No More Learning

’

He stopped at a jeweller’s window and smacked his cheeks sharply to bring the blood
into them. Then, before the flush had faded, we hurried into the restaurant and introduced
ourselves to the PATRON.

The PATRON was a short, fattish, very dignified man with wavy grey hair, dressed in a
smart, double-breasted flannel suit and smelling of scent. Boris told me that he too was
an ex-colonel of the Russian Army. His wife was there too, a horrid, fat Frenchwoman
with a dead-white face and scarlet lips, reminding me of cold veal and tomatoes. The
PATRON greeted Boris genially, and they talked together in Russian for a few minutes. I
stood in the background, preparing to tell some big lies about my experience as a dish-
washer.

Then the PATRON came over towards me. I shuffled uneasily, trying to look servile.
Boris had rubbed it into me that a PLONGEUR is a slave’s slave, and I expected the
PATRON, to treat me like dirt. To my astonishment, he seized me warmly by the hand.

‘So you are an Englishman! ’ he exclaimed. ‘But how channing! I need not ask, then,
whether you are a golfer? ’

‘MAIS CERTAINEMENT,’ I said, seeing that this was expected of me.

‘All my life I have wanted to play golf. Will you, my dear MONSIEUR, be so kind as to
show me a few of the principal strokes? ’

Apparently this was the Russian way of doing business. The PATRON listened
attentively while I explained the difference between a driver and an iron, and then
suddenly informed me that it was all ENTENDU; Boris was to be MAITRE D’ HOTEL
when the restaurant opened, and I PLONGEUR, with a chance of rising to lavatory
attendant if trade was good. When would the restaurant open? I asked. ‘Exactly a
fortnight from today,’ the PATRON answered grandly (he had a manner of waving his
hand and flicking off his cigarette ash at the same time, which looked very grand),



‘exactly a fortnight from today, in time for lunch. ’ Then, with obvious pride, he showed
us over the restaurant.

It was a smallish place, consisting of a bar, a dining-room, and a kitchen no bigger than
the average bathroom. The PATRON was decorating it in a trumpery ‘picturesque’ style
(he called it ‘LE NORMAND’; it was a matter of sham beams stuck on the plaster, and
the like) and proposed to call it the Auberge de Jehan Cottard, to give a medieval effect.
He had a leaflet printed, full of lies about the historical associations of the quarter, and
this leaflet actually claimed, among other things, that there had once been an inn on the
site of the restaurant which was frequented by Charlemagne. The PATRON was very
pleased with this touch. He was also having the bar decorated with indecent pictures by
an artist from the Salon. Finally he gave us each an expensive cigarette, and after some
more talk he went home.

I felt strongly that we should never get any good from this restaurant. The PATRON had
looked to me like a cheat, and, what was worse, an incompetent cheat, and I had seen two
unmistakable duns hanging about the back door. But Boris, seeing himself a MAITRE
D ’HOTEL once more, would not be discouraged.

‘We’ve brought it off — only a fortnight to hold out. What is a fortnight? JE M’EN F .

To think that in only three weeks I shall have my mistress! Will she be dark or fair, I
wonder? I don’t mind, so long as she is not too thin. ’

Two bad days followed. We had only sixty centimes left, and we spent it on half a pound
of bread, with a piece of garlic to rub it with. The point of rubbing garlic on bread is that
the taste lingers and gives one the illusion of having fed recently. We sat most of that day
in the Jardin des Plantes. Boris had shots with stones at the tame pigeons, but always
missed them, and after that we wrote dinner menus on the backs of envelopes. We were
too hungry even to try and think of anything except food. I remember the dinner Boris
finally selected for himself. It was: a dozen oysters, bortch soup (the red, sweet, beetroot
soup with cream on top), crayfishes, a young chicken en CASSEROLE, beef with stewed
plums, new potatoes, a salad, suet pudding and Roquefort cheese, with a litre of
Burgundy and some old brandy. Boris had international tastes in food. Later on, when we
were prosperous, I occasionally saw him eat meals almost as large without difficulty.



