George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

and we spent it on half a pound of bread, with a piece of

garlic to rub it with. The point of rubbing garlic on bread is

that the taste lingers and gives one the illusion of having

fed recently. We sat most of that day in the Jardin des

Plantes. Boris had shots with stones at the tame pigeons,

but always missed them, and after that we wrote dinner

menus on the backs of envelopes. We were too hungry even

to try and think of anything except food. I remember the

dinner Boris finally selected for himself. It was: a dozen

oysters, bortch soup (the red, sweet, beetroot soup with

cream on top), crayfishes, a young chicken en casserole, beef

with stewed plums, new potatoes, a salad, suet pudding

and Roquefort cheese, with a litre of Burgundy and some

old brandy. Boris had international tastes in food. Later

on, when we were prosperous, I occasionally saw him eat

meals almost as large without difficulty.

When our money came to an end I stopped looking for

work, and was another day without food. I did not believe

that the Auberge de Jehan Cottard was really going to

open, and I could see no other prospect, but I was too lazy

to do anything but lie in bed. Then the luck changed

abruptly. At night, at about ten o'clock,

I heard an eager shout from the street. I got up and

went to the window. Boris was there, waving his stick

and beaming. Before speaking he dragged a bent loaf

from his pocket and threw it up to me.

«

Mon ami, mon cher ami , we're saved! What do you

think?"

"Surely you haven't got a job!"

"At the Hôtel X., near the Place de la Concorde--five

hundred francs a month, and food. I have been working

there to-day. Name of Jesus Christ, how I have eaten!"

After ten or twelve hours' work, and with his game

leg, his first thought had been to walk three kilometres

to my hotel and tell me the good news! What was more,

he told me to meet him in the Tuileries the next day

during his afternoon interval, in case he should be able

to steal some food for me. At the appointed time I met

Boris on a public bench. He undid his waistcoat and

produced a large, crushed, newspaper packet; in it were

some minced veal, a wedge of Camembert cheese,

bread and an éclair, all jumbled together.

"

Voila !" said Boris, "that's all I could smuggle out

for you. The doorkeeper is a cunning swine."

It is disagreeable to eat out of a newspaper on a

public seat, especially in the Tuileries, which are

generally full of pretty girls, but I was too hungry to

care. While I ate, Boris explained that he was working in

the cafeterie of the hotel-that is, in English, the

stillroom. It appeared that the cafeterie was the very

lowest post in the hotel, and a dreadful come-down for

a waiter, but it would do until the Auberge de Jehan

Cottard opened. Meanwhile I was to meet Boris every

day in the Tuileries, and he would smuggle out as much

food as he dared. For three days we continued with

this arrangement, and I lived entirely on the stolen

food. Then all our troubles came to an end, for one of

the plongeurs left the Hôtel X., and on Boris's recom-

mendation I was given a job there myself.

X

THE Hôtel X. was a vast, grandiose place with a classical

façade, and at one side a little, dark doorway like a rat-

hole, which was the service entrance. I arrived at a

quarter to seven in the morning. A stream of men with

greasy trousers were hurrying in and being checked by a

doorkeeper who sat in a tiny office. I waited, and

presently the

chef du personnel , a sort of assistant manager,

arrived and began to question me. He was an Italian,

with a round, pale face, haggard from overwork. He

asked whether I was an experienced dishwasher, and I

said that I was; he glanced at my hands and saw that I

was lying, but on hearing that I was an Englishman he

changed his tone and engaged me.

"We have been looking for someone to practise our

English on," he said. "Our clients are all Americans, and

the only English we know is ---" He repeated something

that little boys write on the walls in London. "You may

be useful. Come downstairs."

He led me down a winding staircase into a narrow

passage, deep underground, and so low that I had to

stoop in places. It was stiflingly hot and very dark, with

only dim, yellow bulbs several yards apart. There seemed

to be miles of dark labyrinthine passages actually, I

suppose, a few hundred yards in all-that reminded one

queerly of the lower decks of a liner; there were the same

heat and cramped space and warm reek of food, and a humming,

whirring noise (it came from the kitchen furnaces) just like

the whir of engines.

We passed doorways which let out sometimes a shouting

of oaths, sometimes the red glare of a fire, once a

shuddering draught from an ice chamber. As we went

along, something struck me violently in the back. It was

a hundred-pound block of ice, carried by a blueaproned

porter. After him came a boy with a great slab of veal on

his shoulder, his cheek pressed into the damp, spongy

flesh. They shoved me aside with a cry of «

Sauve-toi ,

idiot

!" and rushed on. On the wall, under one of the

lights, someone had written in a very neat hand: "Sooner

will you find a cloudless sky in winter, than a woman at

the Hôtel X. who has her maidenhead." It seemed a

queer sort of place:

One of the passages branched off into a laundry,

where an old, skull-faced woman gave me a blue apron

and a pile of dishcloths. Then the

chef du personnel took

me to a tiny underground den-a cellar below a cellar, as

it were-where there were a sink and some gas-ovens. It

was too low for me to stand quite upright, and the

temperature was perhaps 11o degrees Fahrenheit. The

chef du personnel

explained that my job was to fetch meals

for the higher hotel employees, who fed in a small

dining-room above, clean their room and wash their

crockery. When he had gone, a waiter, another Italian,

thrust a fierce, fuzzy head into the doorway and looked

down at me.

