’
THE WOMAN ON THE THIRD FLOOR: ‘VACHE!
THE WOMAN ON THE THIRD FLOOR: ‘VACHE!
Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON
BY: GEORGE ORWELL
CATEGORY: FICTION - NOVEL
Down and Out in Paris and London
by
George Orwell
O scathful harm, condition of poverte!
—CHAUCER
eBooks@Adelaide
2004
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The University of Adelaide Library
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Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
CHAPTER XXXIII
CHAPTER XXXIV
CHAPTER XXXV
CHAPTER XXXVI
CHAPTER XXXVII
CHAPTER XXXVIII
CHAPTER I
The rue du Coq d’Or, Paris, seven in the morning. A succession of furious, choking yells
from the street. Madame Monce, who kept the little hotel opposite mine, had come out on
to the pavement to address a lodger on the third floor. Her bare feet were stuck into
sabots and her grey hair was streaming down.
MADAME MONCE: ‘SALOPE! SALOPE! How many times have I told you not to
squash bugs on the wallpaper? Do you think you’ve bought the hotel, eh? Why can’t you
throw them out of the window like everyone else? PUTAIN! SALOPE! ’
THE WOMAN ON THE THIRD FLOOR: ‘VACHE! ’
Thereupon a whole variegated chorus of yells, as windows were flung open on every side
and half the street joined in the quarrel. They shut up abruptly ten minutes later, when a
squadron of cavalry rode past and people stopped shouting to look at them.
I sketch this scene, just to convey something of the spirit of the rue du Coq d’Or. Not that
quarrels were the only thing that happened there — but still, we seldom got through the
morning without at least one outburst of this description. Quarrels, and the desolate cries
of street hawkers, and the shouts of children chasing orange-peel over the cobbles, and at
night loud singing and the sour reek of the refuse-carts, made up the atmosphere of the
street.
It was a very narrow street — a ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching towards one
another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse. All
the houses were hotels and packed to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and
Italians. At the foot of the hotels were tiny BISTROs, where you could be drunk for the
equivalent of a shilling. On Saturday nights about a third of the male population of the
quarter was drunk. There was fighting over women, and the Arab navvies who lived in
the cheapest hotels used to conduct mysterious feuds, and fight them out with chairs and
occasionally revolvers. At night the policemen would only come through the street two
together. It was a fairly rackety place. And yet amid the noise and dirt lived the usual
respectable French shopkeepers, bakers and laundresses and the like, keeping themselves
to themselves and quietly piling up small fortunes. It was quite a representative Paris
slum.
My hotel was called the Hotel des Trois Moineaux. It was a dark, rickety warren of five
storeys, cut up by wooden partitions into forty rooms. The rooms were small arid
inveterately dirty, for there was no maid, and Madame F. , the PATRONNE, had no time
to do any sweeping. The walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they
had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed
innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like columns of
soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that one had to get up every few
hours and kill them in hecatombs. Sometimes when the bugs got too bad one used to burn
sulphur and drive them into the next room; whereupon the lodger next door would retort
by having his room sulphured, and drive the bugs back. It was a dirty place, but
homelike, for Madame F. and her husband were good sorts. The rent of the rooms varied
between thirty and fifty francs a week.
The lodgers were a floating population, largely foreigners, who used to turn up without
luggage, stay a week and then disappear again. They were of every trade — cobblers,
bricklayers, stonemasons, navvies, students, prostitutes, rag-pickers. Some of them were
fantastically poor. In one of the attics there was a Bulgarian student who made fancy
shoes for the American market. From six to twelve he sat on his bed, making a dozen
pairs of shoes and earning thirty-five francs; the rest of the day he attended lectures at the
Sorbonne. He was studying for the Church, and books of theology lay face-down on his
leather-strewn floor. In another room lived a Russian woman and her son, who called
himself an artist. The mother worked sixteen hours a day, darning socks at twenty-five
centimes a sock, while the son, decently dressed, loafed in the Montparnasse cafes. One
room was let to two different lodgers, one a day worker and the other a night worker. In
another room a widower shared the same bed with his two grown-up daughters, both
consumptive.
There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slums are a gathering-place for
eccentric people — people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and
given up trying to be nonnal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of
behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived
lives that were curious beyond words.
There were the Rougiers, for instance, an old, ragged, dwarfish couple who plied an
extraordinary trade. They used to sell postcards on the Boulevard St Michel. The curious
thing was that the postcards were sold in sealed packets as pornographic ones, but were
actually photographs of chateaux on the Loire; the buyers did not discover this till too
late, and of course never complained. The Rougiers earned about a hundred francs a
week, and by strict economy managed to be always half starved and half drunk. The filth
of their room was such that one could smell it on the floor below. According to Madame
F. , neither of the Rougiers had taken off their clothes for four years.
Or there was Henri, who worked in the sewers. He was a tall, melancholy man with curly
hair, rather romantic-looking in his long, sewer-man’s boots. Henri’s peculiarity was that
he did not speak, except for the purposes of work, literally for days together. Only a year
before he had been a chauffeur in good employ and saving money. One day he fell in
love, and when the girl refused him he lost his temper and kicked her. On being kicked
the girl fell desperately in love with Henri, and for a fortnight they lived together and
spent a thousand francs of Henri’s money. Then the girl was unfaithful; Henri planted a
kn ife in her upper ann and was sent to prison for six months. As soon as she had been
stabbed the girl fell more in love with Henri than ever, and the two made up their quarrel
and agreed that when Henri came out of jail he should buy a taxi and they would marry
and settle down. But a fortnight later the girl was unfaithful again, and when Henri came
out she was with child, Henri did not stab her again. He drew out all his savings and went
on a drinking-bout that ended in another month’s imprisonment; after that he went to
work in the sewers. Nothing would induce Henri to talk. If you asked him why he worked
in the sewers he never answered, but simply crossed his wrists to signify handcuffs, and
jerked his head southward, towards the prison. Bad luck seemed to have turned him half-
witted in a single day.
Or there was R. , an Englishman, who lived six months of the year in Putney with his
parents and six months in France. During his time in France he drank four litres of wine a
day, and six litres on Saturdays; he had once travelled as far as the Azores, because the
wine there is cheaper than anywhere in Europe. He was a gentle, domesticated creature,
never rowdy or quarrelsome, and never sober. He would lie in bed till midday, and from
then till midnight he was in his comer of the BISTRO, quietly and methodically soaking.
While he soaked he talked, in a refined, womanish voice, about antique furniture. Except
myself, R. was the only Englishman in the quarter.
There were plenty of other people who lived lives just as eccentric as these: Monsieur
Jules, the Roumanian, who had a glass eye and would not admit it, Furex the Limousin
stonemason, Roucolle the miser — he died before my time, though — old Laurent the rag-
merchant, who used to copy his signature from a slip of paper he carried in his pocket. It
would be fun to write some of their biographies, if one had time. I am trying to describe
the people in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but because they are all part of the
story. Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this
slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and
then the background of my own experiences. It is for that reason that I try to give some
idea of what life was like there.
