George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
Обзор книги George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
By the same author
BURMESE DAYS COMING UP FOR
AIR HOMAGE TO CATALONIA
THE LION AND THE UNICORN
ANIMAL FARM
CRITICAL ESSAYS
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
DOWN AND OUT IN
PARIS AND LONDON
BY
GEORGE ORWELL
" O scathful harm, condition of poverte ! "
CHAUCER
LONDON
SECKER & WARBURG
1949
Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd. 7 John Street, Bloomsbury, London, W.C.
First published (Gollancz), January
1933 New edition, reset, 1949
MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN by MORRISON
AND GIBB LTD., LONDON AND EDINBURGH
I
THE Rue du Coq d'Or, Paris, seven in the morning.
A succession of furious, choking yells from the street.
Madame Monce, who kept the little hotel opposite mine,
had come out on to the pavement to address a lodger on
the third floor. Her bare feet were stuck into sabots and
her grey hair was streaming down.
Madame Monce: « Salope! Salope!
How many times
have I told you not to squash bugs on the wallpaper? Do
you think you've bought the hotel, eh? Why can't you
throw them out of the window like everyone else?
Putain!
Salope! »
The woman on the third floor: « Vache
! »
Thereupon a whole variegated chorus of yells, as
windows were flung open on every side and half the
street joined in the quarrel. They shut up abruptly ten
minutes later, when a squadron of cavalry rode past and
people stopped shouting to look at them.
I sketch this scene, just to convey something of the
spirit of the Rue du Coq d'Or. Not that quarrels were the
only thing that happened there-but still, we seldom got
through the morning without at least one outburst of
this description. Quarrels, and the desolate cries of
street hawkers, and the shouts of children chasing
orange-peel over the cobbles, and at night loud singing
and the sour reek of the refuse-carts, made up the
atmosphere of the street.
It was a very narrow street-a ravine of tall, leprous
houses, lurching towards one another in queer atti-
tudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of
collapse. All the houses were hotels and packed to the
tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and Italians. At 5
the foot of the hotels were tiny bistros, where you could be
drunk for the equivalent of a shilling. On Saturday nights
about a third of the male population of the quarter was
drunk. There was fighting over women, and the Arab
navvies who lived in the cheapest hotels used to conduct
mysterious feuds, and fight them out with chairs and
occasionally revolvers. At night the policemen would
only come through the street two together. It was a fairly
rackety place. And yet amid the noise and dirt lived the
usual respectable French shopkeepers, bakers and
laundresses and the like, keeping themselves to
themselves and quietly piling up small fortunes. It'was
quite a representative Paris slum.
My hotel was called the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux. It
was a dark, rickety warren of five storeys, cut up by
wooden partitions into forty rooms. The rooms were
small and inveterately dirty, for there was no maid,
and Madame F., the patronne, had no time to do any
sweeping. The walls were as thin as matchwood, and
to hide the cracks they had been covered with layer
after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and
housed innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines
of bugs marched all day like columns of soldiers,
and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that
one had to get up every few hours and kill them in
hecatombs. Sometimes when the bugs got too bad
one used to burn sulphur and drive them into the
next room; whereupon the lodger next door would
retort by having his room sulphured, and drive the
bugs back. It was a dirty place, but homelike, for
Madame F. and her husband were good sorts. The
rent of the rooms varied between thirty and fifty
francs a week.
The lodgers were a floating population, largely
foreigners, who used to turn up without luggage, stay
a week and then disappear again. They were of every
trade-cobblers, bricklayers, stonemasons, navvies,
students, prostitutes, rag-pickers. Some of them were
fantastically poor. In one of the attics there was a
Bulgarian student who made fancy shoes for the Ameri-
can market. From six to twelve he sat on his bed, making
a dozen pairs of shoes and earning thirty-five francs; the
rest of the day he attended lectures at the Sorbonne. He
was studying for the Church, and books of theology lay
face-down on his leather-strewn floor. In another room
lived a Russian woman and her son, who called himself
an artist. The mother worked sixteen hours a day,
darning socks at twenty-five centimes a sock, while the
son, decently dressed, loafed in the Montparnasse cafés.
One room was let to two different lodgers, one a day
worker and the other a night worker. In another room a
widower shared the same bed with his two grown-up
daughters, both consumptive.
There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris
slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people -people
who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and
given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them
from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees
people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived
lives that were curious beyond words.