When our money came to an end I stopped looking for work, and was another day
without food. I did not believe that the Auberge de Jehan Cottard was really going to
open, and I could see no other prospect, but I was too lazy to do anything but lie in bed.
Then the luck changed abruptly. At night, at about ten o’clock, I heard an eager shout
from the street. I got up and went to the window. Boris was there, waving his stick and
beaming. Before speaking he dragged a bent loaf from his pocket and threw it up to me.

‘MON AMI, MON CHER AMI, we’re saved! What do you think? ’

‘Surely you haven’t got a job! ’

‘At the Hotel X, near the Place de la Concorde — five hundred francs a month, and food. I
have been working there today. Name of Jesus Christ, how I have eaten! ’

After ten or twelve hours’ work, and with his game leg, his first thought had been to walk
three kilometres to my hotel and tell me the good news! What was more, he told me to
meet him in the Tuileries the next day during his afternoon interval, in case he should be
able to steal some food for me. At the appointed time I met Boris on a public bench. He
undid his waistcoat and produced a large, crushed, newspaper packet; in it were some
minced veal, a wedge of Gamembert cheese, bread and an eclair, all jumbled together.

‘VOILA! ’ said Boris, ‘that’s all I could smuggle out for you. The doorkeeper is a cunning
swine. ’

It is disagreeable to eat out of a newspaper on a public seat, especially in the Tuileries,
which are generally full of pretty girls, but I was too hungry to care. While I ate, Boris
explained that he was working in the cafeterie of the hotel — that is, in English, the
stillroom. It appeared that the cafeterie was the very lowest post in the hotel, and a
dreadful come-down for a waiter, but it would do until the Auberge de Jehan Gottard
opened. Meanwhile I was to meet Boris every day in the Tuileries, and he would smuggle
out as much food as he dared. For three days we continued with this arrangement, and I
lived entirely on the stolen food. Then all our troubles came to an end, for one of the
PLONGEURS left the Hotel X, and on Boris’s recommendation I was given a job there
myself.



CHAPTER X


The Hotel X was a vast, grandiose place with a classical facade, and at one side a little,
dark doorway like a rat-hole, which was the service entrance. I arrived at a quarter to
seven in the morning. A stream of men with greasy trousers were hurrying in and being
checked by a doorkeeper who sat in a tiny office. I waited, and presently the CHEF DU
PERSONNEL, a sort of assistant manager, arrived and began to question me. He was an
Italian, with a round, pale face, haggard from overwork. He asked whether I was an
experienced dishwasher, and I said that I was; he glanced at my hands and saw that I was
lying, but on hearing that I was an Englishman he changed his tone and engaged me.

‘We have been looking for someone to practise our English on,’ he said. ‘Our clients are

all Americans, and the only English we know is ’ He repeated something that little

boys write on the walls in London. ‘You may be useful. Come downstairs. ’

He led me down a winding staircase into a narrow passage, deep underground, and so
low that I had to stoop in places. It was stiflingly hot and very dark, with only dim,
yellow bulbs several yards apart. There seemed to be miles of dark labyrinthine
passages — actually, I suppose, a few hundred yards in all — that reminded one queerly of
the lower decks of a liner; there were the same heat and cramped space and warm reek of
food, and a humming, whirring noise (it came from the kitchen furnaces) just like the
whir of engines. We passed doorways which let out sometimes a shouting of oaths,
sometimes the red glare of a fire, once a shuddering draught from an ice chamber. As we
went along, something struck me violently in the back. It was a hundred-pound block of
ice, carried by a blue-aproned porter. After him came a boy with a great slab of veal on
his shoulder, his cheek pressed into the damp, spongy flesh. They shoved me aside with a
cry of ‘SAUVE-TOI, IDIOT! ’ and rushed on. On the wall, under one of the lights,
someone had written in a very neat hand: ‘Sooner will you find a cloudless sky in winter,
than a woman at the Hotel X who has her maidenhead. ’ It seemed a queer sort of place.

