No More Learning

What can you do, eh? ’

‘I can denounce you to the secret police. You are an Italian spy. ’

Morandi did not deny it. He simply produced a razor from his tail pocket and made two
swift strokes in the air, as though slashing a man’s cheeks open. Whereat the other waiter
took it back.

The queerest type I ever saw in the hotel was an ‘extra’. He had been engaged at twenty-
five francs for the day to replace the Magyar, who was ill. He was a Serbian, a thick-set
nimble fellow of about twenty-five, speaking six languages, including English. He
seemed to know all about hotel work, and up till midday he worked like a slave. Then, as
soon as it had struck twelve, he turned sulky, shirked Us work, stole wine, and finally
crowned all by loafing about openly with a pipe in his mouth. Smoking, of course, was



forbidden under severe penalties. The manager himself heard of it and came down to
interview the Serbian, fuming with rage.


‘What the devil do you mean by smoking here? ’ he cried.

‘What the devil do you mean by having a face like that? ’ answered the Serbian, calmly.

I cannot convey the blasphemy of such a remark. The head cook, if a PLONGEUR had
spoken to him like that, would have thrown a saucepan of hot soup in his face. The
manager said instantly, ‘You’re sacked! ’ and at two o’clock the Serbian was given his
twenty-five francs and duly sacked. Before he went out Boris asked him in Russian what
game he was playing. He said the Serbian answered:

‘Look here, MON VIEUX, they’ve got to pay me a day’s wages if I work up to midday,
haven’t they? That’s the law. And where’s the sense of working after I get my wages? So
I’ll tell you what I do. I go to a hotel and get a job as an extra, and up to midday I work
hard. Then, the moment it’s struck twelve, I start raising such hell that they’ve no choice
but to sack me. Neat, eh? Most days I’m sacked by half past twelve; today it was two
o’clock; but I don’t care, I’ve saved four hours’ work. The only trouble is, one can’t do it
at the same hotel twice. ’

It appeared that he had played this game at half the hotels and restaurants in Paris. It is
probably quite an easy game to play during the summer, though the hotels protect
themselves against it as well as they can by means of a black list.


CHAPTER XIV

In a few days I had grasped the main principles on which the hotel was run. The thing
that would astonish anyone coming for the first time into the service quarters of a hotel
would be the fearful noise and disorder during the rush hours. It is something so different
from the steady work in a shop or a factory that it looks at first sight like mere bad
management. But it is really quite unavoidable, and for this reason. Hotel work is not
particularly hard, but by its nature it comes in rushes and cannot be economized. You
cannot, for instance, grill a steak two hours before it is wanted; you have to wait till the



last moment, by which time a mass of other work has accumulated, and then do it all
together, in frantic haste. The result is that at mealtimes everyone is doing two men’s
work, which is impossible without noise and quarrelling. Indeed the quarrels are a
necessary part of the process, for the pace would never be kept up if everyone did not
accuse everyone else of idling. It was for this reason that during the rush hours the whole
staff raged and cursed like demons. At those times there was scarcely a verb in the hotel
except FOUTRE. A girl in the bakery, aged sixteen, used oaths that would have defeated
a cabman. (Did not Hamlet say ‘cursing like a scullion’? No doubt Shakespeare had
watched scullions at work. ) But we are not losing our heads and wasting time; we were
just stimulating one another for the effort of packing four hours’ work into two hours.

What keeps a hotel going is the fact that the employees take a genuine pride in their
work, beastly and silly though it is. If a man idles, the others soon find him out, and
conspire against him to get him sacked. Cooks, waiters and PLONGEURS differ greatly
in outlook, but they are all alike in being proud of their efficiency.

