George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
of the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux.
The brick-floored room, fifteen feet square, was
packed with twenty people, and the air dim with smoke.
The noise was deafening, for everyone was either talking
at the top of his voice or singing. Sometimes it was just a
confused din of voices; sometimes everyone would burst
out together in the same songthe " Marseillaise, » or the
" Internationale, » or " Madelon," or " Les Fraises et les
Framboises. » Azaya, a great clumping peasant girl who
worked fourteen hours a day in a glass factory, sang a
song about, "
Il a perdu ses pantalons, tout en dansant le
Charleston
." Her friend Marinette, a thin, dark Corsican
girl of obstinate virtue, tied her knees together and
danced the
danse du ventre. The old Rougiers wandered
in and out, cadging drinks and trying to tell a long,
involved story about someone who had once cheated
them over a bedstead. R., cadaverous and silent, sat in
his corner quietly boozing. Charlie, drunk, half danced,
half staggered to and fro with a glass of sham absinthe
balanced in one fat hand, pinching the women's breasts
and declaiming poetry. People played darts and diced
for drinks. Manuel, a Spaniard, dragged the girls to the
bar and shook the dice-box against their bellies, for
luck. Madame F. stood at the bar rapidly pouring
chopines
of wine through the pewter funnel, with a wet
dishcloth always handy, because every man in the room
tried to make love to her. Two children, bastards of big
Louis the bricklayer, sat in a corner sharing a glass of
sirop
. Everyone was very happy, overwhelmingly
certain that the world was a good place and we a notable
set of people.
For an hour the noise scarcely slackened. Then about
midnight there was a piercing shout of «
Citoyens! » and
the sound of a chair falling over. A blond, red-faced
workman had risen to his feet and was banging a bottle
on the table. Everyone stopped singing; the word went
round, "Sh! Furex is starting!" Furex was a strange
creature, a Limousin stonemason who worked steadily
all the week and drank himself into a kind of paroxysm
on Saturdays. He had lost his memory and could not
remember anything before the war, and he would have
gone to pieces through drink if Madame F. had not taken
care of him. On Saturday evenings at about five o'clock
she would say to someone, "Catch Furex before he
spends his wages," and when he had been caught she
would take away his money, leaving him enough for one
good drink. One week he escaped, and, rolling blind
drunk in the Place Monge, was run over by a car and
badly hurt.
The queer thing about Furex was that, though he was
a Communist when sober, he turned violently patriotic
when drunk. He started the evening with good
Communist principles, but after four or five litres he
was a rampant Chauvinist, denouncing spies,
challenging all foreigners to fight, and, if he was not
prevented, throwing bottles. It was at this stage that he
made his speech-for he made a patriotic speech every
Saturday night. The speech was always the same, word
for word. It ran:
"Citizens of the Republic, are there any Frenchmen
here? If there are any Frenchmen here, I rise to remind
them-to remind them in effect, of the glorious days of
the war. When one looks back upon that time of
comradeship and heroism-one looks back, in effect,
upon that time of comradeship and heroism. When one
remembers the heroes who are dead-one remembers, in
effect, the heroes who are dead. Citizens of the
Republic, I was wounded at Verdun
"
Here he partially undressed and showed the wound
he had received at Verdun. There were shouts of
applause. We thought nothing in the world could be
funnier than this speech of Furex's. He was a well-
known spectacle in the quarter; people used to come in
from other
bistros to watch him when his fit started.
The word was passed round to bait Furex. With a
wink to the others someone called for silence, and asked
him to sing the « Marseillaise. » He sang it well, in a fine
bass voice, with patriotic gurgling noises deep down in
his chest when he came to
« Aux arrmes, citoyens!
Forrmez vos bataillons!
» Veritable tears rolled down his
cheeks; he was too drunk to see that everyone was
laughing at him. Then, before he had finished, two
strong workmen seized him by either arm and held him
down, while Azaya shouted, "Vine l'Allemagne! » just out
of his reach. Furex's face went purple at such infamy.
Everyone in the bistro began shouting together, "
Vive
l'Allemagne! A bas la France!"
while Furex struggled to
get at them. But suddenly he spoiled the fun. His face
turned pale and doleful, his limbs went limp, and before
anyone could stop him he was sick on the table. Then Madame
F. hoisted him like a sack and carried him up to bed. In the
morning he reappeared quiet and civil, and bought a copy of
L'Humanité
.
