No More Learning

He glides over the carpet, with a
solemn priest-like air. I remember our assistant MAITRE D’ HOTEL, a fiery Italian,
pausing at the dining-room door to address an apprentice who had broken a bottle of



wine. Shaking his fist above his head he yelled (luckily the door was more or less
soundproof):

‘TU ME FAIS — Do you call yourself a waiter, you young bastard? You a waiter! You’re
not fit to scrub floors in the brothel your mother came from. MAQUEREAU! ’

Words failing him, he turned to the door; and as he opened it he delivered a final insult in
the same manner as Squire Western in TOM JONES.

Then he entered the dining-room and sailed across it dish in hand, graceful as a swan.
Ten seconds later he was bowing reverently to a customer. And you could not help
thinking, as you saw him bow and smile, with that benign smile of the trained waiter, that
the customer was put to shame by having such an aristocrat to serve him.

This washing up was a thoroughly odious job — not hard, but boring and silly beyond
words. It is dreadful to think that some people spend their whole decades at such
occupations. The woman whom I replaced was quite sixty years old, and she stood at the
sink thirteen hours a day, six days a week, the year round; she was, in addition, horribly
bullied by the waiters. She gave out that she had once been an actress — actually, I
imagine, a prostitute; most prostitutes end as charwomen. It was strange to see that in
spite of her age and her life she still wore a bright blonde wig, and darkened her eyes and
painted her face like a girl of twenty. So apparently even a seventy-eight-hour week can
leave one with some vitality.


CHAPTER XIII

On my third day at the hotel the CHEF DU PERSONNEL, who had generally spoken to
me in quite a pleasant tone, called me up and said sharply:

‘Here, you, shave that moustache off at once! NOM DE DIEU, who ever heard of a
PLONGEUR with a moustache? ’


I began to protest, but he cut me short. ‘A PLONGEUR with a moustache — nonsense!
Take care I don’t see you with it tomorrow. ’



On the way home I asked Boris what this meant. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘You must
do what he says, MON AMI. No one in the hotel wears a moustache, except the cooks. I
should have thought you would have noticed it. Reason? There is no reason. It is the
custom. ’

I saw that it was an etiquette, like not wearing a white tie with a dinner-jacket, and
shaved off my moustache. Afterwards I found out the explanation of the custom, which is
this: waiters in good hotels do not wear moustaches, and to show their superiority they
decree that PLONGEURS shall not wear them either; and the cooks wear their
moustaches to show their contempt for the waiters.

This gives some idea of the elaborate caste system existing in a hotel. Our staff,
amounting to about a hundred and ten, had their prestige graded as accurately as that of
soldiers, and a cook or waiter was as much above a PLONGEUR as a captain above a
private. Highest of all came the manager, who could sack anybody, even the cooks. We
never saw the PATRON, and all we knew of him was that his meals had to be prepared
more carefully than that of the customers; all the discipline of the hotel depended on the
manager. He was a conscientious man, and always on the lookout for slackness, but we
were too clever for him. A system of service bells ran through the hotel, and the whole
staff used these for signalling to one another. A long ring and a short ring, followed by
two more long rings, meant that the manager was coming, and when we heard it we took
care to look busy.

Below the manager came the MAITRE D’HOTEL. He did not serve at table, unless to a
lord or someone of that kind, but directed the other waiters and helped with the catering.
His tips, and his bonus from the champagne companies (it was two francs for each cork
he returned to them), came to two hundred francs a day. He was in a position quite apart
from the rest of the staff, and took his meals in a private room, with silver on the table
and two apprentices in clean white jackets to serve him. A little below the head waiter
came the head cook, drawing about five thousand francs a month; he dined in the kitchen,
but at a separate table, and one of the apprentice cooks waited on him. Then came the
CHEF DU PERSONNEL; he drew only fifteen hundred francs a month, but he wore a
black coat and did no manual work, and he could sack PLONGEURS and fine waiters.
Then came the other cooks, drawing anything between three thousand and seven hundred



and fifty A francs a month; then the waiters, making about seventy francs a day in tips,
besides a small retaining fee; then the laundresses and sewing women; then the
apprentice waiters, who received no tips, but were paid seven hundred and fifty francs a
month; then the PLONGEURS, also at seven hundred and fifty francs; then the
chambermaids, at five or six hundred francs a month; and lastly the cafetiers, at five
hundred a month. We of the cafeterie were the very dregs of the hotel, despised and
TUTOIED by everyone.

There were various others — the office employees, called generally couriers, the
storekeeper, the cellannan, some porters and pages, the ice man, the bakers, the night-
watchman, the doorkeeper. Different jobs were done by different races. The office
employees and the cooks and sewing-women were French, the waiters Italians and
Germans (there is hardly such a thing as a French waiter in Paris), the PLONGEURS of
every race in Europe, beside Arabs and Negroes. French was the lingua franca, even the
Italians speaking it to one another.

All the departments had their special perquisites. In all Paris hotels it is the custom to sell
the broken bread to bakers for eight sous a pound, and the kitchen scraps to pigkeepers
for a trifle, and to divide the proceeds of this among the PLONGEURS. There was much
pilfering, too. The waiters all stole food — in fact, I seldom saw a waiter trouble to eat the
rations provided for him by the hotel — and the cooks did it on a larger scale in the
kitchen, and we in the cafeterie swilled illicit tea and coffee. The cellannan stole brandy.
By a rule of the hotel the waiters were not allowed to keep stores of spirits, but had to go
to the cellannan for each drink as it was ordered. As the cellannan poured out the drinks
he would set aside perhaps a teaspoonful from each glass, and he amassed quantities in
this way. He would sell you the stolen brandy for five sous a swig if he thought he could
trust you.

There were thieves among the staff, and if you left money in your coat pockets it was
generally taken. The doorkeeper, who paid our wages and searched us for stolen food,
was the greatest thief in the hotel. Out of my five hundred francs a month, this man
actually managed to cheat me of a hundred and fourteen francs in six weeks. I had asked
to be paid daily, so the doorkeeper paid me sixteen francs each evening, and, by not
paying for Sundays (for which of course payment was due), pocketed sixty-four francs.



Also, I sometimes worked on a Sunday, for which, though I did not know it, I was
entitled to an extra twenty-five francs. The doorkeeper never paid me this either, and so
made away with another seventy-five francs. I only realized during my last week that I
was being cheated, and, as I could prove nothing, only twenty-five francs were refunded.
The doorkeeper played similar tricks on any employee who was fool enough to be taken
in. He called himself a Greek, but in reality he was an Annenian. After knowing him I
saw the force of the proverb ‘Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but
don’t trust an Armenian. ’

There were queer characters among the waiters. One was a gentleman — a youth who had
been educated at a university, and had had a well-paid job in a business office. He had
caught a venereal disease, lost his job, drifted, and now considered himself lucky to be a
waiter. Many of the waiters had slipped into France without passports, and one or two of
them were spies — it is a common profession for a spy to adopt. One day there was a
fearful row in the waiters’ dining-room between Morandi, a dangerous-looking man with
eyes set too far apart, and another Italian. It appeared that Morandi had taken the other
man’s mistress. The other man, a weakling and obviously frightened of Morandi, was
threatening vaguely.

Morandi jeered at him. ‘Well, what are you going to do about it? I’ve slept with your girl,
slept with her three times. It was fine. 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.