George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
the end of my money, and my rent was several days
overdue. We loafed about the dismal empty restaurant,
too hungry even to get on with the work that remained.
Only Boris now believed that the restaurant would
open. He had set his heart on being
maitre d'hôtel, and
he invented a theory that the
patron's money was tied
up in shares and he was waiting a favourable moment
for selling. On the tenth day I had nothing to eat or
smoke, and I told the
patron that I could not continue
working without an advance on my wages. As blandly
as usual, the
patron promised the advance, and then,
according to his custom, vanished. I walked part of
the way home, but I did not feel equal to a scene with
Madame F. over the rent, so I passed the night on a
bench on the boulevard. It was very uncomfortable-the
arm of the seat cuts into your back-and much colder
than I had expected. There was plenty of time, in the
long boring hours between dawn and work, to think
what a fool I had been to deliver myself into the hands
of these Russians.
Then, in the morning, the luck changed. Evidently
the
patron had come to an understanding with his
creditors, for he arrived with money in his pockets, set
the alterations going, and gave me my advance. Boris
and I bought macaroni and a piece of horse's liver, and
had our first hot meal in ten days.
The workmen were brought in and the alterations
made, hastily and with incredible shoddiness. The
tables, for instance, were to be covered with baize, but
when the
patron found that baize was expensive he
bought instead disused army blankets, smelling incor-
rigibly of sweat. The table-cloths (they were check, to go
with the "Norman" decorations) would cover them, of
course. On the last night we were at work till two in the
morning, getting things ready. The crockery did not
arrive till eight, and, being new, had all to be washed.
The cutlery did not arrive till the next morning, nor the
linen either, so that we had to dry the crockery with a
shirt of the
patron's and an old pillowslip belonging to
the concierge. Boris and I did all the work. Jules was
skulking, and the
patron and his wife sat in the bar with
a dun and some Russian friends, drinking success to
the restaurant. The cook was in the kitchen with her
head on the table, crying, because she was expected to
cook for fifty people, and there were not pots and pans
enough for ten. About midnight there was a fearful
interview with some duns, who came intending to
seize eight copper saucepans which the
patron had
obtained on credit. They were bought off with half a
bottle of brandy.
Jules and I missed the last Metro home and had to
sleep on the floor of the restaurant. The first thing we
saw in the morning were two large rats sitting on the
kitchen table, eating from a ham that stood there. It
seemed a bad omen, and I was surer than ever that the
Auberge de Jehan Cottard would turn out a failure.
XX
THE
patron had engaged me as kitchen
plongeur; that is,
my job was to wash up, keep the kitchen clean, prepare
vegetables, make tea, coffee and sandwiches, do the
simpler cooking, and run errands. The terms were, as
usual, five hundred francs a month and food, but I had
no free day and no fixed working hours. At the Hôtel X. I
had seen catering at its best, with unlimited money and
good organisation. Now, at the Auberge, I learned how
things are done in a thoroughly bad restaurant. It is
worth describing, for there are hundreds of similar
restaurants in Paris, and every visitor feeds in one of
them occasionally.
I should add, by the way, that the Auberge was not
the ordinary cheap eating-house frequented by students
and workmen. We did not provide an adequate meal at
less than twenty-five francs, and we were picturesque
and artistic, which sent up our social standing. There
were the indecent pictures in the bar, and the Norman
decorations-sham beams on the walls, electric lights
done up as candlesticks, "peasant" pottery, even a
mounting-block at the door-and the
patron and the head
waiter were Russian officers, and many of the
customers titled Russian refugees. In short, we were
decidedly chic.
Nevertheless, the conditions behind the kitchen door
were suitable for a pigsty. For this is what our service
arrangements were like.
The kitchen measured fifteen feet long by eight
broad, and half this space was taken up by the stoves
and tables. All the pots had to be kept on shelves out of
reach, and there was only room for one dustbin. This
dustbin used to be crammed full by midday, and the
floor was normally an inch deep in a compost of
trampled food.
For firing we had nothing but three gas-stoves,
without ovens, and all joints had to be sent out to the
bakery.
There was no larder. Our substitute for one was a
half-roofed shed in the yard, with a tree growing in the
middle of it. The meat, vegetables and so forth lay there
on the bare earth, raided by rats and cats.