"English, eh?" he said. "Well, I'm in charge here. If

you work well"-he made the motion of up-ending a

bottle and sucked noisily. "If you don't"-he gave the

doorpost several vigorous kicks. "To me, twisting your

neck would be no more than spitting on the floor. And if

there's any trouble, they'll believe me, not you. So be

careful."

After this I set to work rather hurriedly. Except for

about an hour, I was at work from seven in the morning

till a quarter past nine at night; first at washing

crockery, then at scrubbing the tables and floors of the

employees' dining-room, then at polishing glasses and

knives, then at fetching meals, then at washing crockery

again, then at fetching more meals and washing more

crockery. It was easy work, and I got on well with it

except when I went to the kitchen to fetch meals. The

kitchen was like nothing I had ever seen or imagined-a

stifling, low-ceilinged inferno of a cellar, redlit from the

fires, and deafening with oaths and the clanging of pots

and pans. It was so hot that all the metal-work except

the stoves had to be covered with cloth. In the middle

were furnaces, where twelve cooks skipped to and fro,

their faces dripping sweat in spite of their white caps.

Round that were counters where a mob of waiters and

plongeurs clamoured with trays. Scullions, naked to the

waist, were stoking the fires and scouring huge copper

saucepans with sand. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry

and a rage. The head cook, a fine, scarlet man with big

moustachios, stood in the middle booming

continuously, «

Ça marche deux ouefs brouillés !

Ca marche

un Chateau-briand aux pommes sautées!

» except when he

broke off to curse at a plongeur. There were three

counters, and the first time I went to the kitchen I took

my tray unknowingly to the wrong one. The head cook

walked up to me, twisted his moustaches, and looked

me up and down. Then he beckoned to the breakfast

cook and pointed at me.

"Do you see

that ? That is the type of

plongeur they

send us nowadays. Where do you come from, idiot?

From Charenton, I suppose?" (There is a large lunatic

asylum at Charenton.)

"From England," I said.

"I might have known it. Well,

mon cher monsieur

l'Anglais

, may I inform you that you are the son of a

whore? And now the camp to the other counter, where

you belong."

I got this kind of reception every time I went to the

kitchen, for I always made some mistake; I was ex-

pected to know the work, and was cursed accordingly.

From curiosity I counted the number of times I was

called maquereau during the day, and it was thirty-nine.

At half-past four the Italian told me that I could stop

working, but that it was not worth going out, as we

began again at five. I went to the lavatory for a smoke;

smoking was strictly forbidden, and Boris had warned

me that the lavatory was the only safe place. After that

I worked again till a quarter-past nine, when the waiter

put his head into the doorway and told me to leave the

rest of the crockery. To my astonishment, after calling

me pig, mackerel, etc., all day, he had suddenly grown

quite friendly. I realised that the curses I had met with

were only a kind of probation.

"That'll do,

mon p'tit ," said the waiter. «

Tu n'es pas

débrouillard

, but you work all right. Come up and have

your dinner. The hotel allows us two litres of wine

each, and I've stolen another bottle. We'll have a fine

booze."

We had an excellent dinner from the leavings of the

higher employees. The waiter, grown mellow, told me

stories about his love-affairs, and about two men whom

he had stabbed in Italy, and about how he had dodged

his military service. He was a good fellow when one

got to know him; he reminded me of Benvenuto

Cellini, somehow. I was tired and drenched with sweat,

but I felt a new man after a day's solid food. The work

did not seem difficult, and I felt that this job would suit

me. It was not certain, however, that it would continue,

for I had been engaged as an "extra" for the day only,

at twenty-five francs. The sour-faced doorkeeper

counted out the money, less fifty centimes which he

said was for insurance (a lie, I discovered afterwards).

Then he stepped out into the passage, made me take off

my coat, and carefully prodded me all over, searching

for stolen food. After this the

chef du personnel appeared

and spoke to me. Like the waiter, he had grown more

genial on seeing that I was willing to work.

"We will give you a permanent job if you like," he

said. "The head waiter says he would enjoy calling an

Englishman names. Will you sign on for a month?"

Here was a job at last, and I was ready to jump at it.