There were the Rougiers, for instance, an old, ragged,
dwarfish couple who plied an extraordinary trade. They
used to sell post cards on the Boulevard St. Michel. The
curious thing was that the post cards were sold in sealed
packets as pornographic ones, but were actually photo-
graphs of chateaux on the Loire; the buyers did not discover
this till too late, and of course never complained. The
Rougiers earned about a hundred francs a week, and by
strict economy managed to be always half
starved and half drunk. The filth of their room was
such that one could smell it on the floor below. Accord-
ing to Madame F., neither of the Rougiers had taken off
their clothes for four years.
Or there was Henri, who worked in the sewers. He
was a tall, melancholy man with curly hair, rather
romantic-looking in his long, sewer-man's boots.
Henri's peculiarity was that he did not speak, except for
the purposes of work, literally for days together. Only a
year before he had been a chauffeur in good employ and
saving money. One day he fell in love, and when the girl
refused him he lost his temper and kicked her. On being
kicked the girl fell desperately in love with Henri, and
for a fortnight they lived together and spent a thousand
francs of Henri's money. Then the girl was unfaithful;
Henri planted a knife in her upper arm and was sent to
prison for six months. As soon as she had been stabbed
the girl fell more in love with Henri than ever, and the
two made up their quarrel and agreed that when Henri
came out of jail he should buy a taxi and they would
marry and settle down. But a fortnight later the girl was
unfaithful again, and when Henri came out she was with
child. Henri did not stab her again. He drew out all his
savings and went on a drinking-bout that ended in
another month's imprisonment; after that he went to
work in the sewers. Nothing would induce Henri to talk.
If you asked him why he worked in the sewers he never
answered, but simply crossed his wrists to signify
handcuffs, and jerked his head southward, towards the
prison. Bad luck seemed to have turned him half-witted
in a single day.
Or there was R., an Englishman, who lived six
months of the year in Putney with his parents and six
months in France. During his time in France he drank
four litres of wine a day, and six litres on Saturdays;
he had once travelled as far as the Azores, because the
wine there is cheaper than anywhere in Europe. He was a
gentle, domesticated creature, never rowdy or
quarrelsome, and never sober. He would lie in bed till
midday, and from then till midnight he was in his corner
of the bistro, quietly and methodically soaking. While he
soaked he talked, in a refined, womanish voice, about
antique furniture. Except myself, R. was the only
Englishman in the quarter.
There were plenty of other people who lived lives just
as eccentric as these: Monsieur Jules, the Roumanian,
who had a glass eye and would not admit it, Furex the
Limousin stonemason, Roucolle the miser -he died before
my time, though-old Laurent the rag-merchant, who used
to copy his signature from a slip of paper he carried in his
pocket. It would be fun to write some of their
biographies, if one had time. I am trying to describe the
people in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but
because they are all part of the story. Poverty is what I
am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty
in this slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives,
was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the
background of my own experiences. It is for that reason
that I try to give some idea of what life was like there.
II
L I F E in the quarter. Our
bistro, for instance, at the
foot of the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux. A tiny brick-
floored room, half underground, with wine-sodden
tables, and a photograph of a funeral inscribed « Crédit
est mort »; and red-sashed workmen carving sausage
with big jack-knives; and Madame F., a splendid
Auvergnat peasant woman with the face of a strong-
minded cow, drinking Malaga all day " for her
stomach"; and games of dice for apéritifs; and songs
about «
Les Fraises et Les Framboises, » and about
Madelon, who said, "
Comment épouser un soldat, moi qui
aime tout le régiment?
»; and extraordinarily public love-
making. Half the hotel used to meet in the bistro in the
evenings. I wish one could find a pub in London a
quarter as cheery.
One heard queer conversations in the
bistro. As a
sample I give you Charlie, one of the local curiosities,
talking.
Charlie was a youth of family and education who
had run away from home and lived on occasional
remittances. Picture him very pink and young, with
the fresh cheeks and soft brown hair of a nice little
boy, and lips excessively red and wet, like cherries. His
feet are tiny, his arms abnormally short, his hands
dimpled like a baby's. He has a way of dancing and
capering while he talks, as though he were too happy
and too full of life to keep still for an instant. It is
three in the afternoon, and there is no one in the bistro
except Madame F. and one or two men who are out of
work; but it is all the same to Charlie whom he talks
