No More Learning

The nurse had recognized Yvonne, and she
came straight up to us, smiling. She was a big fat woman with a gold pince-nez and red
cheeks like the cheeks of an apple. A motherly, interfering kind of woman.



“‘I hope you are well, MA PETITE? ” she said kindly. “And your baby, is he well too?
Was it a boy, as you were hoping? ”

‘Yvonne had begun trembling so hard that I had to grip her arm. “No,” she said at last.
“‘Ah, then, EVIDEMMENT, it was a girl? ”

‘Thereupon Yvonne, the idiot, lost her head completely. “No,” she actually said again!

‘The nurse was taken aback. “COMMENT! ” she exclaimed, “neither a boy nor a girl! But
how can that be? ”

‘Figure to yourselves, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, it was a dangerous moment. Yvonne
had turned the colour of a beetroot and she looked ready to burst into tears; another
second and she would have confessed everything. Heaven knows what might have
happened. But as for me, I had kept my head; I stepped in and saved the situation.

‘“It was twins,” I said calmly.

‘“Twins! ” exclaimed the nurse. And she was so pleased that she took Yvonne by the
shoulders and embraced her on both cheeks, publicly.

‘Yes, twins. . . ’


CHAPTER XIX

One day, when we had been at the Hotel X five or six weeks, Boris disappeared without
notice. In the evening I found him waiting for me in the Rue de Rivoli. He slapped me
gaily on the shoulder.

‘Free at last, MON AMI! You can give notice in the morning. The Auberge opens
tomorrow. ’


‘Tomorrow? ’



‘Well, possibly we shall need a day or two to arrange things. But, at any rate, no more
CAFETERIA! NOUS SOMMES LANCES, MON AMI! My tail coat is out of pawn
already. ’

His manner was so hearty that I felt sure there was something wrong, and I did not at all
want to leave my safe and comfortable job at the hotel. However, I had promised Boris,
so I gave notice, and the next morning at seven went down to the Auberge de Jehan
Cottard. It was locked, and I went in search of Boris, who had once more bolted from his
lodgings and taken a room in the rue de la Groix Nivert. I found him asleep, together with
a girl whom he had picked up the night before, and who he told me was ‘of a very
sympathetic temperament. ’ As to the restaurant, he said that it was all arranged; there
were only a few little things to be seen to before we opened.

At ten I managed to get Boris out of bed, and we unlocked the restaurant. At a glance I
saw what the ‘few little things’ amounted to. It was briefly this: that the alterations had
not been touched since our last visit. The stoves for the kitchen had not arrived, the water
and electricity had not been laid on, and there was all manner of painting, polishing and
carpentering to be done. Nothing short of a miracle could open the restaurant within ten
days, and by the look of things it might collapse without even opening. It was obvious
what had happened. The PATRON was short of money, and he had engaged the staff
(there were four of us) in order to use us instead of workmen. He would be getting our
services almost free, for waiters are paid no wages, and though he would have to pay me,
he would not be feeding me till the restaurant opened. In effect, he had swindled us of
several hundred francs by sending for us before the restaurant was open. We had thrown
up a good job for nothing.

Boris, however, was full of hope. He had only one idea in his head, namely, that here at
last was a chance of being a waiter and wearing a tail coat once more. For this he was
quite willing to do ten days’ work unpaid, with the chance of being left jobless in the end.
‘Patience! ’ he kept saying. ‘That will arrange itself. Wait till the restaurant opens, and
we’ll get it all back. Patience, MON AMI! ’

We needed patience, for days passed and the restaurant did not even progress towards
opening. We cleaned out the cellars, fixed the shelves, distempered the walls, polished



the woodwork, whitewashed the ceiling, stained the floor; but the main work, the
plumbing and gas-fitting and electricity, was still not done, because the PATRON could
not pay the bills. Evidently he was almost penniless, for he refused the smallest charges,
and he had a trick of swiftly disappearing when asked for money. His blend of shiftiness
and aristocratic manners made him very hard to deal with. Melancholy duns came
looking for him at all hours, and by instruction we always told them that he was at
Fontainebleau, or Saint Cloud, or some other place that was safely distant. Meanwhile, I
was getting hungrier and hungrier. I had left the hotel with thirty francs, and I had to go
back immediately to a diet of dry bread. Boris had managed in the beginning to extract an
advance of sixty francs from the PATRON, but he had spent half of it, in redeeming his
waiter’s clothes, and half on the girl of sympathetic temperament. He borrowed three
francs a day from Jules, the second waiter, and spent it on bread. Some days we had not
even money for tobacco.