One of the passages branched off into a laundry, where an old, skull-faced woman gave
me a blue apron and a pile of dishcloths. Then the CHEF DU PERSONNEL took me to a
tiny underground den — a cellar below a cellar, as it were — where there were a sink and
some gas-ovens. It was too low for me to stand quite upright, and the temperature was
perhaps 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The CHEF DU PERSONNEL explained that my job



was to fetch meals for the higher hotel employees, who fed in a small dining-room above,
clean their room and wash their crockery. When he had gone, a waiter, another Italian,
thrust a fierce, fuzzy head into the doorway and looked down at me.

‘English, eh? ’ he said. ‘Well, I’m in charge here. If you work well’ — he made the motion
of up-ending a bottle and sucked noisily. ‘If you don’t’ — he gave the doorpost several
vigorous kicks. ‘To me, twisting your neck would be no more than spitting on the floor.
And if there’s any trouble, they’ll believe me, not you. So be careful. ’

After this I set to work rather hurriedly. Except for about an hour, I was at work from
seven in the morning till a quarter past nine at night; first at washing crockery, then at
scrubbing the tables and floors of the employees’ dining-room, then at polishing glasses
and knives, then at fetching meals, then at washing crockery again, then at fetching more
meals and washing more crockery. It was easy work, and I got on well with it except
when I went to the kitchen to fetch meals. The kitchen was like nothing I had ever seen or
imagined — a stifling, low-ceilinged inferno of a cellar, red-lit from the fires, and
deafening with oaths and the clanging of pots and pans. It was so hot that all the metal-
work except the stoves had to be covered with cloth. In the middle were furnaces, where
twelve cooks skipped to and fro, their faces dripping sweat in spite of their white caps.
Round that were counters where a mob of waiters and PLONGEURS clamoured with
trays. Scullions, naked to the waist, were stoking the fires and scouring huge copper
saucepans with sand. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry and a rage. The head cook, a fine,
scarlet man with big moustachios, stood in the middle booming continuously, ‘CA
MARCHE DEUX AUFS BROUILLES! CA MARCHE UN CHATEAUBRIAND AUX
POMMES SAUTEES! ’ except when he broke off to curse at a PLONGEUR. There were
three counters, and the first time I went to the kitchen I took my tray unknowingly to the
wrong one. The head cook walked up to me, twisted his moustaches, and looked me up
and down. Then he beckoned to the breakfast cook and pointed at me.

‘Do you see THAT? That is the type of PLONGEUR they send us nowadays. Where do
you come from, idiot? From Charenton, I suppose? ’ (There is a large lunatic asylum at
Charenton. )


‘From England,’ I said.



‘I might have known it. Well, MAN CHER MONSIEUR L’ANGLAIS, may I inform you
that you are the son of a whore? And now — the camp to the other counter, where you
belong. ’

I got this kind of reception every time I went to the kitchen, for I always made some
mistake; I was expected to know the work, and was cursed accordingly. From curiosity I
counted the number of times I was called MAQUEREAU during the day, and it was
thirty-nine.

At half past four the Italian told me that I could stop working, but that it was not worth
going out, as we began at five. I went to the lavatory for a smoke; smoking was strictly
forbidden, and Boris had warned me that the lavatory was the only safe place. After that I
worked again till a quarter past nine, when the waiter put his head into the doorway and
told me to leave the rest of the crockery. To my astonishment, after calling me pig,
mackerel, etc. , all day, he had suddenly grown quite friendly. I realized that the curses I
had met with were only a kind of probation.

