George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
shop and get your deposit back? Starving, with three
francs fifty staring you in the face! Imbecile!'
"I can hardly believe now that in all those five days
I had never once thought of taking the
bidon back to the
shop. As good as three francs fifty in hard cash, and it
had never occurred to me! I sat up in bed. 'Quick!' I
shouted to Maria, 'you take it for me. Take it to the
grocer's at the corner-run like the devil. And bring
back food!
Maria didn't need to be told. She grabbed the bidon
and went clattering down the stairs like a herd of
elephants, and in three minutes she was back with two
pounds of bread under one arm and a half-litre bottle
of wine under the other. I didn't stop to thank her; I
just seized the bread and sank my teeth in it. Have you
noticed how bread tastes when you have been hungry
for a long time? Cold, wet, doughy-like putty almost.
But, Jesus Christ, how good it was! As for the wine, I
sucked it all down in one draught, and it seemed to go
straight into my veins and flow round my body like
new blood. Ah, that made a difference!
"I wolfed the whole two pounds of bread without
stopping to take breath. Maria stood with her hands on
her hips, watching me eat. 'Well, you feel better, eh?'
she said when I had finished.
" 'Better!' I said. 'I feel perfect! I'm not the same
man as I was five minutes ago. There's only one thing
in the world I need now-a cigarette.'
"Maria put her hand in her apron pocket. 'You can't
have it,' she said. 'I've no money. This is all I had left
out of your three francs fifty-seven sous. It's no good;
the cheapest cigarettes are twelve sous a packet.'
" 'Then I can have them!' I said. 'Jesus Christ, what
a piece of luck! I've got five sous-it's just enough.'
"Maria took the twelve sous and was starting out to the
tobacconist's. And then something I had forgotten all
this time came into my head. There was that cursed
Sainte Éloise! I had promised her a candle if she sent
me money; and really, who could say that the prayer
hadn't come true? 'Three or four francs,' I had said;
and the next moment along came three francs fifty.
There was no getting away from it. I should have to
spend my twelve sous on a candle.
"I called Maria back. 'It's no use,' I said; 'there is
Sainte Éloise-I have promised her a candle. The twelve
sous will have to go on that. Silly, isn't it? I can't have
my cigarettes after all.'
« 'Sainte Éloise?' said Maria. 'What about Sainte
Éloise?'
" 'I prayed to her for money and promised her a
candle,' I said. 'She answered the prayer-at any rate,
the money turned up. I shall have to buy that candle.
It's a nuisance, but it seems to me I must keep my
promise.'
" 'But what put Sainte Éloise into your head?' said
Maria.
" 'It was her picture,' I said, and I explained the
whole thing. 'There she is, you see,' I said, and I pointed
to the picture on the wall.
"Maria looked at the picture, and then to my surprise
she burst into shouts of laughter. She laughed more and
more, stamping about the room and holding her fat sides
as though they would burst. I thought she had gone mad.
It was two minutes before she could speak.
" 'Idiot!' she cried at last.
'T'es fou! T'es fou! Do you
mean to tell me you really knelt down and prayed to that
picture? Who told you it was Sainte Éloise?'
" 'But I made sure it was Sainte Éloise!' I said.
" 'Imbecile! It isn't Sainte Éloise at all. Who do you
think it is?'
" 'Who?' I said.
" 'It is Suzanne May, the woman this hotel is called
after.'
"I had been praying to Suzanne May, the famous
prostitute of the Empire. . . .
"But, after all, I wasn't sorry. Maria and I had a good
laugh, and then we talked it over, and we made out that I
didn't owe Sainte Éloise anything. Clearly it wasn't she
who had answered the prayer, and there was no need to
buy her a candle. So I had my packet of cigarettes after
all."
XVI
TIME went on and the Auberge de Jehan Cottard showed
no signs of opening. Boris and I went down there one
day during our afternoon interval and found that none of
the alterations had been done, except the indecent
pictures, and there were three duns instead of two. The
patron
greeted us with his usual blandness,
and the next instant turned to me (his prospective
dishwasher) and borrowed five francs. After that I felt
certain that the restaurant would never get beyond talk.
The
patron, however, again named the opening for
"exactly a fortnight from to-day," and introduced us to
the woman who was to do the cooking, a Baltic Russian
five feet tall and a yard across the hips. She told us that
she had been a singer before she came down to cooking,
and that she was very artistic and adored English
literature, especially
La Case de l'Oncle Tom.
