George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
Then he entered the dining-room and sailed across it
dish in hand, graceful as a swan. Ten seconds later he
was bowing reverently to a customer. And you could
not help thinking, as you saw him bow and smile, with
that benign smile of the trained waiter, that the cus-
tomer was put to shame by having such an aristocrat to
serve him.
This washing up was a thoroughly odious job-not
hard, but boring and silly beyond words. It is dreadful
to think that some people spend their whole decades at
such occupations. The woman whom I replaced was
quite sixty years old, and she stood at the sink thirteen
hours a day, six days a week, the year round; she was,
in addition, horribly bullied by the waiters. She gave
out that she had once been an actress-actually, I
imagine, a prostitute; most prostitutes end as char-
women. It was strange to see that in spite of her age and
her life she still wore a bright blonde wig, and darkened
her eyes and painted her face like a girl of twenty. So
apparently even a seventy-eight-hour week can leave
one with some vitality.
XIII
ON my third day at the hotel the
chef du personnel, who
had generally spoken to me in quite a pleasant tone,
called me up and said sharply:
"Here, you, shave that moustache off at once!
Nom de
Dieu
, who ever heard of a
plongeur with a moustache?"
I began to protest, but he cut me short. "A
plongeur
with a moustache-nonsense! Take care I don't see you
with it to-morrow."
On the way home I asked Boris what this meant.
He shrugged his shoulders. "You must do what he says,
mon ami
. No one in the hotel wears a moustache, except
the cooks. I should have thought you would have
noticed it. Reason? There is no reason. It is the
custom."
I saw that it was an etiquette, like not wearing a white
tie with a dinner jacket, and shaved off my moustache.
Afterwards I found out the explanation of the custom,
which is this: waiters in good hotels do not wear
moustaches, and to show their superiority they decree
that
plongeurs shall not wear them either; and the cooks
wear their moustaches to show their contempt for the
waiters.
This gives some idea of the elaborate caste system
existing in a hotel. Our staff, amounting to about a
hundred and ten, had their prestige graded as accurately
as that of soldiers, and a cook or waiter was as much
above a
plongeur as a captain above a private. Highest of
all came the manager, who could sack anybody, even the
cooks. We never saw the
patron, and all we knew of him
was that his meals had to be prepared more carefully than
that of the customers; all the discipline of the hotel
depended on the manager. He was a conscientious man,
and always on the lookout for slackness, but we were too
clever for him. A system of service bells ran through the
hotel, and the whole staff used these for signalling to one
another. A long ring and a short ring, followed by two
more long rings, meant that the manager was coming,
and when we heard it we took care to look busy.
Below the manager came the
maitre d'hôtel. He did not
serve at table, unless to a lord or someone of that kind,
but directed the other waiters and helped with the
catering. His tips, and his bonus from the champagne
companies (it was two francs for each cork he
returned to them), came to two hundred francs a day. He
was in a position quite apart from the rest of the staff,
and took his meals in a private room, with silver on the
table and two apprentices in clean white jackets to serve
him. A little below the head waiter came the head cook,
drawing about five thousand francs a month; he dined in
the kitchen, but at a separate table, and one of the
apprentice cooks waited on him. Then came the
chef du
personnel
; he drew only fifteen hundred francs a month,
but he wore a black coat and did no manual work, and he
could sack
plongeurs and fine waiters. Then came the other
cooks, drawing anything between three thousand and
seven hundred and fifty francs a month; then the waiters,
making about seventy francs a day in tips, besides a
small retaining fee; then the laundresses and sewing
women; then the apprentice waiters, who received no
tips, but were paid seven hundred and fifty francs a
month; then the
plongeurs, also at seven hundred and fifty
francs; then the chambermaids, at five or six hundred
francs a month; and lastly the cafetiers, at five hundred a
month. We of the cafeterie were the very dregs of the
hotel, despised and tutoied by everyone.
There were various others-the office employees,
called generally couriers, the storekeeper, the cellarman,
some porters and pages, the ice man, the bakers, the
night-watchman, the doorkeeper. Different jobs were
done by different races. The office employees and the
cooks and sewing-women were French, the waiters
Italians and Germans (there is hardly such a thing as a
French waiter in Paris), the
plongeurs of every race in
Europe, beside Arabs and negroes. French was the lingua
franca, even the Italians speaking it to one another.
All the departments had their special perquisites.