Undoubtedly the most workmanlike class, and the least servile, are the cooks. They do
not earn quite so much as waiters, but their prestige is higher and their employment
steadier. The cook does not look upon himself as a servant, but as a skilled workman; he
is generally called ‘UN OUVRIER’ which a waiter never is. He knows his power —
knows that he alone makes or mars a restaurant, and that if he is five minutes late
everything is out of gear. He despises the whole non-cooking staff, and makes it a point
of honour to insult everyone below the head waiter. And he takes a genuine artistic pride
in his work, which demands very great skill. It is not the cooking that is so difficult, but
the doing everything to time. Between breakfast and luncheon the head cook at the Hotel
X would receive orders for several hundred dishes, all to be served at different times; he
cooked few of them himself, but he gave instructions about all of them and inspected
them before they were sent up. His memory was wonderful. The vouchers were pinned
on a board, but the head cook seldom looked at them; everything was stored in his mind,
and exactly to the minute, as each dish fell due, he would call out, ‘FAITES MARCHER
UNE COTELETTE DE VEAU’ (or whatever it was) unfailingly. He was an insufferable
bully, but he was also an artist. It is for their punctuality, and not for any superiority in
technique, that men cooks arc preferred to women.



The waiter’s outlook is quite different. He too is proud in a way of his skill, but his skill
is chiefly in being servile. His work gives him the mentality, not of a workman, but of a
snob. He lives perpetually in sight of rich people, stands at their tables, listens to their
conversation, sucks up to them with smiles and discreet little jokes. He has the pleasure
of spending money by proxy. Moreover, there is always the chance that he may become
rich himself, for, though most waiters die poor, they have long runs of luck occasionally.
At some cafes on the Grand Boulevard there is so much money to be made that the
waiters actually pay the PATRON for their employment. The result is that between
constantly seeing money, and hoping to get it, the waiter comes to identify himself to
some extent with his employers. He will take pains to serve a meal in style, because he
feels that he is participating in the meal himself.

I remember Valenti telling me of some banquet at Nice at which he had once served, and
of how it cost two hundred thousand francs and was talked of for months afterwards. ‘It
was splendid, MON P’TIT, MAIS MAGNIFIQUE! Jesus Christ! The champagne, the
silver, the orchids — I have never seen anything like them, and I have seen some things.
Ah, it was glorious! ’

‘But,’ I said, ‘you were only there to wait? ’

‘Oh, of course. But still, it was splendid. ’

The moral is, never be sorry for a waiter. Sometimes when you sit in a restaurant, still
stuffing yourself half an hour after closing time, you feel that the tired waiter at your side
must surely be despising you. But he is not. He is not thinking as he looks at you, ‘What
an overfed lout’; he is thinking, ‘One day, when I have saved enough money, I shall be
able to imitate that man. ’ He is ministering to a kind of pleasure he thoroughly
understands and admires. And that is why waiters are seldom Socialists, have no effective
trade union, and will work twelve hours a day — they work fifteen hours, seven days a
week, in many cafes. They are snobs, and they find the servile nature of their work rather
congenial.

The PLONGEURS, again, have a different outlook. Theirs is a job which offers no
prospects, is intensely exhausting, and at the same time has not a trace of skill or interest;
the sort of job that would always be done by women if women were strong enough. All



that is required of them is to be constantly on the run, and to put up with long hours and a
stuffy atmosphere. They have no way of escaping from this life, for they cannot save a
penny from their wages, and working from sixty to a hundred hours a week leaves them
no time to train for anything else. The best they can hope for is to find a slightly softer
job as night-watchman or lavatory attendant.

And yet the PLONGEURS, low as they are, also have a kind of pride. It is the pride of
the drudge — the man who is equal to no matter what quantity of work. At that level, the
mere power to go on working like an ox is about the only virtue attainable.
DEBROUILLARD is what every PLONGEUR wants to be called. A DEBROUILLARD
is a man who, even when he is told to do the impossible, will SE DEBROUILLER — get
it done somehow. One of the kitchen PLONGEURS at the Hotel X, a German, was well
known as a DEBROUILLARD. One night an English lord came to the hotel, and the
waiters were in despair, for the lord had asked for peaches, and there were none in stock;
it was late at night, and the shops would be shut. ‘Leave it to me,’ said the German. He
went out, and in ten minutes he was back with four peaches. He had gone into a
neighbouring restaurant and stolen them. That is what is meant by a DEBROUILLARD.
The English lord paid for the peaches at twenty francs each.