CHAPTER II
Life in the quarter. Our BISTRO, for instance, at the foot of the Hotel des Trois
Moineaux. A tiny brick-floored room, half underground, with wine-sodden tables, and a
photograph of a funeral inscribed ‘CREDIT EST MORT’; and red-sashed workmen
carving sausage with big jack-knives; and Madame F. , a splendid Auvergnat peasant
woman with the face of a strong-minded cow, drinking Malaga all day ‘for her stomach’;
and games of dice for APERITIFS; and songs about ‘LES PRAISES ET LES
FRAMBOISES’, and about Madelon, who said, ‘COMMENT EPOUSER UN SOLDAT,
MOI QUI AIME TOUT LE REGIMENT? ’; and extraordinarily public love-making. Half
the hotel used to meet in the BISTRO in the evenings. I wish one could find a pub in
London a quarter as cheery.
One heard queer conversations in the BISTRO. As a sample I give you Charlie, one of
the local curiosities, talking.
Charlie was a youth of family and education who had run away from home and lived on
occasional remittances. Picture him very pink and young, with the fresh cheeks and soft
brown hair of a nice little boy, and lips excessively red and wet, like cherries. His feet are
tiny, his anns abnormally short, his hands dimpled like a baby’s. He has a way of dancing
and capering while he talks, as though he were too happy and too full of life to keep still
for an instant. It is three in the afternoon, and there is no one in the BISTRO except
Madame F. and one or two men who are out of work; but it is all the same to Charlie
whom he talks to, so long as he can talk about himself. He declaims like an orator on a
barricade, rolling the words on his tongue and gesticulating with his short anns. His
small, rather piggy eyes glitter with enthusiasm. He is, somehow, profoundly disgusting
to see.
He is talking of love, his favourite subject.
‘AH, L’ AMOUR, L’ AMOUR! AH, QUE LES FEMMES M’ONT TUE! Alas,
MESSIEURS ET DAMES, women have been my ruin, beyond all hope my ruin. At
twenty-two I am utterly worn out and finished. But what things I have learned, what
abysses of wisdom have I not plumbed! How great a thing it is to have acquired the true
wisdom, to have become in the highest sense of the word a civilized man, to have become
RAFFINE, VICIEUX,’ etc. etc.
‘MESSIEURS ET DAFFIES, I perceive that you are sad. AH, MAIS LA VIE EST
BELLE — you must not be sad. Be more gay, I beseech you!
‘Fill high ze bowl vid Samian vine,
Ve vill not sink of semes like zese!
‘AH, QUE LA VIE EST BELLE! LISTEN, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, out of the
fullness of my experience I will discourse to you of love. I will explain to you what is the
true meaning of love — what is the true sensibility, the higher, more refined pleasure
which is known to civilized men alone. I will tell you of the happiest day of my life. Alas,
but I am past the time when I could know such happiness as that. It is gone for ever — the
very possibility, even the desire for it, are gone.
‘Listen, then. It was two years ago; my brother was in Paris — he is a lawyer — and my
parents had told him to find me and take me out to dinner. We hate each other, my
brother and I, but we preferred not to disobey my parents. We dined, and at dinner he
grew very drunk upon three bottles of Bordeaux. I took him back to his hotel, and on the
way I bought a bottle of brandy, and when we had arrived I made my brother drink a
tumblerful of it — I told him it was something to make him sober. He drank it, and
immediately he fell down like somebody in a fit, dead drunk. I lifted him up and propped
his back against the bed; then I went through his pockets. I found eleven hundred francs,
and with that I hurried down the stairs, jumped into a taxi, and escaped. My brother did
not know my address — I was safe.
‘Where does a man go when he has money? To the BORDELS, naturally. But you do not
suppose that I was going to waste my time on some vulgar debauchery fit only for
navvies? Confound it, one is a civilized man! I was fastidious, exigeant, you understand,
with a thousand francs in my pocket. It was midnight before I found what I was looking
for. I had fallen in with a very smart youth of eighteen, dressed EN SMOKING and with
his hair cut A L’AMERICAINE, and we were talking in a quiet BISTRO away from the
boulevards. We understood one another well, that youth and I. We talked of this and that,
and discussed ways of diverting oneself. Presently we took a taxi together and were
driven away.
‘The taxi stopped in a narrow, solitary street with a single gas-lamp flaring at the end.
There were dark puddles among the stones. Down one side ran the high, blank wall of a
convent. My guide led me to a tall, ruinous house with shuttered windows, and knocked
several times at the door. Presently there was a sound of footsteps and a shooting of bolts,
and the door opened a little. A hand came round the edge of it; it was a large, crooked
hand, that held itself palm upwards under our noses, demanding money.
‘My guide put his foot between the door and the step. “How much do you want? ” he said.
“‘A thousand francs,” said a woman’s voice. “Pay up at once or you don’t come in. ”
‘I put a thousand francs into the hand and gave the remaining hundred to my guide: he
said good night and left me. I could hear the voice inside counting the notes, and then a
thin old crow of a woman in a black dress put her nose out and regarded me suspiciously
before letting me in. It was very dark inside: I could see nothing except a flaring gas-jet
that illuminated a patch of plaster wall, throwing everything else into deeper shadow.
There was a smell of rats and dust. Without speaking, the old woman lighted a candle at
the gas-jet, then hobbled in front of me down a stone passage to the top of a flight of
stone steps.
“‘VOILA! ” she said; “go down into the cellar there and do what you like. I shall see
nothing, hear nothing, know nothing. You are free, you understand — perfectly free. ”
‘Ha, MESSIEURS, need I describe to YOU — FORCEMENT, you know it yourselves —
that shiver, half of terror and half of joy, that goes through one at these moments? I crept
down, feeling my way; I could hear my breathing and the scraping of my shoes on the
stones, otherwise all was silence. At the bottom of the stairs my hand met an electric
switch. I turned it, and a great electrolier of twelve red globes flooded the cellar with a
red light. And behold, I was not in a cellar, but in a bedroom, a great, rich, garish
bedroom, coloured blood red from top to bottom. Figure it to yourselves, MESSIEURS
ET DAMES! Red carpet on the floor, red paper on the walls, red plush on the chairs,
even the ceiling red; everywhere red, burning into the eyes. It was a heavy, stifling red, as
though the light were shining through bowls of blood. At the far end stood a huge, square
bed, with quilts red like the rest, and on it a girl was lying, dressed in a frock of red
velvet. At the sight of me she shrank away and tried to hide her knees under the short
dress.
‘I had halted by the door. “Come here, my chicken,” I called to her.
‘She gave a whimper of fright. With a bound I was beside the bed; she tried to elude me,
but I seized her by the throat — like this, do you see? — tight! She struggled, she began to
cry out for mercy, but I held her fast, forcing back her head and staring down into her
face. She was twenty years old, perhaps; her face was the broad, dull face of a stupid
child, but it was coated with paint and powder, and her blue, stupid eyes, shining in the
red light, wore that shocked, distorted look that one sees nowhere save in the eyes of
these women. She was some peasant girl, doubtless, whom her parents had sold into
slavery.
‘Without another word I pulled her off the bed and threw her on to the floor. And then I
fell upon her like a tiger! Ah, the joy, the incomparable rapture of that time! There,
MESSIEURS ET DAMES, is what I would expound to you; VOILA L ’AMOUR!
’
THE WOMAN ON THE THIRD FLOOR: ‘VACHE! ’
Thereupon a whole variegated chorus of yells, as windows were flung open on every side
and half the street joined in the quarrel. They shut up abruptly ten minutes later, when a
squadron of cavalry rode past and people stopped shouting to look at them.
