George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

literally have to fight on the Paris Metro at six in the

morning-and stood jammed in the swaying mass of

passengers, nose to nose with some hideous French face,

breathing sour wine and garlic. And then one descended

into the labyrinth of the hotel basement, and forgot

daylight till two o'clock, when the sun was hot and the

town black with people and cars.

After my first week at the hotel I always spent the

afternoon interval in sleeping, or, when I had money,

in a

bistro . Except for a few ambitious waiters who went

to English classes, the whole staff wasted their leisure in

this way; one seemed too lazy after the morning's work

to do anything better. Sometimes half a dozen

plongeurs

would make up a party and go to an abominable brothel

in the Rue de Sieyès, where the charge was only five

francs twenty-five centimes-tenpence half-penny. It was

nicknamed «

le prix fixe , » and they used to describe

their experiences there as a great joke. It was a favourite

rendezvous of hotel workers. The

plongeurs' wages did

not allow them to marry, and no doubt work in the

basement does not encourage fastidious feelings.

For another four hours one was in the cellars, and

then one emerged, sweating, into the cool street. It was

lamplight-that strange purplish gleam of the Paris lamps-

and beyond the river the Eiffel Tower flashed from top

to bottom with zigzag skysigns, like enormous snakes of

fire. Streams of cars glided silently to and fro, and

women, exquisite-looking in the dim light, strolled up

and down the arcade. Sometimes a woman would glance

at Boris or me, and then, noticing our greasy clothes,

look hastily away again. One fought another battle in the

Metro and was home by ten. Generally from ten to

midnight I went to a little

bistro in our street, an

underground place frequented by Arab navvies. It was a

bad place for fights, and I sometimes saw bottles thrown,

once with fearful effect, but as a rule the Arabs fought

among themselves and let Christians alone. Raki, the

Arab drink, was very cheap, and the bistro was open at

all hours, for the Arabs-lucky men-had the power of

working all day and drinking all night.

It was the typical life of a

plongeur , and it did not

seem a bad life at the time. I had no sensation of

poverty, for even after paying my rent and setting aside

enough for tobacco and journeys and my food on

Sundays, I still had four francs a day for drinks, and four

francs was wealth. There was-it is hard to express it-a

sort of heavy contentment, the contentment a well-fed

beast might feel, in a life which had become so simple.

For nothing could be simpler than the life of a

plongeur .

He lives in a rhythm between work and sleep, without

time to think, hardly conscious of the exterior world; his

Paris has shrunk to the hotel, the Metro, a few bistros

and his bed. If he goes afield, it is only a few streets

away, on a trip with some servantgirl who sits on his

knee swallowing oysters and beer. On his free day he

lies in bed till noon, puts on a clean shirt, throws dice for

drinks, and after lunch goes back to bed again. Nothing

is quite real to him but the

boulot , drinks and sleep; and

of these sleep is the most important.

One night, in the small hours, there was a murder just

beneath my window. I was woken by a fearful uproar,

and, going to the window, saw a man lying flat on the

stones below; I could see the murderers, three of them,

flitting away at the end of the street. Some of us went

down and found that the man was quite dead, his skull

cracked with a piece of lead piping. I remember the

colour of his blood, curiously purple, like wine; it was

still on the cobbles when I came home that evening, and

they said the schoolchildren had come from miles round

to see it. But the thing that strikes me in looking back is

that I was in bed and asleep within three minutes of the

murder. So were most of the people in the street; we just

made sure that the man was done for, and went straight

back to bed. We were working people, and where was

the sense of wasting sleep over a murder?

Work in the hotel taught me the true value of sleep,

just as being hungry had taught me the true value of

food. Sleep had ceased to be a mere physical necessity; it

was something voluptuous, a debauch more than a relief.

I had no more trouble with the bugs. Mario had told me

of a sure remedy for them, namely pepper, strewed thick

over the bedclothes. It made me sneeze, but the bugs all

hated it, and emigrated to other rooms.

XVII

WITH thirty francs a week to spend on drinks I could

take part in the social life of the quarter. We had some

jolly evenings, on Saturdays, in the little bistro at the foot

of the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux.

The brick-floored room, fifteen feet square, was

packed with twenty people, and the air dim with smoke.

