George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
to, so long as he can talk about himself. He declaims
like an orator on a barricade, rolling the words on his
tongue and gesticulating with his short arms. His
small, rather piggy eyes glitter with enthusiasm. He is,
somehow, profoundly disgusting to see.
He is talking of love, his favourite subject.
«
Ah, l'amour, l'amour! Ah, que les femmes m'ont tué!
Alas, messieurs et dames,
women have been my ruin,
beyond all hope my ruin. At twenty-two I am utterly
worn out and finished. But what things I have learned,
what abysses of wisdom have I not plumbed! How
great a thing it is to have acquired the true wisdom, to
have become in the highest sense of the word a
civilised man, to have become
raffiné, vicieux, » etc. etc.
"
Messieurs et dames, I perceive that you are sad. Ah,
mais la vie est belle-you must not be sad. Be more gay, I
beseech you!
"
Fill high ze bowl vid Saurian vine, Ve
vill not sink of semes like zese!
« Ah, que la vie est belle
! Listen,
messieurs et dames, out
of the fullness of my experience I will discourse to you
of love. I will explain to you what is the true meaning
of love-what is the true sensibility, the higher, more
refined pleasure which is known to civilised men alone.
I will tell you of the happiest day of my life. Alas, but I
am past the time when I could know such happiness as
that. It is gone for ever-the very possibility, even the
desire for it, are gone.
"Listen, then. It was two years ago; my brother was
in Paris-he is a lawyer-and my parents had told him to
find me and take me out to dinner. We hate each other,
my brother and I, but we preferred not to disobey my
parents. We dined, and at dinner he grew very drunk
upon three bottles of Bordeaux. I took him back to his
hotel, and on the way I bought a bottle of brandy, and
when we had arrived I made my brother drink a
tumberful of it-I told him it was something to make
him sober. He drank it, and immediately he fell down
like somebody in a fit, dead drunk. I lifted him up and
propped his back against the bed; then I went through
his pockets. I found eleven hundred francs, and with
that I hurried down the stairs, jumped into a taxi, and
escaped. My brother did not know my address -I was
safe.
"Where does a man go when he has money? To the
bordels
, naturally. But you do not suppose that I was
going to waste my time on some vulgar debauchery fit
only for navvies? Confound it, one is a civilised man! I
was fastidious, exigeant, you understand, with a
thousand francs in my pocket. It was midnight before I
found what I was looking for. I had fallen in with a very
smart youth of eighteen, dressed en smoking and with his
hair cut
à l'américaine, and we were talking in a quiet
bistro
away from the boulevards. We understood one
another well, that youth and I. We talked of this and
that, and discussed ways of diverting oneself. Presently
we took a taxi together and were driven away.
"The taxi stopped in a narrow, solitary street with a
single gas-lamp flaring at the end. There were dark
puddles among the stones. Down one side ran the high,
blank wall of a convent. My guide led me to a tall,
ruinous house with shuttered windows, and knocked
several times at the door. Presently there was a sound of
footsteps and a shooting of bolts, and the door opened a
little. A hand came round the edge of it; it was a large,
crooked hand, that held itself palm upwards under our
noses, demanding money.
"My guide put his foot between the door and the step.
'How much do you want?' he said.
" 'A thousand francs,' said a woman's voice. 'Pay up
at once or you don't come in.'
"I put a thousand francs into the hand and gave the
remaining hundred to my guide: he said good night and
left me. I could hear the voice inside counting the notes,
and then a thin old crow of a woman in a black dress
put her nose out and regarded me suspiciously before
letting me in. It was very dark inside: I could see
nothing except a flaring gas jet that illuminated a patch
of plaster wall, throwing everything else into
deeper shadow. There was a smell of rats and dust.
Without speaking, the old woman lighted a candle at the
gas jet, then hobbled in front of me down a stone
passage to the top of a flight of stone steps.
" '
Voilà!' she said; 'go down into the cellar there and
do what you like. I shall see nothing, hear nothing, know
nothing. You are free, you understand-perfectly free.'
"Ha,
messieurs, need I describe to you
forcément, you
know it yourselves-that shiver, half of terror and half of
joy, that goes through one at these moments? I crept
down, feeling my way; I could hear my breathing and the
scraping of my shoes on the stones, otherwise all was
silence. At the bottom of the stairs my hand met an
electric switch. I turned it, and a great electrolier of
twelve redglobes flooded the cellarwith a red light. And
behold, I was not in a cellar, but in a bedroom, a great,
rich, garish bedroom, coloured blood red from top to
bottom. Figure it to yourselves,
messieurs et dames! Red
carpet on the floor, red paper on the walls, red plush on
the chairs, even the ceiling red; everywhere red, burning
into the eyes. It was a heavy, stifling red, as though the
light were shining through bowls of blood. At the far end
stood a huge, square bed, with quilts red like the rest,
and on it a girl was lying, dressed in a frock of red velvet.