I sketch this scene, just to convey something of the spirit of the rue du Coq d’Or. Not that
quarrels were the only thing that happened there — but still, we seldom got through the
morning without at least one outburst of this description. Quarrels, and the desolate cries
of street hawkers, and the shouts of children chasing orange-peel over the cobbles, and at
night loud singing and the sour reek of the refuse-carts, made up the atmosphere of the
street.
It was a very narrow street — a ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching towards one
another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse. All
the houses were hotels and packed to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and
Italians. At the foot of the hotels were tiny BISTROs, where you could be drunk for the
equivalent of a shilling. On Saturday nights about a third of the male population of the
quarter was drunk. There was fighting over women, and the Arab navvies who lived in
the cheapest hotels used to conduct mysterious feuds, and fight them out with chairs and
occasionally revolvers. At night the policemen would only come through the street two
together. It was a fairly rackety place. And yet amid the noise and dirt lived the usual
respectable French shopkeepers, bakers and laundresses and the like, keeping themselves
to themselves and quietly piling up small fortunes. It was quite a representative Paris
slum.
My hotel was called the Hotel des Trois Moineaux. It was a dark, rickety warren of five
storeys, cut up by wooden partitions into forty rooms. The rooms were small arid
inveterately dirty, for there was no maid, and Madame F. , the PATRONNE, had no time
to do any sweeping. The walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they
had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed
innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like columns of
soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that one had to get up every few
hours and kill them in hecatombs. Sometimes when the bugs got too bad one used to burn
sulphur and drive them into the next room; whereupon the lodger next door would retort
by having his room sulphured, and drive the bugs back. It was a dirty place, but
homelike, for Madame F. and her husband were good sorts. The rent of the rooms varied
between thirty and fifty francs a week.
The lodgers were a floating population, largely foreigners, who used to turn up without
luggage, stay a week and then disappear again. They were of every trade — cobblers,
bricklayers, stonemasons, navvies, students, prostitutes, rag-pickers. Some of them were
fantastically poor. In one of the attics there was a Bulgarian student who made fancy
shoes for the American market. From six to twelve he sat on his bed, making a dozen
pairs of shoes and earning thirty-five francs; the rest of the day he attended lectures at the
Sorbonne. He was studying for the Church, and books of theology lay face-down on his
leather-strewn floor. In another room lived a Russian woman and her son, who called
himself an artist. The mother worked sixteen hours a day, darning socks at twenty-five
centimes a sock, while the son, decently dressed, loafed in the Montparnasse cafes. One
room was let to two different lodgers, one a day worker and the other a night worker. In
another room a widower shared the same bed with his two grown-up daughters, both
consumptive.
There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slums are a gathering-place for
eccentric people — people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and
given up trying to be nonnal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of
behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived
lives that were curious beyond words.
There were the Rougiers, for instance, an old, ragged, dwarfish couple who plied an
extraordinary trade. They used to sell postcards on the Boulevard St Michel. The curious
thing was that the postcards were sold in sealed packets as pornographic ones, but were
actually photographs of chateaux on the Loire; the buyers did not discover this till too
late, and of course never complained. The Rougiers earned about a hundred francs a
week, and by strict economy managed to be always half starved and half drunk. The filth
of their room was such that one could smell it on the floor below. According to Madame
F. , neither of the Rougiers had taken off their clothes for four years.
Or there was Henri, who worked in the sewers. He was a tall, melancholy man with curly
hair, rather romantic-looking in his long, sewer-man’s boots. Henri’s peculiarity was that
he did not speak, except for the purposes of work, literally for days together. Only a year
before he had been a chauffeur in good employ and saving money. One day he fell in
love, and when the girl refused him he lost his temper and kicked her. On being kicked
the girl fell desperately in love with Henri, and for a fortnight they lived together and
spent a thousand francs of Henri’s money. Then the girl was unfaithful; Henri planted a
kn ife in her upper ann and was sent to prison for six months. As soon as she had been
stabbed the girl fell more in love with Henri than ever, and the two made up their quarrel
and agreed that when Henri came out of jail he should buy a taxi and they would marry
and settle down. But a fortnight later the girl was unfaithful again, and when Henri came
out she was with child, Henri did not stab her again. He drew out all his savings and went
on a drinking-bout that ended in another month’s imprisonment; after that he went to
work in the sewers. Nothing would induce Henri to talk. If you asked him why he worked
in the sewers he never answered, but simply crossed his wrists to signify handcuffs, and
jerked his head southward, towards the prison. Bad luck seemed to have turned him half-
witted in a single day.
Or there was R. , an Englishman, who lived six months of the year in Putney with his
parents and six months in France. During his time in France he drank four litres of wine a
day, and six litres on Saturdays; he had once travelled as far as the Azores, because the
wine there is cheaper than anywhere in Europe. He was a gentle, domesticated creature,
never rowdy or quarrelsome, and never sober. He would lie in bed till midday, and from
then till midnight he was in his comer of the BISTRO, quietly and methodically soaking.
While he soaked he talked, in a refined, womanish voice, about antique furniture. Except
myself, R. was the only Englishman in the quarter.
There were plenty of other people who lived lives just as eccentric as these: Monsieur
Jules, the Roumanian, who had a glass eye and would not admit it, Furex the Limousin
stonemason, Roucolle the miser — he died before my time, though — old Laurent the rag-
merchant, who used to copy his signature from a slip of paper he carried in his pocket. It
would be fun to write some of their biographies, if one had time. I am trying to describe
the people in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but because they are all part of the
story. Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this
slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and
then the background of my own experiences. It is for that reason that I try to give some
idea of what life was like there.
CHAPTER II
Life in the quarter. Our BISTRO, for instance, at the foot of the Hotel des Trois
Moineaux. A tiny brick-floored room, half underground, with wine-sodden tables, and a
photograph of a funeral inscribed ‘CREDIT EST MORT’; and red-sashed workmen
carving sausage with big jack-knives; and Madame F. , a splendid Auvergnat peasant
woman with the face of a strong-minded cow, drinking Malaga all day ‘for her stomach’;
and games of dice for APERITIFS; and songs about ‘LES PRAISES ET LES
FRAMBOISES’, and about Madelon, who said, ‘COMMENT EPOUSER UN SOLDAT,
MOI QUI AIME TOUT LE REGIMENT? ’; and extraordinarily public love-making. Half
the hotel used to meet in the BISTRO in the evenings. I wish one could find a pub in
London a quarter as cheery.
One heard queer conversations in the BISTRO. As a sample I give you Charlie, one of
the local curiosities, talking.
Charlie was a youth of family and education who had run away from home and lived on
occasional remittances. Picture him very pink and young, with the fresh cheeks and soft
brown hair of a nice little boy, and lips excessively red and wet, like cherries. His feet are
tiny, his anns abnormally short, his hands dimpled like a baby’s. He has a way of dancing
and capering while he talks, as though he were too happy and too full of life to keep still
for an instant. It is three in the afternoon, and there is no one in the BISTRO except
Madame F. and one or two men who are out of work; but it is all the same to Charlie
whom he talks to, so long as he can talk about himself. He declaims like an orator on a
barricade, rolling the words on his tongue and gesticulating with his short anns. His
small, rather piggy eyes glitter with enthusiasm. He is, somehow, profoundly disgusting
to see.
He is talking of love, his favourite subject.