Mario, who was in charge of the cafeterie, had the typical drudge mentality. All he
thought of was getting through the ‘BOULOT’, and he defied you to give him too much
of it. Fourteen years underground had left him with about as much natural laziness as a
piston rod. ‘FAUT ETRE DUR,’ he used to say when anyone complained. You will often
hear PLONGEURS boast, ‘JE SUIS DUR’ — as though they were soldiers, not male
charwomen.

Thus everyone in the hotel had his sense of honour, and when the press of work came we
were all ready for a grand concerted effort to get through it. The constant war between
the different departments also made for efficiency, for everyone clung to his own
privileges and tried to stop the others idling and pilfering.

This is the good side of hotel work. In a hotel a huge and complicated machine is kept
running by an inadequate staff, because every man has a well-defined job and does it
scrupulously. But there is a weak point, and it is this — that the job the staff are doing is



not necessarily what the customer pays for. The customer pays, as he sees it, for good
service; the employee is paid, as he sees it, for the BOULOT — meaning, as a rule, an
imitation of good service. The result is that, though hotels are miracles of punctuality,
they are worse than the worst private houses in the things that matter.

Take cleanliness, for example. The dirt in the Hotel X, as soon as one penetrated into the
service quarters, was revolting. Our cafeterie had year-old filth in all the dark corners,
and the bread-bin was infested with cockroaches. Once I suggested killing these beasts to
Mario. ‘Why kill the poor animals? ’ he said reproachfully. The others laughed when I
wanted to wash my hands before touching the butter. Yet we were clean where we
recognized cleanliness as part of the BOULOT. We scrubbed the tables and polished the
brasswork regularly, because we had orders to do that; but we had no orders to be
genuinely clean, and in any case we had no time for it. We were simply carrying out our
duties; and as our first duty was punctuality, we saved time by being dirty.

In the kitchen the dirt was worse. It is not a figure of speech, it is a mere statement of fact
to say that a French cook will spit in the soup — that is, if he is not going to drink it
himself. He is an artist, but his art is not cleanliness. To a certain extent he is even dirty
because he is an artist, for food, to look smart, needs dirty treatment. When a steak, for
instance, is brought up for the head cook’s inspection, he does not handle it with a fork.
He picks it up in his fingers and slaps it down, runs his thumb round the dish and licks it
to taste the gravy, runs it round and licks again, then steps back and contemplates the
piece of meat like an artist judging a picture, then presses it lovingly into place with his
fat, pink fingers, every one of which he has licked a hundred times that morning. When
he is satisfied, he takes a cloth and wipes his fingerprints from the dish, and hands it to
the waiter. And the waiter, of course, dips HIS fingers into the gravy — his nasty, greasy
fingers which he is for ever running through his brilliantined hair. Whenever one pays
more than, say, ten francs for a dish of meat in Paris, one may be certain that it has been
fingered in this manner. In very cheap restaurants it is different; there, the same trouble is
not taken over the food, and it is just forked out of the pan and flung on to a plate,
without handling. Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and
spittle one is obliged to eat with it.



Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because sound food is sacrificed to
punctuality and smartness. The hotel employee is too busy getting food ready to
remember that it is meant to be eaten. A meal is simply ‘UNE COMMANDE’ to him,
just as a man dying of cancer is simply ‘a case’ to the doctor. A customer orders, for
example, a piece of toast. Somebody, pressed with work in a cellar deep underground,
has to prepare it. How can he stop and say to himself, ‘This toast is to be eaten — I must
make it eatable’? All he knows is that it must look right and must be ready in three
minutes. Some large drops of sweat fall from his forehead on to the toast. Why should he
worry? Presently the toast falls among the filthy sawdust on the floor. Why trouble to
make a new piece? It is much quicker to wipe the sawdust off. On the way upstairs the
toast falls again, butter side down. Another wipe is all it needs. And so with everything.
The only food at the Hotel X which was ever prepared cleanly was the staffs, and the
PATRON’S. The maxim, repeated by everyone, was: ‘Look out for the PATRON, and as
for the clients, S’EN F — PAS MALI’ Everywhere in the service quarters dirt festered — a
secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel like the intestines through a
man’s body.