In all Paris hotels it is the custom to sell the broken
bread to bakers for eight sous a pound, and the kitchen
scraps to pigkeepers for a trifle, and to divide the pro-
ceeds of this among the
plongeurs. There was much
pilfering, too. The waiters all stole food-in fact, I
seldom saw a waiter trouble to eat the rations provided
for him by the hotel-and the cooks did it on a larger
scale in the kitchen, and we in the cafeterie swilled
illicit tea and coffee. The cellarman stole brandy. By a
rule of the hotel the waiters were not allowed to keep
stores of spirits, but had to go to the cellarman for each
drink as it was ordered. As the cellarman poured out the
drinks he would set aside perhaps a teaspoonful from
each glass, and he amassed quantities in this way. He
would sell you the stolen brandy for five sous a swig if
he thought he could trust you.
There were thieves among the staff, and if you left
money in your coat pockets it was generally taken. The
doorkeeper, who paid our wages and searched us for
stolen food, was the greatest thief in the hotel. Out of
my five hundred francs a month, this man actually
managed to cheat me of a hundred and fourteen francs in
six weeks. I had asked to be paid daily, so the door-
keeper paid me sixteen francs each evening, and, by not
paying for Sundays (for which of course payment was
due), pocketed sixty-four francs. Also, I sometimes
worked on a Sunday, for which, though I did not know
it, I was entitled to an extra twenty-five francs. The
doorkeeper never paid me this either, and so made away
with another seventy-five francs. I only realised during
my last week that I was being cheated, and, as I could
prove nothing, only twenty-five francs were refunded.
The doorkeeper played similar tricks on any employee
who was fool enough to be taken in. He called
himself a Greek, but in reality he was an Armenian.
After knowing him I saw the force of the proverb
"Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek,
but don't trust an Armenian."
There were queer characters among the waiters. One
was a gentleman-a youth who had been educated at a
university, and had had a well-paid job in a business
office. He had caught a venereal disease, lost his job,
drifted, and now considered himself lucky to be a
waiter. Many of the waiters had slipped into France
without passports, and one or two of them were spies --it
is a common profession for a spy to adopt. One day
there was a fearful row in the waiters' dining-room
between Morandi, a dangerous-looking man with eyes
set too far apart, and another Italian. It appeared that
Morandi had taken the other man's mistress. The other
man, a weakling and obviously frightened of Morandi,
was threatening vaguely.
Morandi jeered at him. "Well, what are you going to
do about it? I've slept with your girl, slept with her three
times. It was fine. What can you do, eh?"
"I can denounce you to the secret police. You are an
Italian spy."
Morandi did not deny it. He simply produced a razor
from his tail pocket and made two swift strokes in the
air, as though slashing a man's cheeks open. Whereat the
other waiter took it back.
The queerest type I ever saw in the hotel was an
"extra." He had been engaged at twenty-five francs for
the day to replace the Magyar, who was ill. He was a
Serbian, a thick-set nimble fellow of about twenty-five,
speaking six languages, including English. He seemed to
know all about hotel work, and up till midday he worked
like a slave. Then, as soon as it had struck twelve, he
turned sulky, shirked his work, stole wine,
and finally crowned all by loafing about openly with a
pipe in his mouth. Smoking, of course, was forbidden
under severe penalties. The manager himself heard of it
and came down to interview the Serbian, fuming with
rage.
"What the devil do you mean by smoking here?" he
cried.
"What the devil do you mean by having a face like
that?" answered the Serbian, calmly.
I cannot convey the blasphemy of such a remark. The
head cook, if a
plongeur had spoken to him like that,
would have thrown a saucepan of hot soup in his face.
The manager said instantly, "You're sacked!" and at two
o'clock the Serbian was given his twenty-five francs and
duly sacked. Before he went out Boris asked him in
Russian what game he was playing. He said the Serbian
answered
"Look here,
mon vieux, they've got to pay me a day's
wages if I work up to midday, haven't they? That's the
law. And where's the sense of working after I get my
wages? So I'll tell you what I do. I go to a hotel and get
a job as an extra, and up to midday I work hard. Then,
the moment it's struck twelve, I start raising such hell
that they've no choice but to sack me. Neat, eh? Most
days I'm sacked by half-past twelve; to-day it was two
o'clock; but I don't care, I've saved four hours' work.
The only trouble is, one can't do it at the same hotel
twice."
It appeared that he had played this game at half the
hotels and restaurants in Paris. It is probably quite an
easy game to play during the summer, though the hotels
protect themselves against it as well as they can by
