George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

hurried up to the Place d'Italie and fought for

a place on the Metro. By seven I was in the desolation of

the cold, filthy kitchen, with the potato skins and bones

and fishtails littered on the floor, and a pile of plates,

stuck together in their grease, waiting from overnight. I

could not start on the plates yet, because the water was

cold, and I had to fetch milk and make coffee, for the

others arrived at eight and expected to find coffee ready.

Also, there were always several copper saucepans to

clean. Those copper saucepans are the bane of a

plongeur's

life. They have to be scoured with sand and

bunches of chain, ten minutes to each one, and then

polished on the outside with Brasso. Fortunately, the art

of making them has been lost and they are gradually

vanishing from French kitchens, though one can still

buy them second-hand.

When I had begun on the plates the cook would take

me away from the plates to begin skinning onions, and

when I had begun on the onions the

patron would arrive

and send me out to buy cabbages. When I came back

with the cabbages the

patron's wife would tell me to go to

some shop half a mile away and buy a pot of rouge; by

the time I came back there would be more vegetables

waiting, and the plates were still not done. In this way

our incompetence piled one job on another throughout

the day, everything in arrears.

Till ten, things went comparatively easily, though we

were working fast, and no one lost his temper. The cook

would find time to talk about her artistic nature, and say

did I not think Tolstoi was

épatant, and sing in a fine

soprano voice as she minced beef on the board. But at

ten the waiters began clamouring for their lunch, which

they had early, and at eleven the first customers would

be arriving. Suddenly everything became hurry and bad

temper. There was not the same furious rushing and

yelling as at the Hôtel X., but an atmosphere of

muddle, petty spite and exasperation. Discomfort was at

the bottom of it. It was unbearably cramped in the

kitchen, and dishes had to be put on the floor, and one

had to be thinking constantly about not stepping on

them. The cook's vast buttocks banged against me as she

moved to and fro. A ceaseless, nagging chorus of orders

streamed from her:

"Unspeakable idiot! How many times have I told you

not to bleed the beetroots? Quick, let me get to the sink!

Put those knives away; get on with the potatoes. What

have you done with my strainer? Oh, leave those

potatoes alone. Didn't I tell you to skim the

bouillon ? Take

that can of water off the stove. Never mind the washing

up, chop this celery. No, not like that, you fool, like this.

There! Look at you letting those peas boil over! Now get

to work and scale these herrings. Look, do you call this

plate clean? Wipe it on your apron. Put that salad on the

floor. That's right, put it where I'm bound to step in it!

Look out, that pot's boiling over! Get me down that

saucepan. No, the other one. Put this on the grill. Throw

those potatoes away. Don't waste time, throw them on

the floor. Tread them in.' Now throw down some sawdust;

this floor's like a skating-rink. Look, you fool, that

steak's burning!

Mon Dieu , why did they send me an idiot

for a

plongeur ? Who are you talking to? Do you realise that

my aunt was a Russian countess?" etc. etc. etc.

This went on till three o'clock without much variation,

except that about eleven the cook usually had a

crise de

nerfs

and a flood of tears. From three to five was a fairly

slack time for the waiters, but the cook was still busy,

and I was working my fastest, for there was a pile of dirty

plates waiting, and it was a race to get them done, or

partly done, before dinner began. The washing up was

doubled by the primitive conditions-

a cramped draining-board, tepid water, sodden cloths,

and a sink that got blocked once in an hour. By five the

cook and I were feeling unsteady on our feet, not having

eaten or sat down since seven. We used to collapse, she

on the dustbin and I on the floor, drink a bottle of beer,

and apologise for some of the things we had said in the

morning. Tea was what kept us going. We took care to

have a pot always stewing, and drank pints during the

day.

At half-past five the hurry and quarrelling began

again, and now worse than before, because everyone was

tired out. The cook had a

crise de nerfs at six and another

at nine; they came on so regularly that one could have

told the time by them. She would flop down on the

dustbin, begin weeping hysterically, and cry out that

never, no, never had she thought to come to such a life as

this; her nerves would not stand it; she had studied

music at Vienna; she had a bedridden husband to

support, etc. etc. At another time one would have been

sorry for her, but, tired as we all were, her whimpering

voice merely infuriated us. Jules used. to stand in the

doorway and mimic her weeping. The

patron's wife nagged,

and Boris and Jules quarrelled all day, because Jules

shirked his work, and Boris, as head waiter, claimed the

larger share of the tips. Only the second day after the

restaurant opened, they came to blows in the kitchen over

a two-franc tip, and the cook and I had to separate them.