Apart from the dirt, the PATRON swindled the customers wholeheartedly. For the most
part the materials of the food were very bad, though the cooks knew how to serve it up in
style. The meat was at best ordinary, and as to the vegetables, no good housekeeper
would have looked at them in the market. The cream, by a standing order, was diluted
with milk. The tea and coffee were of inferior sorts, and the jam was synthetic stuff out of
vast, unlabelled tins. All the cheaper wines, according to Boris, were corked VIN
ORDINAIRE. There was a rule that employees must pay for anything they spoiled, and
in consequence damaged things were seldom thrown away. Once the waiter on the third
floor dropped a roast chicken down the shaft of our service lift, where it fell into a litter
of broken bread, tom paper and so forth at the bottom. We simply wiped it with a cloth
and sent it up again. Upstairs there were dirty tales of once-used sheets not being washed,
but simply damped, ironed and put back on the beds. The PATRON was as mean to us as
to the customers. Throughout the vast hotel there was not, for instance, such a thing as a
brush and pan; one had to manage with a broom and a piece of cardboard. And the staff
lavatory was worthy of Central Asia, and there was no place to wash one’s hands, except
the si nk s used for washing crockery.



In spite of all this the Hotel X was one of the dozen most expensive hotels in Paris, and
the customers paid startling prices. The ordinary charge for a night’s lodging, not
including breakfast, was two hundred francs. All wine and tobacco were sold at exactly
double shop prices, though of course the PATRON bought at the wholesale price. If a
customer had a title, or was reputed to be a millionaire, all his charges went up
automatically. One morning on the fourth floor an American who was on diet wanted
only salt and hot water for his breakfast. Valenti was furious. ‘Jesus Christ! ’ he said,
‘what about my ten per cent? Ten per cent of salt and water! ’ And he charged twenty- five
francs for the breakfast. The customer paid without a murmur.

According to Boris, the same kind of thing went on in all Paris hotels, or at least in all the
big, expensive ones. But I imagine that the customers at the Hotel X were especially easy
to swindle, for they were mostly Americans, with a sprinkling of English — no French —
and seemed to know nothing whatever about good food. They would stuff themselves
with disgusting American ‘cereals’, and eat marmalade at tea, and drink vennouth after
dinner, and order a POULET A LA REINE at a hundred francs and then souse it in
Worcester sauce. One customer, from Pittsburg, dined every night in his bedroom on
grape-nuts, scrambled eggs and cocoa. Perhaps it hardly matters whether such o people
are swindled or not.


CHAPTER XV

I heard queer tales in the hotel. There were tales of dope fiends, of old debauchees who
frequented hotels in search of pretty page boys, of thefts and blackmail. Mario told me of
a hotel in which he had been, where a chambermaid stole a priceless diamond ring from
an American lady. For days the staff were searched as they left work, and two detectives
searched the hotel from top to bottom, but the ring was never found. The chambermaid
had a lover in the bakery, and he had baked the ring into a roll, where it lay unsuspected
until the search was over.

Once Valenti, at a slack time, told me a story about himself.


‘You know, MON P’TIT, this hotel life is all very well, but it’s the devil when you’re out
of work. I expect you know what it is to go without eating, eh? FORCEMENT, otherwise



you wouldn’t be scrubbing dishes. Well, I’m not a poor devil of a PLONGEUR; I’m a
waiter, and I went five days without eating, once. Five days without even a crust of
bread — Jesus Christ!