Sometimes the cook came to see how things were getting on, and when she saw that the
kitchen was still bare of pots and pans she usually wept. Jules, the second waiter, refused
steadily to help with the work. He was a Magyar, a little dark, sharp-featured fellow in
spectacles, and very talkative; he had been a medical student, but had abandoned his
training for lack of money. He had a taste for talking while other people were working,
and he told me all about himself and his ideas. It appeared that he was a Communist, and
had various strange theories (he could prove to you by figures that it was wrong to work),
and he was also, like most Magyars, passionately proud. Proud and lazy men do not make
good waiters. It was Jules’s dearest boast that once when a customer in a restaurant had
insulted him, he had poured a plate of hot soup down the customer’s neck, and then
walked straight out without even waiting to be sacked.

As each day went by Jules grew more and more enraged at the trick the PATRON had
played on us. He had a spluttering, oratorical way of talking. He used to walk up and
down shaking his fist, and trying to incite me not to work:

‘Put that brush down, you fool! You and I belong to proud races; we don’t work for
nothing, like these damned Russian serfs. I tell you, to be cheated like this is torture to
me. There have been times in my life, when someone has cheated me even of five sous,
when I have vomited — yes, vomited with rage.



‘Besides, MON VIEUX, don’t forget that I’m a Communist. A BAS LA
BOURGEOISIE! Did any man alive ever see me working when I could avoid it? No.
And not only I don’t wear myself out working, like you other fools, but I steal, just to
show my independence. Once I was in a restaurant where the PATRON thought he could
treat me like a dog. Well, in revenge I found out a way to steal milk from the milk-cans
and seal them up again so that no one should know. I tell you I just swilled that milk
down night and morning. Every day I drank four litres of milk, besides half a litre of
cream. The PATRON was at his wits’ end to know where the milk was going. It wasn’t
that I wanted milk, you understand, because I hate the stuff; it was principle, just
principle.

‘Well, after three days I began to get dreadful pains in my belly, and I went to the doctor.
“What have you been eating? ” he said. I said: “I drink four litres of milk a day, and half a
litre of cream. ” “Four litres! ” he said. “Then stop it at once. You’ll burst if you go on. ”
“What do I care? ” I said. “With me principle is everything. I shall go on drinking that
milk, even if I do burst. ”

‘Well, the next day the PATRON caught me stealing milk. “You’re sacked,” he said;
“you leave at the end of the week. ” “PARDON, MONSIEUR,” I said, “I shall leave this
morning. ” “No, you won’t,” he said, “I can’t spare you till Saturday. ” “Very well, MON
PATRON,” I thought to myself, “we’ll see who gets tired of it first. ” And then I set to
work to smash the crockery. I broke nine plates the first day and thirteen the second; after
that the PATRON was glad to see the last of me.

‘Ah, I’m not one of your Russian MOUJIKS. . . ’

Ten days passed. It was a bad time. I was absolutely at 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’ HOTEL, 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 incorrigibly 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.


CHAPTER 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 Hotel X I had seen
catering at its best, with unlimited money and good organization. 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 tided 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 installation, 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 APERITIFS, 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 insufficient 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 Hotel 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’ltalie 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 Tolstoy was EPATANT, 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 Hotel 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 up, chop this



celery. No, not like that, you fool, like this. There! Look at you letting those peas boil
over! Now get to work and scale these herrings. Look, do you call this plate clean? Wipe
it on your apron. Put that salad on the floor. That’s right, put it where I’m bound to step
in it! Look out, that pot’s boiling over! Get me down that saucepan. No, the other one.
Put this on the grill. Throw those potatoes away. Don’t waste time, throw them on the
floor. Tread them in. Now throw down some sawdust; this Hoor’s like a skating-rink.
Look, you fool, that steak’s burning! MON DIEU, why did they send me an idiot for a
PLONGEUR? Who are you talking to? Do you realize that my aunt was a Russian
countess? ’ etc. etc. etc.

This went on till three o’clock without much variation, except that about eleven the cook
usually had a CRISE DE NERFS and a flood of tears. From three to live was a fairly
slack time for the waiters, but the cook was still busy, and I was working my fastest, for
there was a pile of dirty plates waiting, and it was a race to get them done, or partly done,
before dinner began. The washing up was doubled by the primitive conditions — a
cramped draining-board, tepid water, sodden cloths, and a sink that got blocked once in
an hour. By five the cook and I were feeling unsteady on our feet, not having eaten or sat
down since seven. We used to collapse, she on the dustbin and I on the floor, drink a
bottle of beer, and apologize for some of the things we had said in the morning. Tea was
what kept us going. We took care to have a pot always stewing, and drank pints during
the day.

