George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
a lost bottle of soda-water, and you are arguing with
him. It needs more brains than one might think. Mario
said, no doubt truly, that it took a year to make a
reliable cafetier.
The time between eight and half-past ten was a sort
of delirium. Sometimes we were going as though we
had only five minutes to live; sometimes there were
sudden lulls when the orders stopped and everything
seemed quiet for a moment. Then we swept up the litter
from the floor, threw down fresh sawdust, and
swallowed gallipots of wine or coffee or water-any-
thing, so long as it was wet. Very often we used to
break off chunks of ice and suck them while we
worked. The heat among the gas-fires was nauseating;
we swallowed quarts of drink during the day, and after
a few hours even our aprons were drenched with sweat.
At times we were hopelessly behind with the work, and
some of the customers would have gone without their
breakfast, but Mario always pulled us through. He had
worked fourteen years in the cafeterie, and he had the
skill that never wastes a second between jobs. The
Magyar was very stupid and I was inexperienced, and
Boris was inclined to shirk, partly because of his lame
leg, partly because he was ashamed of working in the
cafeterie after being a waiter; but Mario was wonderful.
The way he would stretch his great arms right across
the cafeterie to fill a coffee-pot with one hand and boil
an egg with the other, at the same time watching toast
and shouting directions to the Magyar, and between
whiles singing snatches from
Rigoletto, was beyond all
praise. The
patron knew his value, and he was paid a
thousand francs a month, instead of five hundred like
the rest of us.
The breakfast pandemonium stopped at half-past ten.
Then we scrubbed the cafeterie tables, swept the floor
and polished the brasswork, and, on good mornings,
went one at a time to the lavatory for a smoke. This was
our slack time-only relatively slack, however, for we
had only ten minutes for lunch, and we never got
through it uninterrupted. The customers' luncheon hour,
between twelve and two, was another period of turmoil
like the breakfast hour. Most of our work was fetching
meals from the kitchen, which meant constant
engueulades
from the cooks. By this time the cooks had
sweated in front of their furnaces for four or five hours,
and their tempers were all warmed up.
At two we were suddenly free men. We threw off our
aprons and put on our coats, hurried out of doors, and,
when we had money, dived into the nearest
bistro. It was
strange, coming up into the street from those firelit
cellars. The air seemed blindingly clear and cold, like
arctic summer; and how sweet the petrol did smell, after
the stenches of sweat and food! Sometimes we met
some of our cooks and waiters in the bistros, and they
were friendly and stood us drinks. Indoors we were their
slaves, but it is an etiquette in hotel life that between
hours everyone is equal, and the
engueulades do not
count.
At a quarter to five we went back to the hotel. Till
half-past six there were no orders, and we used this time
to polish silver, clean out the coffee-urns, and do other
odd jobs. Then the grand turmoil of the day started-the
dinner hour. I wish I could be Zola for a little while, just
to describe that dinner hour. The essence of the situation
was that a hundred or two hundred people were
demanding individually different meals of five or six
courses, and that fifty or sixty people had to cook and
serve them and clean up the mess
afterwards; anyone with experience of catering will
know what that means. And at this time when the work
was doubled, the whole staff was tired out, and a
number of them were drunk. I could write pages about
the scene without giving a true idea of it. The chargings
to and fro in the narrow passages, the collisions, the
yells, the struggling with crates and trays and blocks of
ice, the heat, the darkness, the furious festering quarrels
which there was no time to fight out-they pass
description. Anyone coming into the basement for the
first time would have thought himself in a den of
maniacs. It was only later, when I understood the
working of a hotel, that I saw order in all this chaos.
At half-past eight the work stopped very suddenly.
We were not free till nine, but we used to throw our-
selves full length on the floor, and lie there resting our
legs, too lazy even to go to the ice cupboard for a drink.
Sometimes the
chef du personnel would come in with
bottles of beer, for the hotel stood us an extra beer when
we had had a hard day. The food we were given was no
more than eatable, but the
patron was not mean about
drink; he allowed us two litres of wine a day each,
knowing that if a
plongeur is not given two litres he will
steal three. We had the heeltaps of bottles as well, so
that we often drank too much-a good thing, for one
seemed to work faster when partially drunk.
Four days of the week passed like this; of the other
two working days, one was better and one worse. After
a week of this life I felt in need of a holiday. It was
Saturday night, so the people in our
bistro were busy
getting drunk, and with a free day ahead of me I was
ready to join them. We all went to bed, drunk, at two in
the morning, meaning to sleep till noon. At half-past
five I was suddenly awakened. A night-watchman,
sent from the hotel, was standing at my bedside. He
stripped the clothes back and shook me roughly.
