George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
nasty, greasy fingers which he is for ever running
through his brilliantined hair. Whenever one pays more
than, say, ten francs for a dish of meat in Paris, one may
be certain that it has been fingered in this manner. In
very cheap restaurants it is different; there, the same
trouble is not taken over the food, and it is just forked
out of the pan and flung on to a plate, without handling.
Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more
sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.
Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants,
because sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and
smartness. The hotel employee is too busy getting food
ready to remember that it is meant to be eaten. A meal
is simply «
une commande » to him, just as a man dying of
cancer is simply "
a case" to the doctor. A customer
orders, for example, a piece of toast. Somebody, pressed
with work in a cellar deep underground, has to prepare it.
How can he stop and say to himself, "This toast is to be
eaten-I must make it eatable"? All he knows is that it must
look right and must be ready in three minutes. Some large
drops of sweat fall from his forehead on to the toast. Why
should he worry? Presently the toast falls among the filthy
sawdust on the floor. Why trouble to make a new piece? It
is much quicker to wipe the sawdust off. On the way
upstairs the toast falls again, butter side down. Another
wipe is all it needs. And so with everything. The only food
at the Hôtel X. which was ever prepared cleanly was the
staff's, and the
patron's. The maxim, repeated by everyone,
was: "Look out for the
patron, and as for the clients,
s'en f--
pas mal
! » Everywhere in the service quarters dirt festered-a
secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel
like the intestines through a man's body.
Apart from the dirt, the
patron swindled the customers
wholeheartedly. For the most part the materials of the food
were very bad, though the cooks knew how to serve it up in
style. The meat was at best ordinary, and as to the
vegetables, no good housekeeper would have looked at
them in the market. The cream, by a standing order, was
diluted with milk. The tea and coffee were of inferior sorts,
and the jam was synthetic stuff out of vast, unlabelled tins.
All the cheaper wines, according to Boris, were corked vin
ordinaire. There was a rule that employees must pay for
anything they spoiled, and in consequence damaged things
were seldom thrown away. Once the waiter on the third
floor dropped a roast chicken down the shaft of our service
lift, where it fell into a litter of broken bread, torn paper
and so forth at the bottom. We simply wiped it with a cloth and
sent it up again. Upstairs there were dirty tales of once-used
sheets not being washed, but simply damped, ironed and put back
on the beds. The patron was as mean to us as to the
customers. Throughout the vast hotel there was not,
for instance, such a thing as a brush and pan; one had
to manage with a broom and a piece of cardboard. And
the staff lavatory was worthy of Central Asia, and there
was no place to wash one's hands, except the sinks
used for washing crockery.
In spite of all this the Hôtel X. was one of the dozen
most expensive hotels in Paris, and the customers paid
startling prices. The ordinary charge for a night's
lodging, not including breakfast, was two hundred
francs. All wine and tobacco were sold at exactly double
shop prices, though of course the patron bought at the
wholesale price. If a customer had a title, or was
reputed to be a millionaire, all his charges went up
automatically. One morning on the fourth floor an
American who was on diet wanted only salt and hot
water for his breakfast. Valenti was furious. "Jesus
Christ!" he said, "what about my ten per cent.? Ten per
cent. of salt and water!" And he charged twentyfive
francs for the breakfast. The customer paid without a
murmur.
According to Boris, the same kind of thing went on
in all Paris hotels, or at least in all the big, expensive
ones. But I imagine that the customers at the Hotel X.
were especially easy to swindle, for they were mostly
Americans, with a sprinkling of English-no Frenchand
seemed to know nothing whatever about good food.
They would stuff themselves with disgusting American
"cereals," and eat marmalade at tea, and drink ver-
mouth after dinner, and order a poulet à la reine at a
hundred francs and then souse it in Worcester sauce.
One customer, from Pittsburg, dined every night in his
bedroom on grape-nuts, scrambled eggs and cocoa.
Perhaps it hardly matters whether such people are
swindled or not.
XV
HEARD queer tales in the hotel. There were tales of
dope fiends, of old debauchees who frequented hotels in
search of pretty page boys, of thefts and blackmail.
Mario told me of a hotel in which he had been, where a
chambermaid stole a priceless diamond ring from an
American lady. For days the staff were searched as they
left work, and two detectives searched the hotel from
top to bottom, but the ring was never found. The
chambermaid had a lover in the bakery, and he had
baked the ring into a roll, where it lay unsuspected
until the search was over.