In a fortnight I had got so used to the routine of a
plongeur's
life that I could hardly imagine anything
different. It was a life without much variation. At a
quarter to six one woke with a sudden start, tumbled into
grease-stiffened clothes, and hurried out with dirty face
and protesting muscles. It was dawn, and the windows
were dark except for the workmen's cafés. The sky was
like a vast flat wall of cobalt, with roofs and spires of
black paper pasted upon it. Drowsy men were sweeping
the pavements with ten-foot besoms, and ragged families
picking over the dustbins. Workmen, and girls with a
piece of chocolate in one hand and a croissant in the
other, were pouring into the Metro stations. Trams, filled
with more workmen, boomed gloomily past. One
hastened down to the station, fought for a place-one does
literally have to fight on the Paris Metro at six in the
morning-and stood jammed in the swaying mass of
passengers, nose to nose with some hideous French face,
breathing sour wine and garlic. And then one descended
into the labyrinth of the hotel basement, and forgot
daylight till two o'clock, when the sun was hot and the
town black with people and cars.
After my first week at the hotel I always spent the
afternoon interval in sleeping, or, when I had money,
in a
bistro. Except for a few ambitious waiters who went
to English classes, the whole staff wasted their leisure in
this way; one seemed too lazy after the morning's work
to do anything better. Sometimes half a dozen
plongeurs
would make up a party and go to an abominable brothel
in the Rue de Sieyès, where the charge was only five
francs twenty-five centimes-tenpence half-penny. It was
nicknamed «
le prix fixe, » and they used to describe
their experiences there as a great joke. It was a favourite
rendezvous of hotel workers. The
plongeurs' wages did
not allow them to marry, and no doubt work in the
basement does not encourage fastidious feelings.
For another four hours one was in the cellars, and
then one emerged, sweating, into the cool street. It was
lamplight-that strange purplish gleam of the Paris lamps-
and beyond the river the Eiffel Tower flashed from top
to bottom with zigzag skysigns, like enormous snakes of
fire. Streams of cars glided silently to and fro, and
women, exquisite-looking in the dim light, strolled up
and down the arcade. Sometimes a woman would glance
at Boris or me, and then, noticing our greasy clothes,
look hastily away again. One fought another battle in the
Metro and was home by ten. Generally from ten to
midnight I went to a little
bistro in our street, an
underground place frequented by Arab navvies. It was a
bad place for fights, and I sometimes saw bottles thrown,
once with fearful effect, but as a rule the Arabs fought
among themselves and let Christians alone. Raki, the
Arab drink, was very cheap, and the bistro was open at
all hours, for the Arabs-lucky men-had the power of
working all day and drinking all night.
It was the typical life of a
plongeur, and it did not
seem a bad life at the time. I had no sensation of
poverty, for even after paying my rent and setting aside
enough for tobacco and journeys and my food on
Sundays, I still had four francs a day for drinks, and four
francs was wealth. There was-it is hard to express it-a
sort of heavy contentment, the contentment a well-fed
beast might feel, in a life which had become so simple.
For nothing could be simpler than the life of a
plongeur.
He lives in a rhythm between work and sleep, without
time to think, hardly conscious of the exterior world; his
Paris has shrunk to the hotel, the Metro, a few bistros
and his bed. If he goes afield, it is only a few streets
away, on a trip with some servantgirl who sits on his
knee swallowing oysters and beer. On his free day he
lies in bed till noon, puts on a clean shirt, throws dice for
drinks, and after lunch goes back to bed again. Nothing
is quite real to him but the
boulot, drinks and sleep; and
of these sleep is the most important.
One night, in the small hours, there was a murder just
beneath my window. I was woken by a fearful uproar,
and, going to the window, saw a man lying flat on the
stones below; I could see the murderers, three of them,
flitting away at the end of the street. Some of us went
down and found that the man was quite dead, his skull
cracked with a piece of lead piping. I remember the
colour of his blood, curiously purple, like wine; it was
still on the cobbles when I came home that evening, and
they said the schoolchildren had come from miles round
to see it. But the thing that strikes me in looking back is
that I was in bed and asleep within three minutes of the
murder. So were most of the people in the street; we just
made sure that the man was done for, and went straight
back to bed. We were working people, and where was
the sense of wasting sleep over a murder?
Work in the hotel taught me the true value of sleep,
just as being hungry had taught me the true value of
food. Sleep had ceased to be a mere physical necessity; it
was something voluptuous, a debauch more than a relief.
I had no more trouble with the bugs. Mario had told me
of a sure remedy for them, namely pepper, strewed thick
over the bedclothes. It made me sneeze, but the bugs all
hated it, and emigrated to other rooms.
XVII
WITH thirty francs a week to spend on drinks I could
take part in the social life of the quarter. We had some
jolly evenings, on Saturdays, in the little bistro at the foot