‘That’ll do, MAN P’TIT,’ said the waiter. ‘TU N’ES PAS DEBROUILL ARD , but you
work all right. Come up and have your dinner. The hotel allows us two litres of wine
each, and I’ve stolen another bottle. We’ll have a fine booze. ’

We had an excellent dinner from the leavings of the higher employees. The waiter, grown
mellow, told me stories about his love-affairs, and about two men whom he had stabbed
in Italy, and about how he had dodged Us military service. He was a good fellow when
one got to know him; he reminded me of Benvenuto Cellini, somehow. I was tired and
drenched with sweat, but I felt a new man after a day’s solid food. The work did not seem
difficult, and I felt that this job would suit me. It was not certain, however, that it would
continue, for I had been engaged as an ‘extra’ for the day only, at twenty-five francs. The
sour-faced doorkeeper counted out the money, less fifty centimes which he said was for
insurance (a lie, I discovered afterwards). Then he stepped out into the passage, made me
take off my coat, and carefully prodded me all over, searching for stolen food. After this
the CHEF DU PERSONNEL appeared and spoke to me. Like the waiter, he had grown
more genial on seeing that I was willing to work.



‘We will give you a permanent job if you like,’ he said. ‘The head waiter says he would
enjoy calling an Englishman names. Will you sign on for a month? ’

Here was a job at last, and I was ready to jump at it. Then I remembered the Russian
restaurant, due to open in a fortnight. It seemed hardly fair to promise working a month,
and then leave in the middle. I said that I had other work in prospect — could I be engaged
for a fortnight? But at that the CHEF DU PERSONNEL shrugged his shoulders and said
that the hotel only engaged men by the month. Evidently I had lost my chance of a job.

Boris, by arrangement, was waiting for me in the Arcade of the Rue de Rivoli. When I
told him what had happened, he was furious. For the first time since I had known him he
forgot his manners and called me a fool.

‘Idiot! Species of idiot! What’s the good of my finding you a job when you go and chuck
it up the next moment? How could you be such a fool as to mention the other restaurant?
You’d only to promise you would work for a month. ’

‘It seemed more honest to say I might have to leave,’ I objected.

‘Honest! Honest! Who ever heard of a PLONGEUR being honest? MON AMI’ —
suddenly he seized my lapel and spoke very earnestly — ‘MON AMI, you have worked
here all day. You see what hotel work is like. Do you think a PLONGEUR can afford a
sense of honour? ’

‘No, perhaps not. ’

‘Well, then, go back quickly and tell the CHEF DU PERSONNEL you are quite ready to
work for a month. Say you will throw the other job over. Then, when our restaurant
opens, we have only to walk out. ’

‘But what about my wages if I break my contract?

‘Boris banged his stick on the pavement and cried out at such stupidity. ‘Ask to be paid
by the day, then you won’t lose a sou. Do you suppose they would prosecute a
PLONGEUR for breaking Us contract? A PLONGEUR is too low to be prosecuted. ’



I hurried back, found the CHEF DU PERSONNEL, and told him that I would work for a
month, whereat he signed me on. Ibis was my first lesson in PLONGEUR morality. Later
I realized how foolish it had been to have any scruples, for the big hotels are quite
merciless towards their employees. They engage or discharge men as the work demands,
and they all sack ten per cent or more of their staff when the season is over. Nor have
they any difficulty in replacing a man who leaves at short notice, for Paris is thronged by
hotel employees out of work.


CHAPTER XI

As it turned out, I did not break my contract, for it was six weeks before the Auberge de
Jehan Cottard even showed signs of opening. In the meantime I worked at the Hotel X,
four days a week in the cafeterie, one day helping the waiter on the fourth floor, and one
day replacing the woman who washed up for the dining-room. My day off, luckily, was
Sunday, but sometimes another man was ill and I had to work that day as well. The hours
were from seven in the morning till two in the afternoon, and from five in the evening till
nine — eleven hours; but it was a fourteen-hour day when I washed up for the dining-
room. By the ordinary standards of a Paris PLONGEUR, these are exceptionally short
hours. The only hardship of life was the fearful heat and stuffiness of these labyrinthine
cellars.
Apart from this the hotel, which was large and well organized, was considered a
comfortable one.