‘I tell you, those five days were the devil. The only good thing was, I had my rent paid in
advance. I was living in a dirty, cheap little hotel in the Rue Sainte Eloise up in the Latin
quarter. It was called the Hotel Suzanne May, after some famous prostitute of the time of
the Empire. I was starving, and there was nothing I could do; I couldn’t even go to the
cafes where the hotel proprietors come to engage waiters, because I hadn’t the price of a
drink. All I could do was to lie in bed getting weaker and weaker, and watching the bugs
running about the ceiling. I don’t want to go through that again, I can tell you.
‘In the afternoon of the fifth day I went half mad; at least, that’s how it seems to me now.
There was an old faded print of a woman’s head hanging on the wall of my room, and I
took to wondering who it could be; and after about an hour I realized that it must be
Sainte Eloise, who was the PATRON saint of the quarter. I had never taken any notice of
the thing before, but now, as I lay staring at it, a most extraordinary idea came into my
head.

“‘ECOUTE, MON CHER,” I said to myself, “you’ll be starving to death if this goes on
much longer. You’ve got to do something. Why not try a prayer to Sainte Eloise? Go
down on your knees and ask her to send you some money. After all, it can’t do any harm.
Try it! ”

‘Mad, eh? Still, a man will do anything when he’s hungry. Besides, as I said, it couldn’t
do any harm. I got out of bed and began praying. I said:

“‘Dear Sainte Eloise, if you exist, please send me some money. I don’t ask for much —
just enough to buy some bread and a bottle of wine and get my strength back. Three or
four francs would do. You don’t know how grateful I’ll be, Sainte Eloise, if you help me
this once. And be sure, if you send me anything, the first thing I’ 11 do will be to go and
bum a candle for you, at your church down the street. Amen. ”



‘I put in that about the candle, because I had heard that saints like having candles burnt in
their honour. I meant to keep my promise, of course. But I am an atheist and I didn’t
really believe that anything would come of it.

‘Well, I got into bed again, and five minutes later there came a bang at the door. It was a
girl called Maria, a big fat peasant girl who lived at our hotel. She was a very stupid girl,
but a good sort, and I didn’t much care for her to see me in the state I was in.

‘She cried out at the sight of me. “NOM DE DIEU! ” she said, “what’s the matter with
you? What are you doing in bed at this time of day? QUELLE MINE QUE TU AS! You
look more like a corpse than a man. ”

‘Probably I did look a sight. I had been five days without food, most of the time in bed,
and it was three days since I had had a wash or a shave. The room was a regular pigsty,
too.

“‘What’s the matter? ” said Maria again.

“‘The matter! ” I said; “Jesus Christ! I’m starving. I haven’t eaten for five days. That’s
what’s the matter. ”

‘Maria was horrified. “Not eaten for five days? ” she said. “But why? Haven’t you any
money, then? ”

‘“Money! ” I said. “Do you suppose I should be starving if I had money? I’ve got just five
sous in the world, and I’ve pawned everything. Look round the room and see if there’s
anything more I can sell or pawn. If you can find anything that will fetch fifty centimes,
you’re cleverer than I am. ”

‘Maria began looking round the room. She poked here and there among a lot of rubbish
that was lying about, and then suddenly she got quite excited. Her great thick mouth fell
open with astonishment.


“‘You idiot! ” she cried out. “Imbecile! What’s THIS, then? ”



‘I saw that she had picked up an empty oil BIDON that had been lying in the comer. I had
bought it weeks before, for an oil lamp I had before I sold my things.


“That? ” I said. “That’s an oil BIDON. What about it? ”

‘“Imbecile! Didn’t you pay three francs fifty deposit on it? ”

‘Now, of course I had paid the three francs fifty. They always make you pay a deposit on
the BIDON, and you get it back when the BIDON is returned. But I’d forgotten all about
it.


‘“Yes—” I began.

‘“Idiot! ” shouted Maria again. She got so excited that she began to dance about until I
thought her sabots would go through the floor, “Idiot! T’ES FOU! T’ES FOU! What have
you got to do but take it back to the shop and get your deposit back? Starving, with three
francs fifty staring you in the face! Imbecile! ”

‘I can hardly believe now that in all those five days I had never once thought of taking the
BIDON back to the shop. As good as three francs fifty in hard cash, and it had never
occurred to me! I sat up in bed. “Quick! ” I shouted to Maria, “you take it for me. Take it
to the grocer’s at the corner — run like the devil. And bring back food! ”

‘Maria didn’t need to be told. She grabbed the BIDON and went clattering down the
stairs like a herd of elephants and in three minutes she was back with two pounds of
bread under one arm and a half-litre bottle of wine under the other. I didn’t stop to thank
her; I just seized the bread and sank my teeth in it. Have you noticed how bread tastes
when you have been hungry for a long time? Cold, wet, doughy — like putty almost. But,
Jesus Christ, how good it was! As for the wine, I sucked it all down in one draught, and it
seemed to go straight into my veins and flow round my body like new blood. Ah, that
made a difference!

