. The

others laughed when I wanted to wash my hands before

touching the butter. Yet we were clean where we

recognised cleanliness as part of the boulot. We

scrubbed the tables and polished the brasswork regu-

larly, because we had orders to do that; but we had no

orders to be genuinely clean, and in any case we had no

time for it. We were simply carrying out our duties;

and as our first duty was punctuality, we saved time by

being dirty.

In the kitchen the dirt was worse. It is not a figure of

speech, it is a mere statement of fact to say that a

French cook will spit in the soup-that is, if he is not

going to drink it himself. He is an artist, but his art is

not cleanliness. To a certain extent he is even dirty

because he is an artist, for food, to look smart, needs

dirty treatment. When a steak, for instance, is brought

up for the head cook's inspection, he does not handle it

with a fork. He picks it up in his fingers and slaps it

down, runs his thumb round the dish and licks it to

taste the gravy, runs it round and licks again, then

steps back and contemplates the piece of meat like an

artist judging a picture, then presses it lovingly into

place with his fat, pink fingers, every one of which he

has licked a hundred times that morning. When he is

satisfied, he takes a cloth and wipes his fingerprints

from the dish, and hands it to the waiter. And the

waiter, of course, dips his fingers into the gravy-his

nasty, greasy fingers which he is for ever running

through his brilliantined hair. Whenever one pays more

than, say, ten francs for a dish of meat in Paris, one may

be certain that it has been fingered in this manner. In

very cheap restaurants it is different; there, the same

trouble is not taken over the food, and it is just forked

out of the pan and flung on to a plate, without handling.

Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more

sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.

Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants,

because sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and

smartness. The hotel employee is too busy getting food

ready to remember that it is meant to be eaten. A meal

is simply «

une commande » to him, just as a man dying of

cancer is simply "

a case " to the doctor. A customer

orders, for example, a piece of toast. Somebody, pressed

with work in a cellar deep underground, has to prepare it.

How can he stop and say to himself, "This toast is to be

eaten-I must make it eatable"? All he knows is that it must

look right and must be ready in three minutes. Some large

drops of sweat fall from his forehead on to the toast. Why

should he worry? Presently the toast falls among the filthy

sawdust on the floor. Why trouble to make a new piece? It

is much quicker to wipe the sawdust off. On the way

upstairs the toast falls again, butter side down. Another

wipe is all it needs. And so with everything. The only food

at the Hôtel X. which was ever prepared cleanly was the

staff's, and the

patron's . The maxim, repeated by everyone,

was: "Look out for the

patron , and as for the clients,

s'en f--

pas mal

! » Everywhere in the service quarters dirt festered-a

secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel

like the intestines through a man's body.

Apart from the dirt, the

patron swindled the customers

wholeheartedly. For the most part the materials of the food

were very bad, though the cooks knew how to serve it up in

style. The meat was at best ordinary, and as to the

vegetables, no good housekeeper would have looked at

them in the market. The cream, by a standing order, was

diluted with milk. The tea and coffee were of inferior sorts,

and the jam was synthetic stuff out of vast, unlabelled tins.

All the cheaper wines, according to Boris, were corked vin

ordinaire. There was a rule that employees must pay for

anything they spoiled, and in consequence damaged things

were seldom thrown away. Once the waiter on the third

floor dropped a roast chicken down the shaft of our service

lift, where it fell into a litter of broken bread, torn paper

and so forth at the bottom. We simply wiped it with a cloth and

sent it up again. Upstairs there were dirty tales of once-used

sheets not being washed, but simply damped, ironed and put back

on the beds. The patron was as mean to us as to the

customers. Throughout the vast hotel there was not,

for instance, such a thing as a brush and pan; one had

to manage with a broom and a piece of cardboard. And

the staff lavatory was worthy of Central Asia, and there

was no place to wash one's hands, except the sinks

used for washing crockery.

In spite of all this the Hôtel X. was one of the dozen

most expensive hotels in Paris, and the customers paid

startling prices. The ordinary charge for a night's

lodging, not including breakfast, was two hundred

francs. All wine and tobacco were sold at exactly double

shop prices, though of course the patron bought at the

wholesale price. If a customer had a title, or was

reputed to be a millionaire, all his charges went up

automatically. One morning on the fourth floor an

American who was on diet wanted only salt and hot

water for his breakfast. Valenti was furious. "Jesus

Christ!" he said, "what about my ten per cent.? Ten per

cent. of salt and water!" And he charged twentyfive

francs for the breakfast. The customer paid without a

murmur.

According to Boris, the same kind of thing went on

in all Paris hotels, or at least in all the big, expensive

ones. But I imagine that the customers at the Hotel X.

were especially easy to swindle, for they were mostly

Americans, with a sprinkling of English-no Frenchand

seemed to know nothing whatever about good food.

They would stuff themselves with disgusting American

"cereals," and eat marmalade at tea, and drink ver-

mouth after dinner, and order a poulet à la reine at a

hundred francs and then souse it in Worcester sauce.

One customer, from Pittsburg, dined every night in his

bedroom on grape-nuts, scrambled eggs and cocoa.

Perhaps it hardly matters whether such people are

swindled or not.

XV

HEARD queer tales in the hotel. There were tales of

dope fiends, of old debauchees who frequented hotels in

search of pretty page boys, of thefts and blackmail.

Mario told me of a hotel in which he had been, where a

chambermaid stole a priceless diamond ring from an

American lady. For days the staff were searched as they