Our cafeterie was a murky cellar measuring twenty feet by seven by eight high, and so
crowded with coffee-urns, breadcutters and the like that one could hardly move without
banging against something. It was lighted by one dim electric bulb, and four or five gas-
fires that sent out a fierce red breath. There was a thermometer there, and the temperature
never fell below 1 10 degrees Fahrenheit — it neared 130 at some times of the day. At one
end were five service lifts, and at the other an ice cupboard where we stored milk and
butter. When you went into the ice cupboard you dropped a hundred degrees of
temperature at a single step; it used to remind me of the hymn about Greenland’s icy
mountains and India’s coral strand. Two men worked in the cafeterie besides Boris and
myself. One was Mario, a huge, excitable Italian — he was like a city policeman with
operatic gestures — and the other, a hairy, uncouth animal whom we called the Magyar; I



think he was a Transylvanian, or something even more remote. Except the Magyar we
were all big men, and at the rush hours we collided incessantly.


The work in the cafeterie was spasmodic. We were never idle, but the real work only
came in bursts of two hours at a time — we called each burst ‘UN COUP DE FEU’. The
first COUP DE FEU came at eight, when the guests upstairs began to wake up and
demand breakfast. At eight a sudden banging and yelling would break out all through the
basement; bells rang on all sides, blue-aproned men rushed through the passages, our
service lifts came down with a simultaneous crash, and the waiters on all five floors
began shouting Italian oaths down the shafts. I don’t remember all our duties, but they
included making tea, coffee and chocolate, fetching meals from the kitchen, wines from
the cellar and fruit and so forth from the dining-room, slicing bread, making toast, rolling
pats of butter, measuring jam, opening milk-cans, counting lumps of sugar, boiling eggs,
cooking porridge, pounding ice, grinding coffee — all this for from a hundred to two
hundred customers. The kitchen was thirty yards away, and the dining-room sixty or
seventy yards. Everything we sent up in the service lifts had to be covered by a voucher,
and the vouchers had to be carefully filed, and there was trouble if even a lump of sugar
was lost. Besides this, we had to supply the staff with bread and coffee, and fetch the
meals for the waiters upstairs. All in all, it was a complicated job.

I calculated that one had to walk and run about fifteen miles during the day, and yet the
strain of the work was more mental than physical. Nothing could be easier, on the face of
it, than this stupid scullion work, but it is astonishingly hard when one is in a hurry. One
has to leap to and fro between a multitude of jobs — it is like sorting a pack of cards
against the clock. You are, for example, making toast, when bang! down comes a service
lift with an order for tea, rolls and three different kinds of jam, and simultaneously bang!
down comes another demanding scrambled eggs, coffee and grapefruit; you run to the
kitchen for the eggs and to the dining-room for the fruit, going like lightning so as to be
back before your toast bums, and having to remember about the tea and coffee, besides
half a dozen other orders that are still pending; and at the same time some waiter is
following you and making trouble about a lost bottle of soda-water, and you are arguing
with him. It needs more brains than one might think. Mario said, no doubt truly, that it
took a year to make a reliable cafetier.