‘I wolfed the whole two pounds of bread without stopping to take breath. Maria stood
with her hands on her hips, watching me eat. “Well, you feel better, eh? ” she said when I
had finished.



‘“Better! ” I said. “I feel perfect! I’m not the same man as I was five minutes ago. There’s
only one thing in the world I need now — a cigarette. ”

‘Maria put her hand in her apron pocket. “You can’t have it,” she said. “I’ve no money.
This is all I had left out of your three francs fifty — seven sous. It’s no good; the cheapest
cigarettes are twelve sous a packet. ”

“‘Then I can have them! ” I said. “Jesus Christ, what a piece of luck! I’ve got five sous —
it’s just enough. ”

‘Maria took the twelve sous and was starting out to the tobacconist’s. And then
something I had forgotten all this time came into my head. There was that cursed Sainte
Eloise! I had promised her a candle if she sent me money; and really, who could say that
the prayer hadn’t come true? “Three or four francs,” I had said; and the next moment
along came three francs fifty. There was no getting away from it. I should have to spend
my twelve sous on a candle.

‘I called Maria back. “It’s no use,” I said; “there is Sainte Eloise — I have promised her a
candle. The twelve sous will have to go on that. Silly, isn’t it? I can’t have my cigarettes
after all. ”

“‘Sainte Eloise? ” said Maria. “What about Sainte Eloise? ”

‘“I prayed to her for money and promised her a candle,” I said. “She answered the
prayer — at any rate, the money turned up. I shall have to buy that candle. It’s a nuisance,
but it seems to me I must keep my promise. ”

“‘But what put Sainte Eloise into your head? ” said Maria.

‘“It was her picture,” I said, and I explained the whole thing. “There she is, you see,” I
said, and I pointed to the picture on the wall.

‘Maria looked at the picture, and then to my surprise she burst into shouts of laughter.
She laughed more and more, stamping about the room and holding her fat sides as though
they would burst. I thought she had gone mad. It was two minutes before she could
speak.



‘“Idiot! ” she cried at last. “T’ES FOU! T’ES FOEH Do you mean to tell me you really


knelt down and prayed to that picture? Who told you it was Sainte Eloise? ”

“‘But I made sure it was Sainte Eloise! ” I said.

“‘Imbecile! It isn’t Sainte Eloise at all. Who do you think it is? ”

‘“Who? ” I said.

“‘It is Suzanne May, the woman this hotel is called after. ”

‘I had been praying to Suzanne May, the famous prostitute of the Empire. . .

‘But, after all, I wasn’t sorry. Maria and I had a good laugh, and then we talked it over,
and we made out that I didn’t owe Sainte Eloise anything. Clearly it wasn’t she who had
answered the prayer, and there was no need to buy her a candle. So I had my packet of
cigarettes after all. ’


CHAPTER XVI

Time went on and the Auberge de Jehan Cottard showed no signs of opening. Boris and I
went down there one day during our afternoon interval and found that none of the
alterations had been done, except the indecent pictures, and there were three duns instead
of two. The PATRON greeted us with his usual blandness, and the next instant turned to
me (his prospective dishwasher) and borrowed five francs. After that I felt certain that the
restaurant would never get beyond talk. The PATRON, however, again named the
opening for ‘exactly a fortnight from today’, and introduced us to the woman who was to
do the cooking, a Baltic Russian five feet tall and a yard across the hips. She told us that
she had been a singer before she came down to cooking, and that she was very artistic
and adored English literature, especially LA CASE DE L’ONCLE TOM.