The noise was deafening, for everyone was either talking

at the top of his voice or singing. Sometimes it was just a

confused din of voices; sometimes everyone would burst

out together in the same songthe " Marseillaise, » or the

" Internationale, » or " Madelon," or " Les Fraises et les

Framboises. » Azaya, a great clumping peasant girl who

worked fourteen hours a day in a glass factory, sang a

song about, "

Il a perdu ses pantalons, tout en dansant le

Charleston

." Her friend Marinette, a thin, dark Corsican

girl of obstinate virtue, tied her knees together and

danced the

danse du ventre . The old Rougiers wandered

in and out, cadging drinks and trying to tell a long,

involved story about someone who had once cheated

them over a bedstead. R., cadaverous and silent, sat in

his corner quietly boozing. Charlie, drunk, half danced,

half staggered to and fro with a glass of sham absinthe

balanced in one fat hand, pinching the women's breasts

and declaiming poetry. People played darts and diced

for drinks. Manuel, a Spaniard, dragged the girls to the

bar and shook the dice-box against their bellies, for

luck. Madame F. stood at the bar rapidly pouring

chopines

of wine through the pewter funnel, with a wet

dishcloth always handy, because every man in the room

tried to make love to her. Two children, bastards of big

Louis the bricklayer, sat in a corner sharing a glass of

sirop

. Everyone was very happy, overwhelmingly

certain that the world was a good place and we a notable

set of people.

For an hour the noise scarcely slackened. Then about

midnight there was a piercing shout of «

Citoyens ! » and

the sound of a chair falling over. A blond, red-faced

workman had risen to his feet and was banging a bottle

on the table. Everyone stopped singing; the word went

round, "Sh! Furex is starting!" Furex was a strange

creature, a Limousin stonemason who worked steadily

all the week and drank himself into a kind of paroxysm

on Saturdays. He had lost his memory and could not

remember anything before the war, and he would have

gone to pieces through drink if Madame F. had not taken

care of him. On Saturday evenings at about five o'clock

she would say to someone, "Catch Furex before he

spends his wages," and when he had been caught she

would take away his money, leaving him enough for one

good drink. One week he escaped, and, rolling blind

drunk in the Place Monge, was run over by a car and

badly hurt.

The queer thing about Furex was that, though he was

a Communist when sober, he turned violently patriotic

when drunk. He started the evening with good

Communist principles, but after four or five litres he

was a rampant Chauvinist, denouncing spies,

challenging all foreigners to fight, and, if he was not

prevented, throwing bottles. It was at this stage that he

made his speech-for he made a patriotic speech every

Saturday night. The speech was always the same, word

for word. It ran:

"Citizens of the Republic, are there any Frenchmen

here? If there are any Frenchmen here, I rise to remind

them-to remind them in effect, of the glorious days of

the war. When one looks back upon that time of

comradeship and heroism-one looks back, in effect,

upon that time of comradeship and heroism. When one

remembers the heroes who are dead-one remembers, in

effect, the heroes who are dead. Citizens of the

Republic, I was wounded at Verdun

"

Here he partially undressed and showed the wound

he had received at Verdun. There were shouts of

applause. We thought nothing in the world could be

funnier than this speech of Furex's. He was a well-

known spectacle in the quarter; people used to come in

from other

bistros to watch him when his fit started.

The word was passed round to bait Furex. With a

wink to the others someone called for silence, and asked

him to sing the « Marseillaise. » He sang it well, in a fine

bass voice, with patriotic gurgling noises deep down in

his chest when he came to

« Aux arrmes, citoyens!

Forrmez vos bataillons!

» Veritable tears rolled down his

cheeks; he was too drunk to see that everyone was

laughing at him. Then, before he had finished, two

strong workmen seized him by either arm and held him

down, while Azaya shouted, "Vine l'Allemagne! » just out

of his reach. Furex's face went purple at such infamy.

Everyone in the bistro began shouting together, "

Vive

l'Allemagne! A bas la France!"

while Furex struggled to

get at them. But suddenly he spoiled the fun. His face

turned pale and doleful, his limbs went limp, and before

anyone could stop him he was sick on the table. Then Madame

F. hoisted him like a sack and carried him up to bed. In the

morning he reappeared quiet and civil, and bought a copy of

L'Humanité

.

The table was wiped with a cloth, Madame F.

brought more litre bottles and loaves of bread, and we

settled down to serious drinking. There were more

songs. An itinerant singer came in with his banjo and

performed for five-sou pieces. An Arab and a girl from

the

bistro down the street did a dance, the man wielding

a painted wooden phallus the size of a rolling-pin.

There were gaps in the noise now. People had begun to

talk about their love-affairs, and the war, and the barbel

fishing in the Seine, and the best way to

faire la

revolution

, and to tell stories. Charlie, grown sober again,

captured the conversation and talked about his soul for

five minutes. The doors and windows were opened to

cool the room. The street was emptying, and in the

distance one could hear the lonely milk train thundering

down the Boulevard St. Michel. The air blew cold on

our foreheads, and the coarse African wine still tasted

good: we were still happy, but meditatively, with the