"Get up!" he said. «
Tu t'es bien saoulé la gueule, eh?
Well, never mind that, the hotel's a man short. You've
got to work to-day."
"Why should I work?" I protested. "This is my day
off."
"Day off, nothing! The work's got to be done. Get
up!»
I got up and went out, feeling as though my back
were broken and my skull filled with hot cinders. I did
not think that I could possibly do a day's work. And yet,
after only an hour in the basement, I found that I was
perfectly well. It seemed that in the heat of those
cellars, as in a turkish bath, one could sweat out almost
any quantity of drink.
Plongeurs know this, and count on
it. The power of swallowing quarts of wine, and then
sweating it out before it can do much damage, is one of
the compensations of their life.
XII
BY far my best time at the hotel was when I went to help
the waiter on the fourth floor. We worked in a small
pantry which communicated with the cafeterie by
service lifts. It was delightfully cool after the cellars,
and the work was chiefly polishing silver and glasses,
which is a humane job. Valenti, the waiter, was a decent
sort, and treated me almost as an equal when we were
alone, though he had to speak roughly when there was
anyone else present, for it does not do for a waiter to be
friendly with plongeurs. He used sometimes to tip me five
francs when he had had a good day. He was a comely
youth, aged twenty-four but looking eighteen,
and, like most waiters, he carried himself well and knew
how to wear his clothes. With his black tail-coat and
white tie, fresh face and sleek brown hair, he looked just
like an Eton boy; yet he had earned his living since he
was twelve, and worked his way up literally from the
gutter. Crossing the Italian frontier without a passport,
and selling chestnuts from a barrow on the northern
boulevards, and being given fifty days' imprisonment in
London for working without a permit, and being made
love to by a rich old woman in a hotel, who gave him a
diamond ring and afterwards accused him of stealing it,
were among his experiences. I used to enjoy talking to
him, at slack times when we sat smoking down the lift
shaft.
My bad day was when I washed up for the diningroom.
I had not to wash the plates, which were done in the
kitchen, but only the other crockery, silver, knives and
glasses; yet, even so, it meant thirteen hours' work, and
I used between thirty and forty dishcloths during the
day. The antiquated methods used in France double the
work of washing up. Plate-racks are unheard-of, and
there are no soap-flakes, only the treacly soft soap,
which refuses to lather in the hard, Paris water. I worked
in a dirty, crowded little den, a pantry and scullery
combined, which gave straight on the diningroom.
Besides washing up, I had to fetch the waiters' food and
serve them at table; most of them were intolerably
insolent, and I had to use my fists more than once to get
common civility. The person who normally washed up
was a woman, and they made her life a misery.
It was amusing to look round the filthy little scullery
and think that only a double door was between us and
the dining-room. There sat the customers in all their
splendour-spotless table-cloths, bowls of flowers,
mirrors and gilt cornices and painted cherubim; and
here, just a few feet away, we in our disgusting filth. For
it really was disgusting filth. There was no time to
sweep the floor till evening, and we slithered about in a
compound of soapy water, lettuce-leaves, torn paper and
trampled food. A dozen waiters with their coats off,
showing their sweaty armpits, sat at the table mixing
salads and sticking their thumbs into the cream pots. The
room had a dirty, mixed smell of food and sweat.
Everywhere in the cupboards, behind the piles of
crockery, were squalid stores of food that the waiters
had stolen. There were only two sinks, and no washing
basin, and it was nothing unusual for a waiter to wash
his face in the water in which clean crockery was
rinsing. But the customers saw nothing of this. There
were a coco-nut mat and a mirror outside the dining-
room door, and the waiters used to preen themselves up
and go in looking the picture of cleanliness.
It is an instructive sight to see a waiter going into a
hotel dining-room. As he passes the door a sudden
change comes over him. The set of his shoulders alters;
all the dirt and hurry and irritation have dropped off in
an instant. He glides over the carpet, with a solemn
priest-like air. I remember our assistant maitre d'hôtel, a
fiery Italian, pausing at the dining-room door to address
an apprentice who had broken a bottle of wine. Shaking
his fist above his head he yelled (luckily the door was
more or less soundproof)
«
Tu me fais-----
Do you call yourself a waiter, you
young bastard? You a waiter! You're not fit to scrub
floors in the brothel your mother came from.
Maquereau! »
Words failing him, he turned to the door; and as he
opened it he delivered a final insult in the same manner
as Squire Western in
Tom Jones.
Then he entered the dining-room and sailed across it