‘AH, L’ AMOUR, L’ AMOUR! AH, QUE LES FEMMES M’ONT TUE! Alas,
MESSIEURS ET DAMES, women have been my ruin, beyond all hope my ruin. At
twenty-two I am utterly worn out and finished. But what things I have learned, what
abysses of wisdom have I not plumbed! How great a thing it is to have acquired the true
wisdom, to have become in the highest sense of the word a civilized man, to have become
RAFFINE, VICIEUX,’ etc. etc.
‘MESSIEURS ET DAFFIES, I perceive that you are sad. AH, MAIS LA VIE EST
BELLE — you must not be sad. Be more gay, I beseech you!
‘Fill high ze bowl vid Samian vine,
Ve vill not sink of semes like zese!
‘AH, QUE LA VIE EST BELLE! LISTEN, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, out of the
fullness of my experience I will discourse to you of love. I will explain to you what is the
true meaning of love — what is the true sensibility, the higher, more refined pleasure
which is known to civilized men alone. I will tell you of the happiest day of my life. Alas,
but I am past the time when I could know such happiness as that. It is gone for ever — the
very possibility, even the desire for it, are gone.
‘Listen, then. It was two years ago; my brother was in Paris — he is a lawyer — and my
parents had told him to find me and take me out to dinner. We hate each other, my
brother and I, but we preferred not to disobey my parents. We dined, and at dinner he
grew very drunk upon three bottles of Bordeaux. I took him back to his hotel, and on the
way I bought a bottle of brandy, and when we had arrived I made my brother drink a
tumblerful of it — I told him it was something to make him sober. He drank it, and
immediately he fell down like somebody in a fit, dead drunk. I lifted him up and propped
his back against the bed; then I went through his pockets. I found eleven hundred francs,
and with that I hurried down the stairs, jumped into a taxi, and escaped. My brother did
not know my address — I was safe.
‘Where does a man go when he has money? To the BORDELS, naturally. But you do not
suppose that I was going to waste my time on some vulgar debauchery fit only for
navvies? Confound it, one is a civilized man! I was fastidious, exigeant, you understand,
with a thousand francs in my pocket. It was midnight before I found what I was looking
for. I had fallen in with a very smart youth of eighteen, dressed EN SMOKING and with
his hair cut A L’AMERICAINE, and we were talking in a quiet BISTRO away from the
boulevards. We understood one another well, that youth and I. We talked of this and that,
and discussed ways of diverting oneself. Presently we took a taxi together and were
driven away.
‘The taxi stopped in a narrow, solitary street with a single gas-lamp flaring at the end.
There were dark puddles among the stones. Down one side ran the high, blank wall of a
convent. My guide led me to a tall, ruinous house with shuttered windows, and knocked
several times at the door. Presently there was a sound of footsteps and a shooting of bolts,
and the door opened a little. A hand came round the edge of it; it was a large, crooked
hand, that held itself palm upwards under our noses, demanding money.
‘My guide put his foot between the door and the step. “How much do you want? ” he said.
“‘A thousand francs,” said a woman’s voice. “Pay up at once or you don’t come in. ”
‘I put a thousand francs into the hand and gave the remaining hundred to my guide: he
said good night and left me. I could hear the voice inside counting the notes, and then a
thin old crow of a woman in a black dress put her nose out and regarded me suspiciously
before letting me in. It was very dark inside: I could see nothing except a flaring gas-jet
that illuminated a patch of plaster wall, throwing everything else into deeper shadow.
There was a smell of rats and dust. Without speaking, the old woman lighted a candle at
the gas-jet, then hobbled in front of me down a stone passage to the top of a flight of
stone steps.
“‘VOILA! ” she said; “go down into the cellar there and do what you like. I shall see
nothing, hear nothing, know nothing. You are free, you understand — perfectly free. ”
‘Ha, MESSIEURS, need I describe to YOU — FORCEMENT, you know it yourselves —
that shiver, half of terror and half of joy, that goes through one at these moments? I crept
down, feeling my way; I could hear my breathing and the scraping of my shoes on the
stones, otherwise all was silence. At the bottom of the stairs my hand met an electric
switch. I turned it, and a great electrolier of twelve red globes flooded the cellar with a
red light. And behold, I was not in a cellar, but in a bedroom, a great, rich, garish
bedroom, coloured blood red from top to bottom. Figure it to yourselves, MESSIEURS
ET DAMES! Red carpet on the floor, red paper on the walls, red plush on the chairs,
even the ceiling red; everywhere red, burning into the eyes. It was a heavy, stifling red, as
though the light were shining through bowls of blood. At the far end stood a huge, square
bed, with quilts red like the rest, and on it a girl was lying, dressed in a frock of red
velvet. At the sight of me she shrank away and tried to hide her knees under the short
dress.
‘I had halted by the door. “Come here, my chicken,” I called to her.
‘She gave a whimper of fright. With a bound I was beside the bed; she tried to elude me,
but I seized her by the throat — like this, do you see? — tight! She struggled, she began to
cry out for mercy, but I held her fast, forcing back her head and staring down into her
face. She was twenty years old, perhaps; her face was the broad, dull face of a stupid
child, but it was coated with paint and powder, and her blue, stupid eyes, shining in the
red light, wore that shocked, distorted look that one sees nowhere save in the eyes of
these women. She was some peasant girl, doubtless, whom her parents had sold into
slavery.
‘Without another word I pulled her off the bed and threw her on to the floor. And then I
fell upon her like a tiger! Ah, the joy, the incomparable rapture of that time! There,
MESSIEURS ET DAMES, is what I would expound to you; VOILA L ’AMOUR! There
is the true love, there is the only thing in the world worth striving for; there is the thing
beside which all your arts and ideals, all your philosophies and creeds, all your fine
words and high attitudes, are as pale and profitless as ashes. When one has experienced
love — the true love — what is there in the world that seems more than a mere ghost of
joy?
‘More and more savagely I renewed the attack. Again and again the girl tried to escape;
she cried out for mercy anew, but I laughed at her.
‘“Mercy! ” I said, “do you suppose I have come here to show mercy? Do you suppose I
have paid a thousand francs for that? ” I swear to you, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, that if it
were not for that accursed law that robs us of our liberty, I would have murdered her at
that moment.
‘Ah, how she screamed, with what bitter cries of agony. But there was no one to hear
them; down there under the streets of Paris we were as secure as at the heart of a
pyramid. Tears streamed down the girl’s face, washing away the powder in long, dirty
smears. Ah, that irrecoverable time! You, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, you who have not
cultivated the finer sensibilities of love, for you such pleasure is almost beyond
conception. And I too, now that my youth is gone — ah, youth! — shall never again see life
so beautiful as that. It is finished.
‘Ah yes, it is gone — gone for ever. Ah, the poverty, the shortness, the disappointment of
human joy! For in reality — CAR EN REALITE, what is the duration of the supreme
moment of love. It is nothing, an instant, a second perhaps. A second of ecstasy, and after
that — dust, ashes, nothingness.
‘And so, just for one instant, I captured the supreme happiness, the highest and most
refined emotion to which human beings can attain. And in the same moment it was
finished, and I was left — to what? All my savagery, my passion, were scattered like the
petals of a rose. I was left cold and languid, full of vain regrets; in my revulsion I even
felt a kind of pity for the weeping girl on the floor. Is it not nauseous, that we should be
the prey of such mean emotions? I did not look at the girl again; my sole thought was to
get away. I hastened up the steps of the vault and out into the street. It was dark and
bitterly cold, the streets were empty, the stones echoed under my heels with a hollow,
lonely ring. All my money was gone, I had not even the price of a taxi fare. I walked back
alone to my cold, solitary room.