The table was wiped with a cloth, Madame F.
brought more litre bottles and loaves of bread, and we
settled down to serious drinking. There were more
songs. An itinerant singer came in with his banjo and
performed for five-sou pieces. An Arab and a girl from
the
bistro down the street did a dance, the man wielding
a painted wooden phallus the size of a rolling-pin.
There were gaps in the noise now. People had begun to
talk about their love-affairs, and the war, and the barbel
fishing in the Seine, and the best way to
faire la
revolution
, and to tell stories. Charlie, grown sober again,
captured the conversation and talked about his soul for
five minutes. The doors and windows were opened to
cool the room. The street was emptying, and in the
distance one could hear the lonely milk train thundering
down the Boulevard St. Michel. The air blew cold on
our foreheads, and the coarse African wine still tasted
good: we were still happy, but meditatively, with the
shouting and hilarious mood finished.
By one o'clock we were not happy any longer. We
felt the joy of the evening wearing thin, and called
hastily for more bottles, but Madame F. was watering
the wine now, and it did not taste the same. Men grew
quarrelsome. The girls were violently kissed and hands
thrust into their bosoms and they made off lest worse
should happen. Big Louis, the bricklayer, was drunk,
and crawled about the floor barking and pretending to
be a dog. The others grew tired of him and kicked at
him as he went past. People seized each other by the
arm and began long rambling confessions, and were
angry when these were not listened to. The crowd
thinned. Manuel and another man, both gamblers, went
across to the Arab
bistro, where card-playing went on till
daylight. Charlie suddenly borrowed thirty francs from
Madame F. and disappeared, probably to a brothel. Men
began to empty their glasses, call briefly, «
'Sieurs, dames!"
and go off to bed.
By half-past one the last drop of pleasure had
evaporated, leaving nothing but headaches. We perceived
that we were not splendid inhabitants of a splendid
world, but a crew of underpaid workmen grown squalidly
and dismally drunk. We went on swallowing the wine,
but it was only from habit, and the stuff seemed suddenly
nauseating. One's head had swollen up like a balloon, the
floor rocked, one's tongue and lips were stained purple.
At last it was no use keeping it up any longer. Several
men went out into the yard behind the bistro and were
sick. We crawled up to bed, tumbled down half dressed,
and stayed there ten hours.
Most of my Saturday nights went in this way. On the
whole, the two hours when one was perfectly and wildly
happy seemed worth the subsequent headache. For
many men in the quarter, unmarried and with no future
to think of, the weekly drinking-bout was the one thing
that made life worth living.
XVIII
CHARLIE told us a good story one Saturday night in the
bistro
. Try and picture him-drunk, but sober enough to
talk consecutively. He bangs on the zinc bar and yells for
silence:
"Silence,
messieurs et dames-silence, I implore you!
Listen to this story, that I am about to tell you. A
memorable story, an instructive story, one of the
souvenirs of a refined and civilised life. Silence,
messieurs
et dames
!
"It happened at a time when I was hard up. You
know what that is like-how damnable, that a man of
refinement should ever be in such a condition. My
money had not come from home; I had pawned every-
thing, and there was nothing open to me except to
work, which is a thing I will not do. I was living with a
girl at the time-Yvonne her name was-a great half-witted
peasant girl like Azaya there, with yellow hair and fat
legs. The two of us had eaten nothing in three days.
Mon
Dieu
, what sufferings! The girl used to walk up and
down the room with her hands on her belly, howling
like a dog that she was dying of starvation. It was
terrible.
"But to a man of intelligence nothing is impossible. I
propounded to myself the question, 'What is the easiest
way to get money without working?' And immediately
the answer came: 'To get money easily one must be a
woman. Has not every woman something to sell?' And
then, as I lay reflecting upon the things I should do if I
were a woman, an idea came into my head. I
remembered the Government maternity hospitals-you
know the Government maternity hospitals? They are
places where women who are enceinte are given meals
free and no questions are asked. It is done to encourage
childbearing. Any woman can go there and demand a
meal, and she is given it immediately.
«
'Mon Dieu!' I thought, 'if only I were a woman! I
would eat at one of those places every day. Who can
tell whether a woman is enceinte or not, without an
examination?' 7
"I turned to Yvonne. 'Stop that insufferable
bawling.' I said, 'I have thought of a way to get food.'
" 'How?' said she.
" 'It is simple,' I said. "Go to the Government