At half-past five the hurry and quarrelling began again, and now worse than before,
because everyone was tired out. The cook had a CRISE DE NERFS at six and another at
nine; they came on so regularly that one could have told the time by them. She would
flop down on the dustbin, begin weeping hysterically, and cry out that never, no, never
had she thought to come to such a life as this; her nerves would not stand it; she had
studied music at Vienna; she had a bedridden husband to support, etc. etc. At another
time one would have been sorry for her, but, tired as we all were, her whimpering voice
merely infuriated us. Jules used to stand in the doorway and mimic her weeping. The
PATRON’S wife nagged, and Boris and Jules quarrelled all day, because Jules shirked
his work, and Boris, as head waiter, claimed the larger share of the tips. Only the second
day after the restaurant opened, they came to blows in the kitchen over a two-franc tip,
and the cook and I had to separate them. The only person who never forgot Us manners



was the PATRON. He kept the same hours as the rest of us, but he had no work to do, for
it was his wife who really managed things. His sole job, besides ordering the supplies,
was to stand in the bar smoking cigarettes and looking gentlemanly, and he did that to
perfection.

The cook and I generally found time to eat our dinner between ten and eleven o’clock. At
midnight the cook would steal a packet of food for her husband, stow it under her clothes,
and make off, whimpering that these hours would kill her and she would give notice in
the morning. Jules also left at midnight, usually after a dispute with Boris, who had to
look after the bar till two. Between twelve and half past I did what I could to finish the
washing up. There was no time to attempt doing the work properly, and I used simply to
rub the grease off the plates with table-napkins. As for the dirt on the floor, I let it lie, or
swept the worst of it out of sight under the stoves.

At half past twelve I would put on my coat and hurry out. The PATRON, bland as ever,
would stop me as I went down the alley-way past the bar. ‘MAIS, MON CHER
MONSIEUR, how tired you look! Please do me the favour of accepting this glass of
brandy. ’

He would hand me the glass of brandy as courteously as though I had been a Russian
duke instead of a PLONGEUR. He treated all of us like this. It was our compensation for
working seventeen hours a day.

As a rule the last Metro was almost empty — a great advantage, for one could sit down
and sleep for a quarter of an hour. Generally I was in bed by half past one. Sometimes I
missed the train and had to sleep on the floor of the restaurant, but it hardly mattered, for
I could have slept on cobblestones at that time.


CHAPTER XXI

This life went on for about a fortnight, with a slight increase of work as more customers
came to the restaurant. I could have saved an hour a day by taking a room near the
restaurant, but it seemed impossible to find time to change lodgings — or, for that matter,
to get my hair cut, look at a newspaper, or even undress completely. After ten days I



managed to find a free quarter of an hour, and wrote to my friend B. in London asking
him if he could get me a job of some sort — anything, so long as it allowed more than five
hours sleep. I was simply not equal to going on with a seventeen-hour day, though there
are plenty of people who think nothing of it. When one is overworked, it is a good cure
for self-pity to think of the thousands of people in Paris restaurants who work such hours,
and will go on doing it, not for a few weeks, but for years. There was a girl in a BISTRO
near my hotel who worked from seven in the morning till midnight for a whole year, only
sitting down to her meals. I remember once asking her to come to a dance, and she
laughed and said that she had not been farther than the street comer for several months.
She was consumptive, and died about the time I left Paris.

After only a week we were all neurasthenic with fatigue, except Jules, who skulked
persistently. The quarrels, intennittent at first, had now become continuous. For hours’
one would keep up a drizzle of useless nagging, rising into storms of abuse every few
minutes. ‘Get me down that saucepan, idiot! ’ the cook would cry (she was not tall enough
to reach the shelves where the saucepans were kept). ‘Get it down yourself, you old
whore,’ I would answer. Such remarks seemed to be generated spontaneously from the
air of the kitchen.

We quarrelled over things of inconceivable pettiness. The dustbin, for instance, was an
unending source of quarrels — whether it should be put where I wanted it, which was in
the cook’s way, or where she wanted it, which was between me and the sink. Once she
nagged and nagged until at last, in pure spite, I lifted the dustbin up and put it out in the
middle of the floor, where she was bound to trip over it.

‘Now, you cow,’ I said, ‘move it yourself. ’

Poor old woman, it was too heavy for her to lift, and she sat down, put her head on the
table and burst out crying. And I jeered at her. This is the kind of effect that fatigue has
upon one’s manners.