BY: GEORGE ORWELL
CATEGORY: FICTION - NOVEL
Down and Out in Paris and London
by
George Orwell
O scathful harm, condition of poverte!
—CHAUCER
eBooks@Adelaide
2004
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The University of Adelaide Library
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Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
CHAPTER XXXIII
CHAPTER XXXIV
CHAPTER XXXV
CHAPTER XXXVI
CHAPTER XXXVII
CHAPTER XXXVIII
CHAPTER I
The rue du Coq d’Or, Paris, seven in the morning. A succession of furious, choking yells
from the street. Madame Monce, who kept the little hotel opposite mine, had come out on
to the pavement to address a lodger on the third floor. Her bare feet were stuck into
sabots and her grey hair was streaming down.
MADAME MONCE: ‘SALOPE! SALOPE! How many times have I told you not to
squash bugs on the wallpaper? Do you think you’ve bought the hotel, eh? Why can’t you
throw them out of the window like everyone else? PUTAIN! SALOPE! ’
THE WOMAN ON THE THIRD FLOOR: ‘VACHE! ’
Thereupon a whole variegated chorus of yells, as windows were flung open on every side
and half the street joined in the quarrel. They shut up abruptly ten minutes later, when a
squadron of cavalry rode past and people stopped shouting to look at them.
I sketch this scene, just to convey something of the spirit of the rue du Coq d’Or. Not that
quarrels were the only thing that happened there — but still, we seldom got through the
morning without at least one outburst of this description. Quarrels, and the desolate cries
of street hawkers, and the shouts of children chasing orange-peel over the cobbles, and at
night loud singing and the sour reek of the refuse-carts, made up the atmosphere of the
street.
It was a very narrow street — a ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching towards one
another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse. All
the houses were hotels and packed to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and
Italians. At the foot of the hotels were tiny BISTROs, where you could be drunk for the
equivalent of a shilling. On Saturday nights about a third of the male population of the
quarter was drunk. There was fighting over women, and the Arab navvies who lived in
the cheapest hotels used to conduct mysterious feuds, and fight them out with chairs and
occasionally revolvers. At night the policemen would only come through the street two
together. It was a fairly rackety place. And yet amid the noise and dirt lived the usual
respectable French shopkeepers, bakers and laundresses and the like, keeping themselves
to themselves and quietly piling up small fortunes. It was quite a representative Paris
slum.
My hotel was called the Hotel des Trois Moineaux. It was a dark, rickety warren of five
storeys, cut up by wooden partitions into forty rooms. The rooms were small arid
inveterately dirty, for there was no maid, and Madame F. , the PATRONNE, had no time
to do any sweeping. The walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they
had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed
innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like columns of
soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that one had to get up every few
hours and kill them in hecatombs. Sometimes when the bugs got too bad one used to burn
sulphur and drive them into the next room; whereupon the lodger next door would retort
by having his room sulphured, and drive the bugs back. It was a dirty place, but
homelike, for Madame F. and her husband were good sorts. The rent of the rooms varied
between thirty and fifty francs a week.
The lodgers were a floating population, largely foreigners, who used to turn up without
luggage, stay a week and then disappear again. They were of every trade — cobblers,
bricklayers, stonemasons, navvies, students, prostitutes, rag-pickers. Some of them were
fantastically poor. In one of the attics there was a Bulgarian student who made fancy
shoes for the American market. From six to twelve he sat on his bed, making a dozen
pairs of shoes and earning thirty-five francs; the rest of the day he attended lectures at the
Sorbonne. He was studying for the Church, and books of theology lay face-down on his
leather-strewn floor. In another room lived a Russian woman and her son, who called
himself an artist. The mother worked sixteen hours a day, darning socks at twenty-five
centimes a sock, while the son, decently dressed, loafed in the Montparnasse cafes. One
room was let to two different lodgers, one a day worker and the other a night worker. In
another room a widower shared the same bed with his two grown-up daughters, both
consumptive.
There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slums are a gathering-place for
eccentric people — people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and
given up trying to be nonnal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of
behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived
lives that were curious beyond words.
There were the Rougiers, for instance, an old, ragged, dwarfish couple who plied an
extraordinary trade. They used to sell postcards on the Boulevard St Michel. The curious
thing was that the postcards were sold in sealed packets as pornographic ones, but were
actually photographs of chateaux on the Loire; the buyers did not discover this till too
late, and of course never complained. The Rougiers earned about a hundred francs a
week, and by strict economy managed to be always half starved and half drunk. The filth
of their room was such that one could smell it on the floor below. According to Madame
F. , neither of the Rougiers had taken off their clothes for four years.
Or there was Henri, who worked in the sewers. He was a tall, melancholy man with curly
hair, rather romantic-looking in his long, sewer-man’s boots. Henri’s peculiarity was that
he did not speak, except for the purposes of work, literally for days together. Only a year
before he had been a chauffeur in good employ and saving money. One day he fell in
love, and when the girl refused him he lost his temper and kicked her. On being kicked
the girl fell desperately in love with Henri, and for a fortnight they lived together and
spent a thousand francs of Henri’s money. Then the girl was unfaithful; Henri planted a
kn ife in her upper ann and was sent to prison for six months. As soon as she had been
stabbed the girl fell more in love with Henri than ever, and the two made up their quarrel
and agreed that when Henri came out of jail he should buy a taxi and they would marry
and settle down. But a fortnight later the girl was unfaithful again, and when Henri came
out she was with child, Henri did not stab her again. He drew out all his savings and went
on a drinking-bout that ended in another month’s imprisonment; after that he went to
work in the sewers. Nothing would induce Henri to talk. If you asked him why he worked
in the sewers he never answered, but simply crossed his wrists to signify handcuffs, and
jerked his head southward, towards the prison. Bad luck seemed to have turned him half-
witted in a single day.
Or there was R. , an Englishman, who lived six months of the year in Putney with his
parents and six months in France. During his time in France he drank four litres of wine a
day, and six litres on Saturdays; he had once travelled as far as the Azores, because the
wine there is cheaper than anywhere in Europe. He was a gentle, domesticated creature,
never rowdy or quarrelsome, and never sober. He would lie in bed till midday, and from
then till midnight he was in his comer of the BISTRO, quietly and methodically soaking.
While he soaked he talked, in a refined, womanish voice, about antique furniture. Except
myself, R. was the only Englishman in the quarter.
There were plenty of other people who lived lives just as eccentric as these: Monsieur
Jules, the Roumanian, who had a glass eye and would not admit it, Furex the Limousin
stonemason, Roucolle the miser — he died before my time, though — old Laurent the rag-
merchant, who used to copy his signature from a slip of paper he carried in his pocket. It
would be fun to write some of their biographies, if one had time. I am trying to describe
the people in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but because they are all part of the
story. Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this
slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and
then the background of my own experiences. It is for that reason that I try to give some
idea of what life was like there.
CHAPTER II
Life in the quarter. Our BISTRO, for instance, at the foot of the Hotel des Trois
Moineaux. A tiny brick-floored room, half underground, with wine-sodden tables, and a
photograph of a funeral inscribed ‘CREDIT EST MORT’; and red-sashed workmen
carving sausage with big jack-knives; and Madame F. , a splendid Auvergnat peasant
woman with the face of a strong-minded cow, drinking Malaga all day ‘for her stomach’;
and games of dice for APERITIFS; and songs about ‘LES PRAISES ET LES
FRAMBOISES’, and about Madelon, who said, ‘COMMENT EPOUSER UN SOLDAT,
MOI QUI AIME TOUT LE REGIMENT? ’; and extraordinarily public love-making. Half
the hotel used to meet in the BISTRO in the evenings. I wish one could find a pub in
London a quarter as cheery.