There was no hot water laid on. Water for washing up
had to be heated in pans, and, as there was no room for
these on the stoves when meals were cooking, most of
the plates had to be washed in cold water. This, with
soft soap and the hard Paris water, meant scraping the
grease off with bits of newspaper.
We were so short of saucepans that I had to wash
each one as soon as it was done with, instead of leaving
them till the evening. This alone wasted probably an
hour a day.
Owing to some scamping of expense in the installa-
tion, the electric light usually fused at eight in the
evening. The patron would only allow us three candles
in the kitchen, and the cook said three were unlucky, so
we had only two.
Our coffee-grinder was borrowed from a
bistro near
by, and our dustbin and brooms from the concierge.
After the first week a quantity of linen did not come back
from the wash, as the bill was not paid. We were in
trouble with the inspector of labour, who had discovered
that the staff included no Frenchmen; he had several
private interviews with the
patron, who, I believe, was
obliged to bribe him. The electric company was still
dunning us, and when the duns found that we would
buy them off with
apéritifs, they came every morning. We
were in debt at the grocery, and credit would have been
stopped, only the grocer's wife (a moustachio'd woman of
sixty) had taken a fancy to Jules, who was sent every
morning to cajole her. Similarly I had to waste an hour
every day haggling over vegetables in the Rue du
Commerce, to save a few centimes.
These are the results of starting a restaurant on in-
sufficient capital. And in these conditions the cook and I
were expected to serve thirty or forty meals a day, and
would later on be serving a hundred. From the first day
it was too much for us. The cook's working hours were
from eight in the morning till midnight, and mine from
seven in the morning till half-past twelve the next
morning-seventeen and a half hours, almost without a
break. We never had time to sit down till five in the
afternoon, and even then there was no seat except the
top of the dustbin. Boris, who lived near by and had not
to catch the last Metro home, worked from eight in the
morning till two the next morning-eighteen hours a day,
seven days a week. Such hours, though not usual, are
nothing extraordinary in Paris.
Life settled at once into a routine that made the Hôtel
X. seem like a holiday. Every morning at six I drove
myself out of bed, did not shave, sometimes washed,
hurried up to the Place d'Italie and fought for
a place on the Metro. By seven I was in the desolation of
the cold, filthy kitchen, with the potato skins and bones
and fishtails littered on the floor, and a pile of plates,
stuck together in their grease, waiting from overnight. I
could not start on the plates yet, because the water was
cold, and I had to fetch milk and make coffee, for the
others arrived at eight and expected to find coffee ready.
Also, there were always several copper saucepans to
clean. Those copper saucepans are the bane of a
plongeur's
life. They have to be scoured with sand and
bunches of chain, ten minutes to each one, and then
polished on the outside with Brasso. Fortunately, the art
of making them has been lost and they are gradually
vanishing from French kitchens, though one can still
buy them second-hand.
When I had begun on the plates the cook would take
me away from the plates to begin skinning onions, and
when I had begun on the onions the
patron would arrive
and send me out to buy cabbages. When I came back
with the cabbages the
patron's wife would tell me to go to
some shop half a mile away and buy a pot of rouge; by
the time I came back there would be more vegetables
waiting, and the plates were still not done. In this way
our incompetence piled one job on another throughout
the day, everything in arrears.
Till ten, things went comparatively easily, though we
were working fast, and no one lost his temper. The cook
would find time to talk about her artistic nature, and say
did I not think Tolstoi was
épatant, and sing in a fine
soprano voice as she minced beef on the board. But at
ten the waiters began clamouring for their lunch, which
they had early, and at eleven the first customers would
be arriving. Suddenly everything became hurry and bad
temper. There was not the same furious rushing and
yelling as at the Hôtel X., but an atmosphere of
muddle, petty spite and exasperation. Discomfort was at
the bottom of it. It was unbearably cramped in the
kitchen, and dishes had to be put on the floor, and one
had to be thinking constantly about not stepping on
them. The cook's vast buttocks banged against me as she
moved to and fro. A ceaseless, nagging chorus of orders
streamed from her:
"Unspeakable idiot! How many times have I told you
not to bleed the beetroots? Quick, let me get to the sink!
Put those knives away; get on with the potatoes. What
have you done with my strainer? Oh, leave those
potatoes alone. Didn't I tell you to skim the
bouillon? Take
that can of water off the stove. Never mind the washing