After a few days the cook had ceased talking about Tolstoy and her artistic nature, and
she and I were not on speaking terms, except for the purposes of work, and Boris and
Jules were not on speaking terms, and neither of them was on speaking terms with the
cook. Even Boris and I were barely on speaking terms. We had agreed beforehand that



the ENGUEULADES of working hours did not count between times; but we had called
each other things too bad to be forgotten — and besides, there were no between times.
Jules grew lazier and lazier, and he stole food constantly — from a sense of duty, he said.
He called the rest of us JAUNE — blackleg — when we would not join with him in
stealing. He had a curious, malignant spirit. He told me, as a matter of pride, that he had
sometimes wrung a dirty dishcloth into a customer’s soup before taking it in, just to be
revenged upon a member of the bourgeoisie.

The kitchen grew dirtier and the rats bolder, though we trapped a few of them. Looking
round that filthy room, with raw meat lying among refuse on the floor, and cold, clotted
saucepans sprawling everywhere, and the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used to
wonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world as bad as ours. But the other
three all said that they had been in dirtier places. Jules took a positive pleasure in seeings
things dirty. In the afternoon, when he had not much to do, he used to stand in the kitchen
doorway jeering at us for working too hard:

‘Fool! Why do you wash that plate? Wipe it on your trousers. Who cares about the
customers? THEY don’t know what’s going on. What is restaurant work? You are
carving a chicken and it falls on the floor. You apologize, you bow, you go out; and in
five minutes you come back by another door — with the same chicken. That is restaurant
work,’ etc.

And, strange to say, in spite of all this filth and incompetence, the Auberge de Jehan
Cottard was actually a success. For the first few days all our customers were Russians,
friends of the PATRON, and these were followed by Americans and other foreigners — no
Frenchmen. Then one night there was tremendous excitement, because our first
Frenchman had arrived. For a moment our quarrels were forgotten and we all united in
the effort to serve a good dinner. Boris tiptoed into the kitchen, jerked his thumb over his
shoulder and whispered conspiratorially:

‘SH! ATTENTION, UN FRANCAIS! ’

A moment later the PATRON’S wife came and whispered:

‘ATTENTION, UN FRANCAIS! See that he gets a double portion of all vegetables. ’



While the Frenchman ate, the PATRON’S wife stood behind the grille of the kitchen
door and watched the expression of his face. Next night the Frenchman came back with
two other Frenchmen. This meant that we were earning a good name; the surest sign of a
bad restaurant is to be frequented only by foreigners. Probably part of the reason for our
success was that the PATRON, with the sole gleam of sense he had shown in fitting out
the restaurant, had bought very sharp table-knives. Sharp knives, of course, are THE
secret of a successful restaurant. I am glad that this happened, for it destroyed one of my
illusions, namely, the idea that Frenchmen know good food when they see it. Or perhaps
we WERE a fairly good restaurant by Paris standards; in which case the bad ones must be
past imagining.

In a very few days after I had written to B he replied to say that there was a job he could
get for me. It was to look after a congenital imbecile, which sounded a splendid rest cure
after the Auberge de Jehan Cottard. I pictured myself loafing in the country lanes,
knocking thistle-heads off with my stick, feeding on roast lamb and treacle tart, and
sleeping ten hours a night in sheets smelling of lavender. B sent me a fiver to pay my
passage and get my clothes out of the pawn, and as soon as the money arrived I gave one
day’s notice and left the restaurant. My leaving so suddenly embarrassed the PATRON,
for as usual he was penniless, and he had to pay my wages thirty francs short. However
he stood me a glass of Courvoisier ‘48 brandy, and I think he felt that this made up the
difference. They engaged a Czech, a thoroughly competent PLONGEUR, in my place,
and the poor old cook was sacked a few weeks later. Afterwards I heard that, with two
first-rate people in the kitchen, the PLONGEUR’ S work had been cut down to fifteen
hours a day. Below that no one could have cut it, short of modernizing the kitchen.


CHAPTER XXII

For what they are worth I want to give my opinions about the life of a Paris PLONGEUR.
When one comes to think of it, it is strange that thousands of people in a great modem
city should spend their waking hours swabbing dishes in hot dens underground. The
question I am raising is why this life goes on — what purpose it serves, and who wants it
to continue, and why I am not taking the merely rebellious, FAINEANT attitude. I am
trying to consider the social significance of a PLONGEUR’ S life.



