George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
Numéro 97!"
"Yes," I said, standing up.
"Seventy francs?"
Seventy francs for ten pounds' worth of clothes! But it
was no use arguing; I had seen someone else attempt to
argue, and the clerk had instantly refused the pledge. I
took the money and the pawnticket and walked out. I
had now no clothes except what I stood up in-the coat
badly out at the elbow-an overcoat, moderately pawnable,
and one spare shirt. Afterwards, when it was too late, I
learned that it was wiser to go to a pawnshop in the
afternoon. The clerks are French, and, like most French
people, are in a bad temper till they have eaten their
lunch.
When I got home, Madame F. was sweeping the
bistro floor. She came up the steps to meet me. I could
see in her eye that she was uneasy about my rent.
"Well," she said, "what did you get for your clothes?
Not much, eh?"
"Two hundred francs," I said promptly.
"
Tiens!" she said, surprised; "well, that's not bad.
How expensive those English clothes must be!"
The lie saved a lot of trouble, and, strangely enough, it
came true. A few days later I did receive exactly two
hundred francs due to me for a newspaper article, and,
though it hurt to do it, I at once paid every penny of it in
rent. So, though I came near to starving in the following
weeks, I was hardly ever without a roof.
It was now absolutely necessary to find work, and I
remembered a friend of mine, a Russian waiter named
Boris, who might be able to help me. I had first met him
in the public ward of a hospital, where he was being
treated for arthritis in the left leg. He had told me to come
to him if I were ever in difficulties.
I must say something about Boris, for he was a
curious character and my close friend for a long time. He
was a big, soldierly man of about thirty-five, and had
been good-looking, but since his illness he had grown im-
mensely fat from lying in bed. Like most Russian
refugees, he had had an adventurous life. His parents,
killed in the Revolution, had been rich people, and he had
served through the war in the Second Siberian Rifles,
which, according to him, was the best regiment in the
Russian Army. After the war he had first worked in a
brush factory, then as a porter at Les Halles, then had
become a dishwasher, and had finally worked his way up
to be a waiter. When he fell ill he was at the Hôtel Scribe,
and taking a hundred francs a day in tips. His ambition
was to become a maitre d'hdtel, save fifty thousand
francs, and set up a small, select restaurant on the Right
Bank.
Boris always talked of the war as the happiest time
0f his life. War and soldiering were his passion; he
had read innumerable books 0f strategy and military
history, and could tell you all about the theories 0f
Napoleon, Kutuzof, Clausewitz, Moltke and Foch.
Anything to do with soldiers pleased him. His favourite
café was the Closerie des Lilas in Montparnasse,
simply because the statue 0f Marshal Ney stands
outside it. Later 0n, Boris and I sometimes went to the
Rue du Commerce together. If we went by Metro, Boris
always got out at Cambronne station instead 0f
Commerce, though Commerce was nearer; he liked the
association with General Cambronne, who was called
on to surrender at Waterloo, and answered simply,
«
Merde! »
The only things left to Boris by the Revolution were
his medals and some photographs of his old regiment;
he had kept these when everything else went to the
pawnshop. Almost every day he would spread the
photographs out on the bed and talk about them:
"
Voila, mon ami! There you see me at the head 0f my
company. Fine big men, eh? Not like these little rats 0f
Frenchmen. A captain at twenty-not bad, eh? Yes, a
captain in the Second Siberian Rifles; and my father
was a colonel.
«
Ah, mais, mon ami, the ups and downs of life! A
captain in the Russian Army, and then, piff! the Revo-
lution-every penny gone. In 1916 I stayed a week at the
Hotel Édouard Sept; in 1920 I was trying for a job as
night watchman there. I have been night watchman,
cellarman, floor scrubber, dishwasher, porter, lavatory
attendant. I have tipped waiters, and I have been
tipped by waiters.
« Ah, but I have known what it is to live like a
gentleman,
mon ami. I do not say it to boast, but the
other day I was trying to compute how many
mistresses I have had in my life, and I made it out to
be over two hundred. Yes, at least two hundred . . . Ah, well,
ca reviendra
. Victory is to him who fights the longest.
Courage!" etc. etc.
Boris had a queer, changeable nature. He always
wished himself back in the army, but he had also been
a waiter long enough t0 acquire the waiter's outlook.
Though he had never saved more than a few thousand
francs, he took it for granted that in the end he would
be able to set up his own restaurant and grow rich. All
waiters, I afterwards found, talk and think of this; it is
what reconciles them to being waiters. Boris used to
talk interestingly about hotel life:
"Waiting is a gamble," he used to say; "you may die
poor, you may make your fortune in a year. You are
not paid wages, you depend on tips-ten per cent. of the
bill, and a commission from the wine companies on
champagne corks. Sometimes the tips are enormous.