The time between eight and half past ten was a sort of delirium. Sometimes we were
going as though we had only five minutes to live; sometimes there were sudden lulls
when the orders stopped and everything seemed quiet for a moment. Then we swept up
the litter from the floor, threw down fresh sawdust, and swallowed gallipots of wine or
coffee or water — anything, so long as it was wet. Very often we used to break off chunks
of ice and suck them while we worked. The heat among the gas-fires was nauseating; we
swallowed quarts of drink during the day, and after a few hours even our aprons were
drenched with sweat. At times we were hopelessly behind with the work, and some of the
customers would have gone without their breakfast, but Mario always pulled us through.
He had worked fourteen years in the cafeterie, and he had the skill that never wastes a
second between jobs. The Magyar was very stupid and I was inexperienced, and Boris
was inclined to shirk, partly because of his lame leg, partly because he was ashamed of
working in the cafeterie after being a waiter; but Mario was wonderful. The way he
would stretch his great arms right across the cafeterie to fill a coffee-pot with one hand
and boil an egg with the other, at the same time watching toast and shouting directions to
the Magyar, and between whiles singing snatches from RIGOLETTO, was beyond all
praise. The PATRON knew his value, and he was paid a thousand francs a month, instead
of five hundred like the rest of us.

The breakfast pandemonium stopped at half past ten. Then we scrubbed the cafeterie
tables, swept the floor and polished the brasswork, and, on good mornings, went one at a
time to the lavatory for a smoke. This was our slack time — only relatively slack,
however, for we had only ten minutes for lunch, and we never got through it
uninterrupted. The customers’ luncheon hour, between twelve and two, was another
period of turmoil like the breakfast hour. Most of our work was fetching meals from the
kitchen, which meant constant ENGUEULADES from the cooks. By this time the cooks
had sweated in front of their furnaces for four or five hours, and their tempers were all
warmed up.

At two we were suddenly free men. We threw off our aprons and put on our coats,
hurried out of doors, and, when we had money, dived into the nearest BISTRO. It was
strange, coming up into the street from those firelit cellars. The air seemed blindingly
clear and cold, like arctic summer; and how sweet the petrol did smell, after the stenches
of sweat and food! Sometimes we met some of our cooks and waiters in the BISTROS,



and they were friendly and stood us drinks. Indoors we were their slaves, but it is an
etiquette in hotel life that between hours everyone is equal, and the ENGUEULADES do
not count.

At a quarter to five we went back to the hotel. Till half-past six there were no orders, and
we used this time to polish silver, clean out the coffee-urns, and do other odd jobs. Then
the grand turmoil of the day started — the dinner hour. I wish I could be Zola for a little
while, just to describe that dinner hour. The essence of the situation was that a hundred or
two hundred people were demanding individually different meals of five or six courses,
and that fifty or sixty people had to cook and serve them and clean up the mess
afterwards; anyone with experience of catering will know what that means. And at this
time when the work was doubled, the whole staff was tired out, and a number of them
were drunk. I could write pages about the scene without giving a true idea of it. The
chargings to and fro in the narrow passages, the collisions, the yells, the struggling with
crates and trays and blocks of ice, the heat, the darkness, the furious festering quarrels
which there was no time to fight out — they pass description. Anyone coming into the
basement for the first time would have thought himself in a den of maniacs. It was only
later, when I understood the working of a hotel, that I saw order in all this chaos.

At half past eight the work stopped very suddenly. We were not free till nine, but we used
to throw ourselves full length on the floor, and lie there resting our legs, too lazy even to
go to the ice cupboard for a drink. Sometimes the CHEF DU PERSONNEL would come
in with bottles of beer, for the hotel stood us an extra beer when we had had a hard day.
The food we were given was no more than eatable, but the PATRON was not mean about
drink; he allowed us two litres of wine a day each, knowing that if a PLONGEUR is not
given two litres he will steal three. We had the heeltaps of bottles as well, so that we
often drank too much — a good thing, for one seemed to work faster when partially drunk.

Four days of the week passed like this; of the other two working days, one was better and
one worse. After a week of this life I felt in need of a holiday. It was Saturday night, so
the people in our BISTRO were busy getting drunk, and with a free day ahead of me I
was ready to join them. We all went to bed, drunk, at two in the morning, meaning to
sleep till noon. At half past five I was suddenly awakened. A night-watchman, sent from



the hotel, was standing at my bedside. He stripped the clothes back and shook me
roughly.