In a fortnight I had got so used to the routine of a PLONGEUR’S life that I could hardly
imagine anything different. It was a life without much variation. At a quarter to six one
woke with a sudden start, tumbled into grease-stiffened clothes, and hurried out with
dirty face and protesting muscles. It was dawn, and the windows were dark except for the



workmen’s cafes. The sky was like a vast flat wall of cobalt, with roofs and spires of
black paper pasted upon it. Drowsy men were sweeping the pavements with ten-foot
besoms, and ragged families picking over the dustbins. Workmen, and girls with a piece
of chocolate in one hand and a CROISSANT in the other, were pouring into the Metro
stations. Trams, filled with more workmen, boomed gloomily past. One hastened down to
the station, fought for a place — one does literally have to fight on the Paris Metro at six in
the morning — and stood jammed in the swaying mass of passengers, nose to nose with
some hideous French face, breathing sour wine and garlic. And then one descended into
the labyrinth of the hotel basement, and forgot daylight till two o’clock, when the sun
was hot and the town black with people and cars.

After my first week at the hotel I always spent the afternoon interval in sleeping, or, when
I had money, in a BISTRO. Except for a few ambitious waiters who went to English
classes, the whole staff wasted their leisure in this way; one seemed too lazy after the
morning’s work to do anything better. Sometimes half a dozen PLONGEURS would
make up a party and go to an abominable brothel in the Rue de Sieyes, where the charge
was only five francs twenty-five centimes — tenpence half-penny. It was nicknamed ‘LE
PRIX FIXE’, and they used to describe their experiences there as a great joke. It was a
favourite rendezvous of hotel workers. The PLONGEURS’ wages did not allow them to
marry, and no doubt work in the basement does not encourage fastidious feelings.

For another four hours one was in the cellars, and then one emerged, sweating, into the
cool street. It was lamplight — that strange purplish gleam of the Paris lamps — and
beyond the river the Eiffel Tower flashed from top to bottom with zigzag skysigns, like
enormous snakes of fire. Streams of cars glided silently to and fro, and women, exquisite-
looking in the dim light, strolled up and down the arcade. Sometimes a woman would
glance at Boris or me, and then, noticing our greasy clothes, look hastily away again. One
fought another battle in the Metro and was home by ten. Generally from ten to midnight I
went to a little BISTRO in our street, an underground place frequented by Arab navvies.
It was a bad place for fights, and I sometimes saw bottles thrown, once with fearful
effect, but as a rule the Arabs fought among themselves and let Christians alone. Raki,
the Arab drink, was very cheap, and the BISTRO was open at all hours, for the Arabs —
lucky men — had the power of working all day and drinking all night.



It was the typical life of a PLONGEUR, and it did not seem a bad life at the time. I had
no sensation of poverty, for even after paying my rent and setting aside enough for
tobacco and journeys and my food on Sundays, I still had four francs a day for drinks,
and four francs was wealth. There was — it is hard to express it — a sort of heavy
contentment, the contentment a well-fed beast might feel, in a life which had become so
simple. For nothing could be simpler than the life of a PLONGEUR. He lives in a rhythm
between work and sleep, without time to think, hardly conscious of the exterior world; his
Paris has shrunk to the hotel, the Metro, a few BISTROS and his bed. If he goes afield, it
is only a few streets away, on a trip with some servant-girl who sits on his knee
swallowing oysters and beer. On his free day he lies in bed till noon, puts on a clean shirt,
throws dice for drinks, and after lunch goes back to bed again. Nothing is quite real to
him but the BOULOT, drinks and sleep; and of these sleep is the most important.

One night, in the small hours, there was a murder just beneath my window. I was woken
by a fearful uproar, and, going to the window, saw a man lying flat on the stones below; I
could see the murderers, three of them, flitting away at the end of the street. Some of us
went down and found that the man was quite dead, his skull cracked with a piece of lead
piping. I remember the colour of his blood, curiously purple, like wine; it was still on the
cobbles when I came home that evening, and they said the school-children had come
from miles round to see it.