The barman at Maxim's, for instance, makes five
hundred francs a day. More than five hundred, in the
season. . . . I have made two hundred francs a day
myself. It was at a hotel in Biarritz, in the season. The
whole staff, from the manager down to the
plongeurs,
was working twenty-one hours a day. Twenty-one
hours' work and two and a half hours in bed, for a
month on end. Still, it was worth it, at two hundred
francs a day.
"You never know when a stroke of luck is coming.
Once when I was at the Hôtel Royal an American
customer sent for me before dinner and ordered
twentyfour brandy cocktails. I brought them all
together on a tray, in twenty-four glasses. 'Now,
garcon
,' said the customer (he was drunk), 'I'll drink
twelve and you'll drink twelve, and if you can walk to
the door afterwards you get a hundred francs.' I
walked to the door, and he gave me a hundred francs.
And every night for six days he did the same thing; twelve
brandy
cocktails, then a hundred francs. A few months later
I heard he had been extradited by the American
Governmentembezzlement. There is something fine, do
you not think, about these Americans?"
I liked Boris, and we had interesting times together,
playing chess and talking about war and hotels. Boris
used often to suggest that I should become a waiter.
"The life would suit you," he used to say; "when you are
in work, with a hundred francs a day and a nice mistress,
it's not bad. You say you go in for writing. Writing is
bosh. There is only one way to make money at writing,
and that is to marry a publisher's daughter. But you
would make a good waiter if you shaved that moustache
off. You are tall and you speak English those are the
chief things a waiter needs. Wait till I can bend this
accursed leg,
mon ami. And then, if you are ever out of
a job, come to me."
Now that I was short of my rent, and getting hungry,
I remembered Boris's promise, and decided to look him
up at once. I did not hope to become a waiter so easily
as he had promised, but of course I knew how to scrub
dishes, and no doubt he could get me a job in the
kitchen. He had said that dishwashing jobs were to be
had for the asking during the summer. It was a great
relief to remember that I had after all one influential
friend to fall back on.
V
A SHORT time before, Boris had given me an address
in the Rue du Marché des Blancs Manteaux. All he had
said in his letter was that "things were not marching too
badly," and I assumed that he was back
at the Hôtel Scribe, touching his hundred francs a
day. I was full of hope, and wondered why I had been
fool enough not to go to Boris before. I saw myself in a
cosy restaurant, with jolly cooks singing love-songs as
they broke eggs into the pan, and five solid meals a day.
I even squandered two francs-fifty on a packet of
Gaulois Bleu, in anticipation of my wages.
In the morning I walked down to the Rue du Marché
des Blancs Manteaux; with a shock, I found it a slummy
back street as bad as my own. Boris's hotel was the
dirtiest hotel in the street. From its dark doorway there
came out a vile, sour odour, a mixture of slops and
synthetic soup-it was Bouillon Zip, twenty-five
centimes a packet. A misgiving came over me. People
who drink Bouillon Zip are starving, or near it. Could
Boris possibly be earning a hundred francs a day? A
surly patron, sitting in the office, said to me, Yes, the
Russian was at home-in the attic. I went up six flights of
narrow, winding stairs, the Bouillon Zip growing
stronger as one got higher. Boris did not answer when I
knocked at his door, so I opened it and went in.
The room was an attic, ten feet square, lighted only
by a skylight, its sole furniture a narrow iron bedstead, a
chair, and a washhand-stand with one game leg. A long
S-shaped chain of bugs marched slowly across the wall
above the bed. Boris was lying asleep, naked, his large
belly making a mound under the grimy sheet. His chest
was spotted with insect bites. As I came in he woke up,
rubbed his eyes, and groaned deeply.
"Name of Jesus Christ!" he exclaimed, "oh, name of
Jesus Christ, my back! Curse it, I believe my back is
broken!"
"What's the matter?" I exclaimed.
"My back is broken, that is all. I have spent the night
on the floor. Oh, name of Jesus Christ! If you knew
what my back feels like!"
"My dear Boris, are you ill?"
"Not ill, only starving-yes, starving to death if this
goes on much longer. Besides sleeping on the floor, I
have lived on two francs a day for weeks past. It is
fearful. You have come at a bad moment, mon ami. »
It did not seem much use to ask whether Boris still
had his job at the Hôtel Scribe. I hurried downstairs
and bought a loaf of bread. Boris threw himself on the
bread and ate half of it, after which he felt better, sat
up in bed, and told me what was the matter with him.
He had failed to get a job after leaving the hospital,
because he was still very lame, and he had spent all
his money and pawned everything, and finally starved
for several days. He had slept a week on the quay
under the Pont d'Austerlitz, among some empty wine
barrels. For the past fortnight he had been living in
this room, together with a Jew, a mechanic. It -
appeared (there was some complicated explanation)