One heard queer conversations in the BISTRO. As a sample I give you Charlie, one of
the local curiosities, talking.
Charlie was a youth of family and education who had run away from home and lived on
occasional remittances. Picture him very pink and young, with the fresh cheeks and soft
brown hair of a nice little boy, and lips excessively red and wet, like cherries. His feet are
tiny, his anns abnormally short, his hands dimpled like a baby’s. He has a way of dancing
and capering while he talks, as though he were too happy and too full of life to keep still
for an instant. It is three in the afternoon, and there is no one in the BISTRO except
Madame F. and one or two men who are out of work; but it is all the same to Charlie
whom he talks to, so long as he can talk about himself. He declaims like an orator on a
barricade, rolling the words on his tongue and gesticulating with his short anns. His
small, rather piggy eyes glitter with enthusiasm. He is, somehow, profoundly disgusting
to see.
He is talking of love, his favourite subject.
‘AH, L’ AMOUR, L’ AMOUR! AH, QUE LES FEMMES M’ONT TUE! Alas,
MESSIEURS ET DAMES, women have been my ruin, beyond all hope my ruin. At
twenty-two I am utterly worn out and finished. But what things I have learned, what
abysses of wisdom have I not plumbed! How great a thing it is to have acquired the true
wisdom, to have become in the highest sense of the word a civilized man, to have become
RAFFINE, VICIEUX,’ etc. etc.
‘MESSIEURS ET DAFFIES, I perceive that you are sad. AH, MAIS LA VIE EST
BELLE — you must not be sad. Be more gay, I beseech you!
‘Fill high ze bowl vid Samian vine,
Ve vill not sink of semes like zese!
‘AH, QUE LA VIE EST BELLE! LISTEN, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, out of the
fullness of my experience I will discourse to you of love. I will explain to you what is the
true meaning of love — what is the true sensibility, the higher, more refined pleasure
which is known to civilized men alone. I will tell you of the happiest day of my life. Alas,
but I am past the time when I could know such happiness as that. It is gone for ever — the
very possibility, even the desire for it, are gone.
‘Listen, then. It was two years ago; my brother was in Paris — he is a lawyer — and my
parents had told him to find me and take me out to dinner. We hate each other, my
brother and I, but we preferred not to disobey my parents. We dined, and at dinner he
grew very drunk upon three bottles of Bordeaux. I took him back to his hotel, and on the
way I bought a bottle of brandy, and when we had arrived I made my brother drink a
tumblerful of it — I told him it was something to make him sober. He drank it, and
immediately he fell down like somebody in a fit, dead drunk. I lifted him up and propped
his back against the bed; then I went through his pockets. I found eleven hundred francs,
and with that I hurried down the stairs, jumped into a taxi, and escaped. My brother did
not know my address — I was safe.
‘Where does a man go when he has money? To the BORDELS, naturally. But you do not
suppose that I was going to waste my time on some vulgar debauchery fit only for
navvies? Confound it, one is a civilized man! I was fastidious, exigeant, you understand,
with a thousand francs in my pocket. It was midnight before I found what I was looking
for. I had fallen in with a very smart youth of eighteen, dressed EN SMOKING and with
his hair cut A L’AMERICAINE, and we were talking in a quiet BISTRO away from the
boulevards. We understood one another well, that youth and I. We talked of this and that,
and discussed ways of diverting oneself. Presently we took a taxi together and were
driven away.
‘The taxi stopped in a narrow, solitary street with a single gas-lamp flaring at the end.
There were dark puddles among the stones. Down one side ran the high, blank wall of a
convent. My guide led me to a tall, ruinous house with shuttered windows, and knocked
several times at the door. Presently there was a sound of footsteps and a shooting of bolts,
and the door opened a little. A hand came round the edge of it; it was a large, crooked
hand, that held itself palm upwards under our noses, demanding money.
‘My guide put his foot between the door and the step. “How much do you want? ” he said.
“‘A thousand francs,” said a woman’s voice. “Pay up at once or you don’t come in. ”
‘I put a thousand francs into the hand and gave the remaining hundred to my guide: he
said good night and left me. I could hear the voice inside counting the notes, and then a
thin old crow of a woman in a black dress put her nose out and regarded me suspiciously
before letting me in. It was very dark inside: I could see nothing except a flaring gas-jet
that illuminated a patch of plaster wall, throwing everything else into deeper shadow.
There was a smell of rats and dust. Without speaking, the old woman lighted a candle at
the gas-jet, then hobbled in front of me down a stone passage to the top of a flight of
stone steps.
“‘VOILA! ” she said; “go down into the cellar there and do what you like. I shall see
nothing, hear nothing, know nothing. You are free, you understand — perfectly free. ”
‘Ha, MESSIEURS, need I describe to YOU — FORCEMENT, you know it yourselves —
that shiver, half of terror and half of joy, that goes through one at these moments? I crept
down, feeling my way; I could hear my breathing and the scraping of my shoes on the
stones, otherwise all was silence. At the bottom of the stairs my hand met an electric
switch. I turned it, and a great electrolier of twelve red globes flooded the cellar with a
red light. And behold, I was not in a cellar, but in a bedroom, a great, rich, garish
bedroom, coloured blood red from top to bottom. Figure it to yourselves, MESSIEURS
ET DAMES! Red carpet on the floor, red paper on the walls, red plush on the chairs,
even the ceiling red; everywhere red, burning into the eyes. It was a heavy, stifling red, as
though the light were shining through bowls of blood. At the far end stood a huge, square
bed, with quilts red like the rest, and on it a girl was lying, dressed in a frock of red
velvet. At the sight of me she shrank away and tried to hide her knees under the short
dress.
‘I had halted by the door. “Come here, my chicken,” I called to her.
‘She gave a whimper of fright. With a bound I was beside the bed; she tried to elude me,
but I seized her by the throat — like this, do you see? — tight! She struggled, she began to
cry out for mercy, but I held her fast, forcing back her head and staring down into her
face. She was twenty years old, perhaps; her face was the broad, dull face of a stupid
child, but it was coated with paint and powder, and her blue, stupid eyes, shining in the
red light, wore that shocked, distorted look that one sees nowhere save in the eyes of
these women. She was some peasant girl, doubtless, whom her parents had sold into
slavery.
‘Without another word I pulled her off the bed and threw her on to the floor. And then I
fell upon her like a tiger! Ah, the joy, the incomparable rapture of that time! There,
MESSIEURS ET DAMES, is what I would expound to you; VOILA L ’AMOUR!
’
THE WOMAN ON THE THIRD FLOOR: ‘VACHE! ’
Thereupon a whole variegated chorus of yells, as windows were flung open on every side
and half the street joined in the quarrel. They shut up abruptly ten minutes later, when a
squadron of cavalry rode past and people stopped shouting to look at them.
I sketch this scene, just to convey something of the spirit of the rue du Coq d’Or. Not that
quarrels were the only thing that happened there — but still, we seldom got through the
morning without at least one outburst of this description. Quarrels, and the desolate cries
of street hawkers, and the shouts of children chasing orange-peel over the cobbles, and at
night loud singing and the sour reek of the refuse-carts, made up the atmosphere of the
street.