The only person who never forgot his manners was the

patron

. He kept the same hours as the rest of us, but he

had no work to do, for it was his wife who really managed

things. His sole job, besides ordering the supplies, was to

stand in the bar smoking cigarettes and looking

gentlemanly, and he did that to perfection.

The cook and I generally found time to eat our

dinner between ten and eleven o'clock. At midnight the

cook would steal a packet of food for her husband, stow

it under her clothes, and make off, whimpering that

these hours would kill her and she would give notice in

the morning. Jules also left at midnight, usually after a

dispute with Boris, who had to look after the bar till two.

Between twelve and half-past I did what I could to finish

the washing up. There was no time to attempt doing the

work properly, and I used simply to rub the grease off

the plates with tablenapkins. As for the dirt on the floor,

I let it lie, or swept the worst of it out of sight under the

stoves.

At half-past twelve I would put on my coat and hurry

out. The

patron , bland as ever, would stop me as I went

down the alley-way past the bar. «

Mais, mon cher

monsieur

, how tired you look! Please do me the favour of

accepting this glass of brandy."

He would hand me the glass of brandy as courteously

as though I had been a Russian duke instead of a

plongeur. He treated all of us like this. It was our com-

pensation for working seventeen hours a day.

As a rule the last Metro was almost empty-a great

advantage, for one could sit down and sleep for a

quarter of an hour. Generally I was in bed by halfpast

one. Sometimes I missed the train and had to sleep on

the floor of the restaurant, but it hardly mattered, for I

could have slept on cobblestones at that time.

XXI

THIS life went on for about a fortnight, with a slight

increase of work as more customers came to the restaur-

ant. I could have saved an hour a day by taking a

room near the restaurant, but it seemed impossible to

find time to change lodgings-or, for that matter, to get

my hair cut, look at a newspaper, or even undress

completely. After ten days I managed to find a free

quarter of an hour, and wrote to my friend B. in London

asking him if he could get me a job of some sort-

anything, so long as it allowed more than five hours

sleep. I was simply not equal to going on with a

seventeen-hour day, though there are plenty of people

who think nothing of it. When one is overworked, it is a

good cure for self-pity to think of the thousands of

people in Paris restaurants who work such hours, and

will go on doing it, not for a few weeks, but for years.

There was a girl in a

bistro near my hotel who worked

from seven in the morning till midnight for a whole year,

only sitting down to her meals. I remember once asking

her to come to a dance, and she laughed and said that

she had not been further than the street corner for

several months. She was consumptive, and died about

the time I left Paris.

After only a week we were all neurasthenic with

fatigue, except Jules, who skulked persistently. The

quarrels, intermittent at first, had now become con-

tinuous. For hours one would keep up a drizzle of

useless nagging, rising into storms of abuse every few

minutes. "Get me down that saucepan, idiot!' the cook

would cry (she was not tall enough to reach the shelves

where the saucepans were kept). "Get it down yourself,

you old whore," I would answer. Such remarks seemed to

be generated spontaneously from the air of the kitchen.

We quarrelled over things of inconceivable pettiness.

The dustbin, for instance, was an unending source of

quarrels-whether it should be put where I wanted it,

which was in the cook's way, or where she wanted it,

which was between me and the sink. Once she nagged

and nagged until at last, in pure spite, I lifted the

dustbin up and put it out in the middle of the floor,

where she was bound to trip over it.

"Now, you cow," I said, "move it yourself."

Poor old woman, it was too heavy for her to lift, and

she sat down, put her head on the table and burst out

crying. And I jeered at her. This is the kind of effect that

fatigue has upon one's manners.

After a few days the cook had ceased talking about

Tolstoi and her artistic nature, and she and I were not

on speaking terms, except for the purposes of work, and

Boris and Jules were not on speaking terms, and neither

of them was on speaking terms with the cook. Even

Boris and I were barely on speaking terms. We had

agreed beforehand that the

engueulades of working hours

did not count between times; but we had called each

other things too bad to be forgotten-and besides, there

were no between times. Jules grew lazier and lazier, and

he stole food constantly-from a sense of duty, he said.

He called the rest of us

jaune -blackleg-when we would

not join with him in stealing. He had a curious,

malignant spirit. He told me, as a matter of pride, that

he had sometimes wrung a dirty dishcloth into a

customer's soup before taking it in, just to be revenged

upon a member of the bourgeoisie.

The kitchen grew dirtier and the rats bolder, though

we trapped a few of them. Looking round that filthy

room, with raw meat lying among refuse on the floor,

and cold, clotted saucepans sprawling everywhere, and

the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used to

wonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world