At the sight of me she shrank away and tried to hide her
knees under the short dress.
"I had halted by the door. 'Come here, my chicken,' I
called to her.
"She gave a whimper of fright. With a bound I was
beside the bed; she tried to elude me, but I seized her by
the throat-like this, do you see?-tight! She struggled, she
began to cry out for mercy, but I held her fast, forcing
back her head and staring down into her face. She was
twenty years old, perhaps; her face was the
broad, dull face of a stupid child, but it was coated
with paint and powder, and her blue, stupid eyes,
shining in the red light, wore that shocked, distorted
look that one sees nowhere save in the eyes of these
women. She was some peasant girl, doubtless, whom
her parents had sold into slavery.
"Without another word I pulled her off the bed and
threw her on to the floor. And then I fell upon her like
a tiger! Ah, the joy, the incomparable rapture of that
time! There,
messieurs et dames, is what I would expound to
you;
voilà (amour! There is the true love, there is the only
thing in the world worth striving for; there is the thing
beside which all your arts and ideals, all your
philosophies and creeds, all your fine words and high
attitudes, are as pale and profitless as ashes. When
one has experienced love-the true love-what is there in
the world that seems more than a mere ghost of joy?
"More and more savagely I renewed the attack.
Again and again the girl tried to escape; she cried out
for mercy anew, but I laughed at her.
" 'Mercy!' I said, 'do you suppose I have come here
to show mercy? Do you suppose I have paid a
thousand francs for that?' I swear to you, messieurs et
dames, that if it were not for that accursed law that robs
us of our liberty, I would have murdered her at that
moment.
« Ah, how she screamed, with what bitter cries of
agony. But there was no one to hear them; down there
under the streets of Paris we were as secure as at the
heart of a pyramid. Tears streamed down the girl's
face, washing away the powder in long, dirty smears.
Ah, that irrecoverable time! You,
messieurs et dames, you
who have not cultivated the finer sensibilities of love,
for you such pleasure is almost beyond conception.
And I too, now that my youth is gone-ah, youth!-
shall never again see life so beautiful as that. It
is finished.
« Ah yes, it is gone-gone for ever. Ah, the poverty,
the shortness, the disappointment of human joy! For
in reality-car
en réalité, what is the duration of the
supreme moment of love? It is nothing, an instant, a
second perhaps. A second of ecstasy, and after that-
dust, ashes, nothingness.
"And so, just for one instant, I captured the
supreme happiness, the highest and most refined
emotion to which human beings can attain. And in the
same moment it was finished, and I was left-to what?
All my savagery, my passion, were scattered like the
petals of a rose. I was left cold and languid, full. of
vain regrets; in my revulsion I even felt a kind of pity
for the weeping girl on the floor. Is it not nauseous,
that we should be the prey of such mean emotions? I
did not look at the girl again; my sole thought was to
get away. I hastened up the steps of the vault and out
into the street. It was dark and bitterly cold, the
streets were empty, the stones echoed under my heels
with a hollow, lonely ring. All my money was gone, I
had not even the price of a taxi fare. I walked back
alone to my cold, solitary room.
"But there,
messieurs et dames, that is what I promised
to expound to you. That is Love. That was the happiest
day of my life."
He was a curious specimen, Charlie. I describe
him, just to show what diverse characters could be
found flourishing in the Coq d'Or quarter.
III
I
L I V E D in the Coq d'Or quarter for about a year
and a half. One day, in summer, I found that I had just
four hundred and fifty francs left, and beyond this
nothing but thirty-six francs a week, which I earned by giving
English lessons. Hitherto I had not thought about the
future, but I now realised that I must do something at
once. I decided to start looking for a job, and-very
luckily, as it turned out-I took the precaution of paying
two hundred francs for a month's rent in advance. With
the other two hundred and fifty francs, besides the
English lessons, I could live a month, and in a month I
should probably find work. I aimed at becoming a guide
to one of the tourist companies, or perhaps an
interpreter. However, a piece of bad luck prevented this.
One day there turned up at the hotel a young Italian
who called himself a compositor. He was rather an am-
biguous person, for he wore side whiskers, which are