It was a very narrow street — a ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching towards one
another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse. All
the houses were hotels and packed to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and
Italians. At the foot of the hotels were tiny BISTROs, where you could be drunk for the
equivalent of a shilling. On Saturday nights about a third of the male population of the
quarter was drunk. There was fighting over women, and the Arab navvies who lived in
the cheapest hotels used to conduct mysterious feuds, and fight them out with chairs and
occasionally revolvers. At night the policemen would only come through the street two
together. It was a fairly rackety place. And yet amid the noise and dirt lived the usual
respectable French shopkeepers, bakers and laundresses and the like, keeping themselves
to themselves and quietly piling up small fortunes. It was quite a representative Paris
slum.
My hotel was called the Hotel des Trois Moineaux. It was a dark, rickety warren of five
storeys, cut up by wooden partitions into forty rooms. The rooms were small arid
inveterately dirty, for there was no maid, and Madame F. , the PATRONNE, had no time
to do any sweeping. The walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they
had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed
innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like columns of
soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that one had to get up every few
hours and kill them in hecatombs. Sometimes when the bugs got too bad one used to burn
sulphur and drive them into the next room; whereupon the lodger next door would retort
by having his room sulphured, and drive the bugs back. It was a dirty place, but
homelike, for Madame F. and her husband were good sorts. The rent of the rooms varied
between thirty and fifty francs a week.
The lodgers were a floating population, largely foreigners, who used to turn up without
luggage, stay a week and then disappear again. They were of every trade — cobblers,
bricklayers, stonemasons, navvies, students, prostitutes, rag-pickers. Some of them were
fantastically poor. In one of the attics there was a Bulgarian student who made fancy
shoes for the American market. From six to twelve he sat on his bed, making a dozen
pairs of shoes and earning thirty-five francs; the rest of the day he attended lectures at the
Sorbonne. He was studying for the Church, and books of theology lay face-down on his
leather-strewn floor. In another room lived a Russian woman and her son, who called
himself an artist. The mother worked sixteen hours a day, darning socks at twenty-five
centimes a sock, while the son, decently dressed, loafed in the Montparnasse cafes. One
room was let to two different lodgers, one a day worker and the other a night worker. In
another room a widower shared the same bed with his two grown-up daughters, both
consumptive.
There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slums are a gathering-place for
eccentric people — people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and
given up trying to be nonnal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of
behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived
lives that were curious beyond words.
There were the Rougiers, for instance, an old, ragged, dwarfish couple who plied an
extraordinary trade. They used to sell postcards on the Boulevard St Michel. The curious
thing was that the postcards were sold in sealed packets as pornographic ones, but were
actually photographs of chateaux on the Loire; the buyers did not discover this till too
late, and of course never complained. The Rougiers earned about a hundred francs a
week, and by strict economy managed to be always half starved and half drunk. The filth
of their room was such that one could smell it on the floor below. According to Madame
F. , neither of the Rougiers had taken off their clothes for four years.
Or there was Henri, who worked in the sewers. He was a tall, melancholy man with curly
hair, rather romantic-looking in his long, sewer-man’s boots. Henri’s peculiarity was that
he did not speak, except for the purposes of work, literally for days together. Only a year
before he had been a chauffeur in good employ and saving money. One day he fell in
love, and when the girl refused him he lost his temper and kicked her. On being kicked
the girl fell desperately in love with Henri, and for a fortnight they lived together and
spent a thousand francs of Henri’s money. Then the girl was unfaithful; Henri planted a
kn ife in her upper ann and was sent to prison for six months. As soon as she had been
stabbed the girl fell more in love with Henri than ever, and the two made up their quarrel
and agreed that when Henri came out of jail he should buy a taxi and they would marry
and settle down. But a fortnight later the girl was unfaithful again, and when Henri came
out she was with child, Henri did not stab her again. He drew out all his savings and went
on a drinking-bout that ended in another month’s imprisonment; after that he went to
work in the sewers. Nothing would induce Henri to talk. If you asked him why he worked
in the sewers he never answered, but simply crossed his wrists to signify handcuffs, and
jerked his head southward, towards the prison. Bad luck seemed to have turned him half-
witted in a single day.
Or there was R. , an Englishman, who lived six months of the year in Putney with his
parents and six months in France. During his time in France he drank four litres of wine a
day, and six litres on Saturdays; he had once travelled as far as the Azores, because the
wine there is cheaper than anywhere in Europe. He was a gentle, domesticated creature,
never rowdy or quarrelsome, and never sober. He would lie in bed till midday, and from
then till midnight he was in his comer of the BISTRO, quietly and methodically soaking.
While he soaked he talked, in a refined, womanish voice, about antique furniture. Except
myself, R. was the only Englishman in the quarter.
There were plenty of other people who lived lives just as eccentric as these: Monsieur
Jules, the Roumanian, who had a glass eye and would not admit it, Furex the Limousin
stonemason, Roucolle the miser — he died before my time, though — old Laurent the rag-
merchant, who used to copy his signature from a slip of paper he carried in his pocket. It
would be fun to write some of their biographies, if one had time. I am trying to describe
the people in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but because they are all part of the
story. Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this
slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and
then the background of my own experiences. It is for that reason that I try to give some
idea of what life was like there.
CHAPTER II
Life in the quarter. Our BISTRO, for instance, at the foot of the Hotel des Trois
Moineaux. A tiny brick-floored room, half underground, with wine-sodden tables, and a
photograph of a funeral inscribed ‘CREDIT EST MORT’; and red-sashed workmen
carving sausage with big jack-knives; and Madame F. , a splendid Auvergnat peasant
woman with the face of a strong-minded cow, drinking Malaga all day ‘for her stomach’;
and games of dice for APERITIFS; and songs about ‘LES PRAISES ET LES
FRAMBOISES’, and about Madelon, who said, ‘COMMENT EPOUSER UN SOLDAT,
MOI QUI AIME TOUT LE REGIMENT? ’; and extraordinarily public love-making. Half
the hotel used to meet in the BISTRO in the evenings. I wish one could find a pub in
London a quarter as cheery.
One heard queer conversations in the BISTRO. As a sample I give you Charlie, one of
the local curiosities, talking.
Charlie was a youth of family and education who had run away from home and lived on
occasional remittances. Picture him very pink and young, with the fresh cheeks and soft
brown hair of a nice little boy, and lips excessively red and wet, like cherries. His feet are
tiny, his anns abnormally short, his hands dimpled like a baby’s. He has a way of dancing
and capering while he talks, as though he were too happy and too full of life to keep still
for an instant. It is three in the afternoon, and there is no one in the BISTRO except
Madame F. and one or two men who are out of work; but it is all the same to Charlie
whom he talks to, so long as he can talk about himself. He declaims like an orator on a
barricade, rolling the words on his tongue and gesticulating with his short anns. His
small, rather piggy eyes glitter with enthusiasm. He is, somehow, profoundly disgusting
to see.
He is talking of love, his favourite subject.
‘AH, L’ AMOUR, L’ AMOUR! AH, QUE LES FEMMES M’ONT TUE! Alas,
MESSIEURS ET DAMES, women have been my ruin, beyond all hope my ruin. At
twenty-two I am utterly worn out and finished. But what things I have learned, what
abysses of wisdom have I not plumbed! How great a thing it is to have acquired the true
wisdom, to have become in the highest sense of the word a civilized man, to have become
RAFFINE, VICIEUX,’ etc. etc.
‘MESSIEURS ET DAFFIES, I perceive that you are sad. AH, MAIS LA VIE EST
BELLE — you must not be sad. Be more gay, I beseech you!
‘Fill high ze bowl vid Samian vine,
Ve vill not sink of semes like zese!
‘AH, QUE LA VIE EST BELLE! LISTEN, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, out of the
fullness of my experience I will discourse to you of love. I will explain to you what is the
true meaning of love — what is the true sensibility, the higher, more refined pleasure
which is known to civilized men alone. I will tell you of the happiest day of my life. Alas,
but I am past the time when I could know such happiness as that. It is gone for ever — the
very possibility, even the desire for it, are gone.
‘Listen, then. It was two years ago; my brother was in Paris — he is a lawyer — and my
parents had told him to find me and take me out to dinner. We hate each other, my
brother and I, but we preferred not to disobey my parents. We dined, and at dinner he
grew very drunk upon three bottles of Bordeaux. I took him back to his hotel, and on the
way I bought a bottle of brandy, and when we had arrived I made my brother drink a
tumblerful of it — I told him it was something to make him sober. He drank it, and
immediately he fell down like somebody in a fit, dead drunk. I lifted him up and propped
his back against the bed; then I went through his pockets. I found eleven hundred francs,
and with that I hurried down the stairs, jumped into a taxi, and escaped. My brother did
not know my address — I was safe.
‘Where does a man go when he has money? To the BORDELS, naturally. But you do not
suppose that I was going to waste my time on some vulgar debauchery fit only for
navvies? Confound it, one is a civilized man! I was fastidious, exigeant, you understand,
with a thousand francs in my pocket. It was midnight before I found what I was looking
for. I had fallen in with a very smart youth of eighteen, dressed EN SMOKING and with
his hair cut A L’AMERICAINE, and we were talking in a quiet BISTRO away from the
boulevards. We understood one another well, that youth and I. We talked of this and that,
and discussed ways of diverting oneself. Presently we took a taxi together and were
driven away.
‘The taxi stopped in a narrow, solitary street with a single gas-lamp flaring at the end.
There were dark puddles among the stones. Down one side ran the high, blank wall of a
convent. My guide led me to a tall, ruinous house with shuttered windows, and knocked
several times at the door. Presently there was a sound of footsteps and a shooting of bolts,
and the door opened a little. A hand came round the edge of it; it was a large, crooked
hand, that held itself palm upwards under our noses, demanding money.
‘My guide put his foot between the door and the step. “How much do you want? ” he said.
“‘A thousand francs,” said a woman’s voice. “Pay up at once or you don’t come in. ”
‘I put a thousand francs into the hand and gave the remaining hundred to my guide: he
said good night and left me. I could hear the voice inside counting the notes, and then a
thin old crow of a woman in a black dress put her nose out and regarded me suspiciously
before letting me in. It was very dark inside: I could see nothing except a flaring gas-jet
that illuminated a patch of plaster wall, throwing everything else into deeper shadow.
There was a smell of rats and dust. Without speaking, the old woman lighted a candle at
the gas-jet, then hobbled in front of me down a stone passage to the top of a flight of
stone steps.
“‘VOILA! ” she said; “go down into the cellar there and do what you like. I shall see
nothing, hear nothing, know nothing. You are free, you understand — perfectly free. ”
‘Ha, MESSIEURS, need I describe to YOU — FORCEMENT, you know it yourselves —
that shiver, half of terror and half of joy, that goes through one at these moments? I crept
down, feeling my way; I could hear my breathing and the scraping of my shoes on the
stones, otherwise all was silence. At the bottom of the stairs my hand met an electric
switch. I turned it, and a great electrolier of twelve red globes flooded the cellar with a
red light. And behold, I was not in a cellar, but in a bedroom, a great, rich, garish
bedroom, coloured blood red from top to bottom. Figure it to yourselves, MESSIEURS
ET DAMES! Red carpet on the floor, red paper on the walls, red plush on the chairs,
even the ceiling red; everywhere red, burning into the eyes. It was a heavy, stifling red, as
though the light were shining through bowls of blood. At the far end stood a huge, square
bed, with quilts red like the rest, and on it a girl was lying, dressed in a frock of red
velvet. At the sight of me she shrank away and tried to hide her knees under the short
dress.
‘I had halted by the door. “Come here, my chicken,” I called to her.
‘She gave a whimper of fright. With a bound I was beside the bed; she tried to elude me,
but I seized her by the throat — like this, do you see? — tight! She struggled, she began to
cry out for mercy, but I held her fast, forcing back her head and staring down into her
face. She was twenty years old, perhaps; her face was the broad, dull face of a stupid
child, but it was coated with paint and powder, and her blue, stupid eyes, shining in the
red light, wore that shocked, distorted look that one sees nowhere save in the eyes of
these women. She was some peasant girl, doubtless, whom her parents had sold into
slavery.
‘Without another word I pulled her off the bed and threw her on to the floor. And then I
fell upon her like a tiger! Ah, the joy, the incomparable rapture of that time! There,
MESSIEURS ET DAMES, is what I would expound to you; VOILA L ’AMOUR! There
is the true love, there is the only thing in the world worth striving for; there is the thing
beside which all your arts and ideals, all your philosophies and creeds, all your fine
words and high attitudes, are as pale and profitless as ashes. When one has experienced
love — the true love — what is there in the world that seems more than a mere ghost of
joy?
‘More and more savagely I renewed the attack. Again and again the girl tried to escape;
she cried out for mercy anew, but I laughed at her.
‘“Mercy! ” I said, “do you suppose I have come here to show mercy? Do you suppose I
have paid a thousand francs for that? ” I swear to you, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, that if it
were not for that accursed law that robs us of our liberty, I would have murdered her at
that moment.
‘Ah, how she screamed, with what bitter cries of agony. But there was no one to hear
them; down there under the streets of Paris we were as secure as at the heart of a
pyramid. Tears streamed down the girl’s face, washing away the powder in long, dirty
smears. Ah, that irrecoverable time! You, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, you who have not
cultivated the finer sensibilities of love, for you such pleasure is almost beyond
conception. And I too, now that my youth is gone — ah, youth! — shall never again see life
so beautiful as that. It is finished.
‘Ah yes, it is gone — gone for ever. Ah, the poverty, the shortness, the disappointment of
human joy! For in reality — CAR EN REALITE, what is the duration of the supreme
moment of love. It is nothing, an instant, a second perhaps. A second of ecstasy, and after
that — dust, ashes, nothingness.
‘And so, just for one instant, I captured the supreme happiness, the highest and most
refined emotion to which human beings can attain. And in the same moment it was
finished, and I was left — to what? All my savagery, my passion, were scattered like the
petals of a rose. I was left cold and languid, full of vain regrets; in my revulsion I even
felt a kind of pity for the weeping girl on the floor. Is it not nauseous, that we should be
the prey of such mean emotions? I did not look at the girl again; my sole thought was to
get away. I hastened up the steps of the vault and out into the street. It was dark and
bitterly cold, the streets were empty, the stones echoed under my heels with a hollow,
lonely ring. All my money was gone, I had not even the price of a taxi fare. I walked back
alone to my cold, solitary room.