‘Get up! ’ he said. ‘TU T’ES BIEN SAOULE LA GNEULE, EH? Well, never mind that,
the hotel’s a man short. You’ve got to work today. ’

‘Why should I work? ’ I protested. ‘This is my day off. ’

‘Day off, nothing! The work’s got to be done. Get up! ’

I got up and went out, feeling as though my back were broken and my skull fdled with
hot cinders. I did not think that I could possibly do a day’s work. And yet, after only an
hour in the basement, I found that I was perfectly well. It seemed that in the heat of those
cellars, as in a turkish bath, one could sweat out almost any quantity of drink.
PLONGEURS know this, and count on it. The power of swallowing quarts of wine, and
then sweating it out before it can do much damage, is one of the compensations of their
life.


CHAPTER XII

By far my best time at the hotel was when I went to help the waiter on the fourth floor.
We worked in a small pantry which communicated with the cafeterie by service lifts. It
was delightfully cool after the cellars, and the work was chiefly polishing silver and
glasses, which is a humane job. Valenti, the waiter, was a decent sort, and treated me
almost as an equal when we were alone, though he had to speak roughly when there was
anyone else present, for it does not do for a waiter to be friendly with PLONGEURS. He
used sometimes to tip me five francs when he had had a good day. He was a comely
youth, aged twenty-four but looking eighteen, and, like most waiters, he carried himself
well and knew how to wear his clothes. With his black tail-coat and white tie, fresh face
and sleek brown hair, he looked just like an Eton boy; yet he had earned his living since
he was twelve, and worked his way up literally from the gutter. Grossing the Italian
frontier without a passport, and selling chestnuts from a barrow on the northern
boulevards, and being given fifty days’ imprisonment in London for working without a
pennit, and being made love to by a rich old woman in a hotel, who gave him a diamond



ring and afterwards accused him of stealing it, were among his experiences. I used to
enjoy talking to him, at slack times when we sat smoking down the lift shaft.

My bad day was when I washed up for the dining-room. I had not to wash the plates,
which were done in the kitchen, but only the other crockery, silver, knives and glasses;
yet, even so, it meant thirteen hours’ work, and I used between thirty and forty dishcloths
during the day. The antiquated methods used in France double the work of washing up.
Plate-racks are unheard-of, and there are no soap-flakes, only the treacly soft soap, which
refuses to lather in the hard, Paris water. I worked in a dirty, crowded little den, a pantry
and scullery combined, which gave straight on the dining-room. Besides washing up, I
had to fetch the waiters’ food and serve them at table; most of them were intolerably
insolent, and I had to use my fists more than once to get common civility. The person
who normally washed up was a woman, and they made her life a misery.

It was amusing to look round the filthy little scullery and think that only a double door
was between us and the dining-room. There sat the customers in all their splendour —
spotless table-cloths, bowls of flowers, mirrors and gilt cornices and painted cherubim;
and here, just a few feet away, we in our disgusting filth. For it really was disgusting
filth. There was no time to sweep the floor till evening, and we slithered about in a
compound of soapy water, lettuce-leaves, tom paper and trampled food. A dozen waiters
with their coats off, showing their sweaty armpits, sat at the table mixing salads and
sticking their thumbs into the cream pots. The room had a dirty, mixed smell of food and
sweat. Everywhere in the cupboards, behind the piles of crockery, were squalid stores of
food that the waiters had stolen. There were only two sinks, and no washing basin, and it
was nothing unusual for a waiter to wash his face in the water in which clean crockery
was rinsing. But the customers saw nothing of this. There were a coco-nut mat and a
mirror outside the dining-room door, and the waiters used to preen themselves up and go
in looking the picture of cleanliness.

It is an instructive sight to see a waiter going into a hotel dining-room. As he passes the
door a sudden change comes over him. The set of his shoulders alters; all the dirt and
hurry and irritation have dropped off in an instant. 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.