Once Valenti, at a slack time, told me a story about
himself.
"You know,
mon p'tit, this hotel life is all very well,
but it's the devil when you're out of work. I expect you
know what it is to go without eating, eh?
Forcément,
otherwise you wouldn't be scrubbing dishes. Well, I'm
not a poor devil of a
plongeur; I'm a waiter, and I went
five days without eating, once. Five days without even a
crust of bread Jesus Christ!
"I tell you, those five days were the devil. The only
good thing was, I had my rent paid in advance. I was
living in a dirty, cheap little hotel in the Rue Sainte
Éloise up in the Latin quarter. It was called the Hotel
Suzanne May, after some famous prostitute of the time
of the Empire. I was starving, and there was nothing I
could do; I couldn't even go to the cafés where the hotel
proprietors come to engage waiters, because I
hadn't the price of a drink. All I could do was to lie in
bed getting weaker and weaker, and watching the bugs
running about the ceiling. I don't want to go through
that again, I can tell you.
"In the afternoon of the fifth day I went half mad; at
least, that's how it seems to me now. There was an old
faded print of a woman's head hanging on the wall of
my room, and I took to wondering who it could be; and
after about an hour I realised that it must be Sainte
Éloise, who was the patron saint of the quarter. I had
never taken any notice of the thing before, but now, as I
lay staring at it, a most extraordinary idea came into my
head.
"
'Écoute, mon cher,' I said to myself, 'you'll be
starving to death if this goes on much longer. You've
got to do something. Why not try a prayer to Sainte
Éloise? Go down on your knees and ask her to send you
some money. After all, it can't do any harm. Try it!'
"Mad, eh? Still, a man will do anything when he's
hungry. Besides, as I said, it couldn't do any harm. I got
out of bed and began praying. I said:
" 'Dear Sainte Éloise, if you exist, please send me
some money. I don't ask for much just enough to buy
some bread and a bottle of wine and get my strength
back. Three or four francs would do. You don't know
how grateful I'll be, Sainte Éloise, if you help me this
once. And be sure, if you send me anything, the first
thing I'll do will be to go and burn a candle for you, at
your church down the street. Amen.'
"I put in that about the candle, because I had heard
that saints like having candles burnt in their honour. I
meant to keep my promise, of course. But I am an
atheist and I didn't really believe that anything would
come of it.
"Well, I got into bed again, and five minutes later
there came a bang at the door. It was a girl called Maria,
a big fat peasant girl who lived at our hotel. She was a
very stupid girl, but. a good sort, and I didn't much care
for her to see me in the state I was in.
"She cried out at the sight of me.
'Nom de Dieu!' she
said, 'what's the matter with you? What are you doing
in bed at this time of day?
Quelle mine que tu as! You look
more like a corpse than a man.'
"Probably I did look a sight. I had been five days
without food, most of the time in bed, and it was three
days since I had had a wash or a shave. The room was a
regular pigsty, too.
" 'What's the matter?' said Maria again.
" 'The matter!' I said; 'Jesus Christ! I'm starving. I
haven't eaten for five days. That's what's the matter.'
"Maria was horrified. 'Not eaten for five days?' she
said. 'But why? Haven't you any money, then?'
" 'Money!' I said. 'Do you suppose I should be
starving if I had money? I've got just five sous in the
world, and I've pawned everything. Look round the
room and see if there's anything more I can sell or
pawn. If you can find anything that will fetch fifty
centimes, you're cleverer than I am.'
"Maria began looking round the room. She poked
here and there among a lot of rubbish that was lying
about, and then suddenly she got quite excited. Her
great thick mouth fell open with astonishment.
" 'You idiot!' she cried out. 'Imbecile! What's
this,
then?'
"I saw that she had picked up an empty oil
bidon that
had been lying in the corner. I had bought it weeks
before, for an oil lamp I had before I sold my things.
" 'That?' I said. 'That's an oil
bidon. What about it?'
" 'Imbecile! Didn't you pay three francs fifty
deposit on it?'
"Now, of course I had paid the three francs fifty.
They always make you pay a deposit on the
bidon, and
you get it back when the
bidon is returned. But I'd for-
gotten all about it.
" 'Yes---' I began.
" 'Idiot!' shouted Maria again. She got so excited
that she began to dance about until I thought her
sabots would go through the floor. 'Idiot!
T'es fou!T'es
fou
! What have you got to do but take it back to the
shop and get your deposit back? Starving, with three