I think one should start by saying that a PLONGEUR is one of the slaves of the modem
world. Not that there is any need to whine over him, for he is better off than many manual
workers, but still, he is no freer than if he were bought and sold. His work is servile and
without art; he is paid just enough to keep him alive; his only holiday is the sack. He is
cut off from marriage, or, if he marries, his wife must work too. Except by a lucky
chance, he has no escape from this life, save into prison. At this moment there are men
with university degrees scrubbing dishes in Paris for ten or fifteen hours a day. One
cannot say that it is mere idleness on their part, for an idle man cannot be a PLONGEUR;
they have simply been trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible. If
PLONGEURS thought at all, they would long ago have formed a union and gone on
strike for better treatment. But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their
life has made slaves of them.

The question is, why does this slavery continue? People have a way of taking it for
granted that all work is done for a sound purpose. They see somebody else doing a
disagreeable job, and think that they have solved things by saying that the job is
necessary. Coal-mining, for example, is hard work, but it is necessary — we must have
coal. Working in the sewers is unpleasant, but somebody must work in the sewers. And
similarly with a PLONGEUR’ S work. Some people must feed in restaurants, and so other
people must swab dishes for eighty hours a week. It is the work of civilization, therefore
unquestionable. This point is worth considering.

Is a PLONGEUR’ S work really necessary to civilization? We have a feeling that it must
be ‘honest’ work, because it is hard and disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish
of manual work. We see a man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a
social need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he may only be
cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue. I believe it is the same
with a PLONGEUR. He earns his bread in the sweat of his brow, but it does not follow
that he is doing anything useful; he may be only supplying a luxury which, very often, is
not a luxury.

As an example of what I mean by luxuries which are not luxuries, take an extreme case,
such as one hardly sees in Europe. Take an Indian rickshaw puller, or a gharry pony. In
any Far Eastern town there are rickshaw pullers by the hundred, black wretches weighing



eight stone, clad in loin-cloths. Some of them are diseased; some of them are fifty years
old. For miles on end they trot in the sun or rain, head down, dragging at the shafts, with
the sweat dripping from their grey moustaches. When they go too slowly the passenger
calls them BAHINCHUT. They earn thirty or forty rupees a month, and cough their lungs
out after a few years. The gharry ponies are gaunt, vicious things that have been sold
cheap as having a few years’ work left in them. Their master looks on the whip as a
substitute for food. Their work expresses itself in a sort of equation — whip plus food
equals energy; generally it is about sixty per cent whip and forty per cent food.
Sometimes their necks are encircled by one vast sore, so that they drag all day on raw
flesh. It is still possible to make them work, however; it is just a question of thrashing
them so hard that the pain behind outweighs the pain in front. After a few years even the
whip loses its virtue, and the pony goes to the knacker. These are instances of
unnecessary work, for there is no real need for gharries and rickshaws; they only exist
because Orientals consider it vulgar to walk. They are luxuries, and, as anyone who has
ridden in them knows, very poor luxuries. They afford a small amount of convenience,
which cannot possibly balance the suffering of the men and animals.

Similarly with the PLONGEUR. He is a king compared with a rickshaw puller or a
gharry pony, but his case is analogous. He is the slave of a hotel or a restaurant, and his
slavery is more or less useless. For, after all, where is the REAL need of big hotels and
smart restaurants? They are supposed to provide luxury, but in reality they provide only a
cheap, shoddy imitation of it. Nearly everyone hates hotels. Some restaurants are better
than others, but it is impossible to get as good a meal in a restaurant as one can get, for
the same expense, in a private house. No doubt hotels and restaurants must exist, but
there is no need that they should enslave hundreds of people. What makes the work in
them is not the essentials; it is the shams that are supposed to represent luxury.
Smartness, as it is called, means, in effect, merely that the staff work more and the
customers pay more; no one benefits except the proprietor, who will presently buy
himself a striped villa at Deauville. Essentially, a ‘smart’ hotel is a place where a hundred
people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they
do not really want. If the nonsense were cut out of hotels and restaurants, and the work
done with simple efficiency, PLONGEURS might work six or eight hours a day instead
often or fifteen.



Suppose it is granted that a PLONGEUR’S work is more or less useless. Then the
question follows, Why does anyone want him to go on working? I am trying to go
beyond the immediate economic cause, and to consider what pleasure it can give anyone
to think of men swabbing dishes for life. For there is no doubt that people — comfortably
situated people — do find a pleasure in such thoughts. A slave, Marcus Gato said, should
be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is needed or not,
he must work, because work in itself is good — for slaves, at least. This sentiment still
survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery.

I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the
mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if
they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be
intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions,
usually says something like this:

‘We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy
harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness.