I walked back
alone to my cold, solitary room.
alone to my cold, solitary room.
Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
’
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.
‘But there, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, that is what I promised to expound to you. That is
Love. That was the happiest day of my life. ’
He was a curious specimen, Charlie. I describe him, just to show what diverse characters
could be found flourishing in the Coq d’Or quarter.
CHAPTER III
I lived in the Coq d’Or quarter for about a year and a half. One day, in summer, I found
that I had just four hundred and fifty francs left, and beyond this nothing but thirty-six
francs a week, which I earned by giving English lessons. Hitherto I had not thought about
the future, but I now realized that I must do something at once. I decided to start looking
for a job, and — very luckily, as it turned out — I took the precaution of paying two
hundred francs for a month’s rent in advance. With the other two hundred and fifty
francs, besides the English lessons, I could live a month, and in a month I should
probably find work. I aimed at becoming a guide to one of the tourist companies, or
perhaps an interpreter. However, a piece of bad luck prevented this.
One day there turned up at the hotel a young Italian who called himself a compositor. He
was rather an ambiguous person, for he wore side whiskers, which are the mark either of
an apache or an intellectual, and nobody was quite certain in which class to put him.
Madame F. did not like the look of him, and made him pay a week’s rent in advance. The
Italian paid the rent and stayed six nights at the hotel. During this time he managed to
prepare some duplicate keys, and on the last night he robbed a dozen rooms, including
mine. Luckily, he did not find the money that was in my pockets, so I was not left
penniless. I was left with just forty-seven francs — that is, seven and tenpence.
This put an end to my plans of looking for work. I had now got to live at the rate of about
six francs a day, and from the start it was too difficult to leave much thought for anything
else. It was now that my experiences of poverty began — for six francs a day, if not actual
poverty, is on the fringe of it. Six francs is a shilling, and you can live on a shilling a day
in Paris if you know how. But it is a complicated business.
It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about
poverty — it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to
you sooner or later; and it, is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would
be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is
merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar LOWNESS of poverty that you discover
first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.
You discover, for instance, the secrecy attaching to poverty. At a sudden stroke you have
been reduced to an income of six francs a day. But of course you dare not admit it — you
have got to pretend that you are living quite as usual. From the start it tangles you in a net
of lies, and even with the lies you can hardly manage it. You stop sending clothes to the
laundry, and the laundress catches you in the street and asks you why; you mumble
something, and she, thinking you are sending the clothes elsewhere, is your enemy for
life. The tobacconist keeps asking why you have cut down your smoking. There are
letters you want to answer, and cannot, because stamps are too expensive. And then there
are your meals — meals are the worst difficulty of all. Every day at meal-times you go
out, ostensibly to a restaurant, and loaf an hour in the Luxembourg Gardens, watching the
pigeons. Afterwards you smuggle your food home in your pockets. Your food is bread
and margarine, or bread and wine, and even the nature of the food is governed by lies.
You have to buy rye bread instead of household bread, because the rye loaves, though
dearer, are round and can be smuggled in your pockets. This wastes you a franc a day.
Sometimes, to keep up appearances, you have to spend sixty centimes on a drink, and go
correspondingly short of food. Your linen gets filthy, and you run out of soap and razor-
blades. Your hair wants cutting, and you try to cut it yourself, with such fearful results
that you have to go to the barber after all, and spend the equivalent of a day’s food. All
day you arc telling lies, and expensive lies.
You discover the extreme precariousness of your six francs a day. Mean disasters happen
and rob you of food. You have spent your last eighty centimes on half a litre of milk, and
are boiling it over the spirit lamp. While it boils a bug runs down your forearm; you give
the bug a flick with your nail, and it falls, plop! straight into the milk. There is nothing
for it but to throw the milk away and go foodless.
You go to the baker’s to buy a pound of bread, and you wait while the girl cuts a pound
for another customer. She is clumsy, and cuts more than a pound. ‘PARDON,
MONSIEUR,’ she says, ‘I suppose you don’t mind paying two sous extra? ’ Bread is a
franc a pound, and you have exactly a franc. When you think that you too might be asked
to pay two sous extra, and would have to confess that you could not, you bolt in panic. It
is hours before you dare venture into a baker’s shop again.
You go to the greengrocer’s to spend a franc on a kilogram of potatoes. But one of the
pieces that make up the franc is a Belgian piece, and the shopman refuses it. You slink
out of the shop, and can never go there again.
You have strayed into a respectable quarter, and you see a prosperous friend coming. To
avoid him you dodge into the nearest cafe. Once in the cafe you must buy something, so
you spend your last fifty centimes on a glass of black coffee with a dead fly in it. One
could multiply these disasters by the hundred. They are part of the process of being hard
up.
You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margarine in your belly, you go
out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge,
wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter,
strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyere cheeses like grindstones. A
snivelling self-pity comes over you at the sight of so much food. You plan to grab a loaf
and run, swallowing it before they catch you; and you refrain, from pure funk.
You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times when you have
nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing. For half a day at a
time you lie on your bed, feeling like the JEUNE SQUELETTE in Baudelaire’s poem.
Only food could rouse you. You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread
and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.
This — one could describe it further, but it is all in the same style — is life on six francs a
day. Thousands of people in Paris live it — struggling artists and students, prostitutes
when their luck is out, out-of-work people of all kinds. It is the suburbs, as it were, of
poverty.
I continued in this style for about three weeks. The forty-seven francs were soon gone,
and I had to do what I could on thirty-six francs a week from the English lessons. Being
inexperienced, I handled the money badly, and sometimes I was a day without food.
When this happened I used to sell a few of my clothes, smuggling them out of the hotel in
small packets and taking them to a secondhand shop in the rue de la Montagne St
Genevieve. The shopman was a red-haired Jew, an extraordinary disagreeable man, who
used to fall into furious rages at the sight of a client. From his manner one would have
supposed that we had done him some injury by coming to him. ‘MERDE! ’ he used to
shout, ‘YOU here again? What do you think this is? A soup kitchen? ’ And he paid
incredibly low prices. For a hat which I had bought for twenty-five shillings and scarcely
worn he gave five francs; for a good pair of shoes, five francs; for shirts, a franc each. He
always preferred to exchange rather than buy, and he had a trick of thrusting some useless
article into one’s hand and then pretending that one had accepted it. Once 1 saw him take
a good overcoat from an old woman, put two white billiard-balls into her hand, and then
push her rapidly out of the shop before she could protest. It would have been a pleasure to
flatten the Jew’s nose, if only one could have afforded it.
These three weeks were squalid and uncomfortable, and evidently there was worse
coming, for my rent would be due before long. Nevertheless, things were not a quarter as
bad as I had expected. For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery
which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and
the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty:
the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less
money you have, the less you worry. When you have a hundred francs in the world you
are liable to the most craven panics. When you have only three francs you are quite
indifferent; for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than
that. You are bored, but you are not afraid. You think vaguely, ‘I shall be starving in a
day or two — shocking, isn’t it? ’ And then the mind wanders to other topics. A bread and
margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne.
And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who
has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at
knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to
the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it.
It takes off a lot of anxiety,
CHAPTER IV
One day my English lessons ceased abruptly. The weather was getting hot and one of my
pupils, feeling too lazy to go on with his lessons, dismissed me. The other disappeared
from his lodgings without notice, owing me twelve francs. I was left with only thirty
centimes and no tobacco. For a day and a half I had nothing to cat or smoke, and then, too
hungry to put it off any longer, I packed my remaining clothes into my suitcase and took
them to the pawnshop. This put an end to all pretence of being in funds, for I could not
take my clothes out of the hotel without asking Madame F. ‘s leave. I remember, however,
how surprised she was at my asking her instead of removing the clothes on the sly,
shooting the moon being a common trick in our quarter.
It was the first time that I had been in a French pawnshop. One went through grandiose
stone portals (marked, of course, ‘FIBERTE, EGATITE, FRATERNITE’ they write that
even over the police stations in France) into a large, bare room like a school classroom,
with a counter and rows of benches. Forty or fifty people were waiting. One handed one’s
pledge over the counter and sat down. Presently, when the clerk had assessed its value he
would call out, ‘NUMERO such and such, will you take fifty francs? ’ Sometimes it was
only fifteen francs, or ten, or five — whatever it was, the whole room knew it. As I Came
in the clerk called with an air of offence, ‘NUMERO 83 — here! ’ and gave a little whistle
and a beckon, as though calling a dog. NUMERO 83 stepped to the counter; he was an
old bearded man, with an overcoat buttoned up at the neck and frayed trouser-ends.
Without a word the clerk shot the bundle across the counter — evidently it was worth
nothing. It fell to the ground and came open, displaying four pairs of men’s woollen
pants. No one could help laughing. Poor NUMERO 83 gathered up his pants and
shambled out, muttering to himself.
The clothes I was pawning, together with the suitcase, had cost over twenty pounds, and
were in good condition. I thought they must be worth ten pounds, and a quarter of this
(one expects quarter value at a pawnshop) was two hundred and fifty or three hundred
francs. I waited without anxiety, expecting two hundred francs at the worst.
At last the clerk called my number: ‘NUMERO 97! ’
‘Yes,’ I said, standing up.
‘Seventy francs? ’
Seventy francs for ten pounds’ worth of clothes! But it was no use arguing; I had seen
someone else attempt to argue, and the clerk had instantly refused the pledge. I took the
money and the pawnticket and walked out. I had now no clothes except what I stood up
in — the coat badly out at the elbow — an overcoat, moderately pawnable, and one spare
shirt. Afterwards, when it was too late, I learned that it was wiser to go to a pawnshop in
the afternoon. The clerks are French, and, like most French people, are in a bad temper
till they have eaten their lunch.
When I got home, Madame F. was sweeping the BISTRO floor. She came up the steps to
meet me. I could see in her eye that she was uneasy about my rent.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘what did you get for your clothes? Not much, eh? ’
‘Two hundred francs,’ I said promptly.
‘TIENS! ’ she said, surprised; ‘well, THAT’S not bad. How expensive those English
clothes must be! ’
The lie saved a lot of trouble, and, strangely enough, it came true. A few days later I did
receive exactly two hundred francs due to me for a newspaper article, and, though it hurt
to do it, I at once paid every penny of it in rent. So, though I came near to starving in the
following weeks, I was hardly ever without a roof.
It was now absolutely necessary to find work, and I remembered a friend of mine, a
Russian waiter named Boris, who might be able to help me. I had first met him in the
public ward of a hospital, where he was being treated for arthritis in the left leg. He had
told me to come to him if I were ever in difficulties.
I must say something about Boris, for he was a curious character and my close friend for
a long time. He was a big, soldierly man of about thirty-five, and had been good looking,
but since his illness he had grown immensely fat from lying in bed. Like most Russian
refugees, he had had an adventurous life. His parents, killed in the Revolution, had been
rich people, and he had served through the war in the Second Siberian Rifles, which,
according to him, was the best regiment in the Russian Army. After the war he had first
worked in a brush factory, then as a porter at Les Halles, then had become a dishwasher,
and had finally worked his way up to be a waiter. When he fell ill he was at the Hotel
Scribe, and taking a hundred francs a day in tips. His ambition was to become a MAITRE
D ’HOTEL, save fifty thousand francs, and set up a small, select restaurant on the Right
Bank.
Boris always talked of the war as the happiest time of his life. War and soldiering were
his passion; he had read innumerable books of strategy and military history, and could
tell you all about the theories of Napoleon, Kutuzof, Clausewitz, Moltke and Foch.
Anything to do with soldiers pleased him. His favourite cafe was the Gloserie des Lilas in
Montparnasse, simply because the statue of Marshal Ney stands outside it. Later on,
Boris and I sometimes went to the rue du Commerce together. If we went by Metro, Boris
always got out at Cambronne station instead of Commerce, though Commerce was
nearer; he liked the association with General Cambronne, who was called on to surrender
at Waterloo, and answered simply, ‘MERDE! ’
The only things left to Boris by the Revolution were his medals and some photographs of
his old regiment; he had kept these when everything else went to the pawnshop. Almost
every day he would spread the photographs out on the bed and talk about them:
‘VOILA, MON AML There you see me at the head of my company. Fine big men, eh?
Not like these little rats of Frenchmen. A captain at twenty — not bad, eh? Yes, a captain
in the Second Siberian Rifles; and my father was a colonel.
‘AH, MAIS, MON AMI, the ups and downs of life! A captain in the Russian Army, and
then, piffl the Revolution — every penny gone. In 1916 I stayed a week at the Hotel
Edouard Sept; in 1920 I was trying for a job as night watchman there. I have been night
watchman, cellannan, floor scrubber, dishwasher, porter, lavatory attendant. I have tipped
waiters, and I have been tipped by waiters.
‘Ah, but I have known what it is to live like a gentleman, MON AMI. I do not say it to
boast, but the other day I was trying to compute how many mistresses I have had in my
life, and I made it out to be over two hundred. Yes, at least two hundred. . . Ah, well, CA
REVIENDRA. Victory is to him who fights the longest. Courage! ’ etc. etc.
Boris had a queer, changeable nature. He always wished himself back in the army, but he
had also been a waiter long enough to acquire the waiter’s outlook. Though he had never
saved more than a few thousand francs, he took it for granted that in the end he would be
able to set up his own restaurant and grow rich. All waiters, I afterwards found, talk and
think of this; it is what reconciles them to being waiters. Boris used to talk interestingly
about Hotel life:
‘Waiting is a gamble,’ he used to say; ‘you may die poor, you may make your fortune in
a year. You are not paid wages, you depend on tips — ten per cent of the bill, and a
commission from the wine companies on champagne corks. Sometimes the tips are
enonnous. The bannan at Maxim’s, for instance, makes five hundred francs a day.
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.
‘But there, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, that is what I promised to expound to you. That is
Love. That was the happiest day of my life. ’
He was a curious specimen, Charlie. I describe him, just to show what diverse characters
could be found flourishing in the Coq d’Or quarter.
CHAPTER III
I lived in the Coq d’Or quarter for about a year and a half. One day, in summer, I found
that I had just four hundred and fifty francs left, and beyond this nothing but thirty-six
francs a week, which I earned by giving English lessons. Hitherto I had not thought about
the future, but I now realized that I must do something at once. I decided to start looking
for a job, and — very luckily, as it turned out — I took the precaution of paying two
hundred francs for a month’s rent in advance. With the other two hundred and fifty
francs, besides the English lessons, I could live a month, and in a month I should
probably find work. I aimed at becoming a guide to one of the tourist companies, or
perhaps an interpreter. However, a piece of bad luck prevented this.
One day there turned up at the hotel a young Italian who called himself a compositor. He
was rather an ambiguous person, for he wore side whiskers, which are the mark either of
an apache or an intellectual, and nobody was quite certain in which class to put him.
Madame F. did not like the look of him, and made him pay a week’s rent in advance. The
Italian paid the rent and stayed six nights at the hotel. During this time he managed to
prepare some duplicate keys, and on the last night he robbed a dozen rooms, including
mine. Luckily, he did not find the money that was in my pockets, so I was not left
penniless. I was left with just forty-seven francs — that is, seven and tenpence.
This put an end to my plans of looking for work. I had now got to live at the rate of about
six francs a day, and from the start it was too difficult to leave much thought for anything
else. It was now that my experiences of poverty began — for six francs a day, if not actual
poverty, is on the fringe of it. Six francs is a shilling, and you can live on a shilling a day
in Paris if you know how. But it is a complicated business.
It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about
poverty — it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to
you sooner or later; and it, is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would
be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is
merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar LOWNESS of poverty that you discover
first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.
You discover, for instance, the secrecy attaching to poverty. At a sudden stroke you have
been reduced to an income of six francs a day. But of course you dare not admit it — you
have got to pretend that you are living quite as usual. From the start it tangles you in a net
of lies, and even with the lies you can hardly manage it. You stop sending clothes to the
laundry, and the laundress catches you in the street and asks you why; you mumble
something, and she, thinking you are sending the clothes elsewhere, is your enemy for
life. The tobacconist keeps asking why you have cut down your smoking. There are
letters you want to answer, and cannot, because stamps are too expensive. And then there
are your meals — meals are the worst difficulty of all. Every day at meal-times you go
out, ostensibly to a restaurant, and loaf an hour in the Luxembourg Gardens, watching the
pigeons. Afterwards you smuggle your food home in your pockets. Your food is bread
and margarine, or bread and wine, and even the nature of the food is governed by lies.
You have to buy rye bread instead of household bread, because the rye loaves, though
dearer, are round and can be smuggled in your pockets. This wastes you a franc a day.
Sometimes, to keep up appearances, you have to spend sixty centimes on a drink, and go
correspondingly short of food. Your linen gets filthy, and you run out of soap and razor-
blades. Your hair wants cutting, and you try to cut it yourself, with such fearful results
that you have to go to the barber after all, and spend the equivalent of a day’s food. All
day you arc telling lies, and expensive lies.
You discover the extreme precariousness of your six francs a day. Mean disasters happen
and rob you of food. You have spent your last eighty centimes on half a litre of milk, and
are boiling it over the spirit lamp. While it boils a bug runs down your forearm; you give
the bug a flick with your nail, and it falls, plop! straight into the milk. There is nothing
for it but to throw the milk away and go foodless.
You go to the baker’s to buy a pound of bread, and you wait while the girl cuts a pound
for another customer. She is clumsy, and cuts more than a pound. ‘PARDON,
MONSIEUR,’ she says, ‘I suppose you don’t mind paying two sous extra? ’ Bread is a
franc a pound, and you have exactly a franc. When you think that you too might be asked
to pay two sous extra, and would have to confess that you could not, you bolt in panic. It
is hours before you dare venture into a baker’s shop again.
You go to the greengrocer’s to spend a franc on a kilogram of potatoes. But one of the
pieces that make up the franc is a Belgian piece, and the shopman refuses it. You slink
out of the shop, and can never go there again.
You have strayed into a respectable quarter, and you see a prosperous friend coming. To
avoid him you dodge into the nearest cafe. Once in the cafe you must buy something, so
you spend your last fifty centimes on a glass of black coffee with a dead fly in it. One
could multiply these disasters by the hundred. They are part of the process of being hard
up.
You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margarine in your belly, you go
out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge,
wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter,
strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyere cheeses like grindstones. A
snivelling self-pity comes over you at the sight of so much food. You plan to grab a loaf
and run, swallowing it before they catch you; and you refrain, from pure funk.
You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times when you have
nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing. For half a day at a
time you lie on your bed, feeling like the JEUNE SQUELETTE in Baudelaire’s poem.
Only food could rouse you. You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread
and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.
This — one could describe it further, but it is all in the same style — is life on six francs a
day. Thousands of people in Paris live it — struggling artists and students, prostitutes
when their luck is out, out-of-work people of all kinds. It is the suburbs, as it were, of
poverty.
I continued in this style for about three weeks. The forty-seven francs were soon gone,
and I had to do what I could on thirty-six francs a week from the English lessons. Being
inexperienced, I handled the money badly, and sometimes I was a day without food.
When this happened I used to sell a few of my clothes, smuggling them out of the hotel in
small packets and taking them to a secondhand shop in the rue de la Montagne St
Genevieve. The shopman was a red-haired Jew, an extraordinary disagreeable man, who
used to fall into furious rages at the sight of a client. From his manner one would have
supposed that we had done him some injury by coming to him. ‘MERDE! ’ he used to
shout, ‘YOU here again? What do you think this is? A soup kitchen? ’ And he paid
incredibly low prices. For a hat which I had bought for twenty-five shillings and scarcely
worn he gave five francs; for a good pair of shoes, five francs; for shirts, a franc each. He
always preferred to exchange rather than buy, and he had a trick of thrusting some useless
article into one’s hand and then pretending that one had accepted it. Once 1 saw him take
a good overcoat from an old woman, put two white billiard-balls into her hand, and then
push her rapidly out of the shop before she could protest. It would have been a pleasure to
flatten the Jew’s nose, if only one could have afforded it.
These three weeks were squalid and uncomfortable, and evidently there was worse
coming, for my rent would be due before long. Nevertheless, things were not a quarter as
bad as I had expected. For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery
which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and
the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty:
the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less
money you have, the less you worry. When you have a hundred francs in the world you
are liable to the most craven panics. When you have only three francs you are quite
indifferent; for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than
that. You are bored, but you are not afraid. You think vaguely, ‘I shall be starving in a
day or two — shocking, isn’t it? ’ And then the mind wanders to other topics. A bread and
margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne.
And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who
has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at
knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to
the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it.
It takes off a lot of anxiety,
CHAPTER IV
One day my English lessons ceased abruptly. The weather was getting hot and one of my
pupils, feeling too lazy to go on with his lessons, dismissed me. The other disappeared
from his lodgings without notice, owing me twelve francs. I was left with only thirty
centimes and no tobacco. For a day and a half I had nothing to cat or smoke, and then, too
hungry to put it off any longer, I packed my remaining clothes into my suitcase and took
them to the pawnshop. This put an end to all pretence of being in funds, for I could not
take my clothes out of the hotel without asking Madame F. ‘s leave. I remember, however,
how surprised she was at my asking her instead of removing the clothes on the sly,
shooting the moon being a common trick in our quarter.
It was the first time that I had been in a French pawnshop. One went through grandiose
stone portals (marked, of course, ‘FIBERTE, EGATITE, FRATERNITE’ they write that
even over the police stations in France) into a large, bare room like a school classroom,
with a counter and rows of benches. Forty or fifty people were waiting. One handed one’s
pledge over the counter and sat down. Presently, when the clerk had assessed its value he
would call out, ‘NUMERO such and such, will you take fifty francs? ’ Sometimes it was
only fifteen francs, or ten, or five — whatever it was, the whole room knew it. As I Came
in the clerk called with an air of offence, ‘NUMERO 83 — here! ’ and gave a little whistle
and a beckon, as though calling a dog. NUMERO 83 stepped to the counter; he was an
old bearded man, with an overcoat buttoned up at the neck and frayed trouser-ends.
Without a word the clerk shot the bundle across the counter — evidently it was worth
nothing. It fell to the ground and came open, displaying four pairs of men’s woollen
pants. No one could help laughing. Poor NUMERO 83 gathered up his pants and
shambled out, muttering to himself.
The clothes I was pawning, together with the suitcase, had cost over twenty pounds, and
were in good condition. I thought they must be worth ten pounds, and a quarter of this
(one expects quarter value at a pawnshop) was two hundred and fifty or three hundred
francs. I waited without anxiety, expecting two hundred francs at the worst.
At last the clerk called my number: ‘NUMERO 97! ’
‘Yes,’ I said, standing up.
‘Seventy francs? ’
Seventy francs for ten pounds’ worth of clothes! But it was no use arguing; I had seen
someone else attempt to argue, and the clerk had instantly refused the pledge. I took the
money and the pawnticket and walked out. I had now no clothes except what I stood up
in — the coat badly out at the elbow — an overcoat, moderately pawnable, and one spare
shirt. Afterwards, when it was too late, I learned that it was wiser to go to a pawnshop in
the afternoon. The clerks are French, and, like most French people, are in a bad temper
till they have eaten their lunch.
When I got home, Madame F. was sweeping the BISTRO floor. She came up the steps to
meet me. I could see in her eye that she was uneasy about my rent.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘what did you get for your clothes? Not much, eh? ’
‘Two hundred francs,’ I said promptly.
‘TIENS! ’ she said, surprised; ‘well, THAT’S not bad. How expensive those English
clothes must be! ’
The lie saved a lot of trouble, and, strangely enough, it came true. A few days later I did
receive exactly two hundred francs due to me for a newspaper article, and, though it hurt
to do it, I at once paid every penny of it in rent. So, though I came near to starving in the
following weeks, I was hardly ever without a roof.
It was now absolutely necessary to find work, and I remembered a friend of mine, a
Russian waiter named Boris, who might be able to help me. I had first met him in the
public ward of a hospital, where he was being treated for arthritis in the left leg. He had
told me to come to him if I were ever in difficulties.
I must say something about Boris, for he was a curious character and my close friend for
a long time. He was a big, soldierly man of about thirty-five, and had been good looking,
but since his illness he had grown immensely fat from lying in bed. Like most Russian
refugees, he had had an adventurous life. His parents, killed in the Revolution, had been
rich people, and he had served through the war in the Second Siberian Rifles, which,
according to him, was the best regiment in the Russian Army. After the war he had first
worked in a brush factory, then as a porter at Les Halles, then had become a dishwasher,
and had finally worked his way up to be a waiter. When he fell ill he was at the Hotel
Scribe, and taking a hundred francs a day in tips. His ambition was to become a MAITRE
D ’HOTEL, save fifty thousand francs, and set up a small, select restaurant on the Right
Bank.
Boris always talked of the war as the happiest time of his life. War and soldiering were
his passion; he had read innumerable books of strategy and military history, and could
tell you all about the theories of Napoleon, Kutuzof, Clausewitz, Moltke and Foch.
Anything to do with soldiers pleased him. His favourite cafe was the Gloserie des Lilas in
Montparnasse, simply because the statue of Marshal Ney stands outside it. Later on,
Boris and I sometimes went to the rue du Commerce together. If we went by Metro, Boris
always got out at Cambronne station instead of Commerce, though Commerce was
nearer; he liked the association with General Cambronne, who was called on to surrender
at Waterloo, and answered simply, ‘MERDE! ’
The only things left to Boris by the Revolution were his medals and some photographs of
his old regiment; he had kept these when everything else went to the pawnshop. Almost
every day he would spread the photographs out on the bed and talk about them:
‘VOILA, MON AML There you see me at the head of my company. Fine big men, eh?
Not like these little rats of Frenchmen. A captain at twenty — not bad, eh? Yes, a captain
in the Second Siberian Rifles; and my father was a colonel.
‘AH, MAIS, MON AMI, the ups and downs of life! A captain in the Russian Army, and
then, piffl the Revolution — every penny gone. In 1916 I stayed a week at the Hotel
Edouard Sept; in 1920 I was trying for a job as night watchman there. I have been night
watchman, cellannan, floor scrubber, dishwasher, porter, lavatory attendant. I have tipped
waiters, and I have been tipped by waiters.
‘Ah, but I have known what it is to live like a gentleman, MON AMI. I do not say it to
boast, but the other day I was trying to compute how many mistresses I have had in my
life, and I made it out to be over two hundred. Yes, at least two hundred. . . Ah, well, CA
REVIENDRA. Victory is to him who fights the longest. Courage! ’ etc. etc.
Boris had a queer, changeable nature. He always wished himself back in the army, but he
had also been a waiter long enough to acquire the waiter’s outlook. Though he had never
saved more than a few thousand francs, he took it for granted that in the end he would be
able to set up his own restaurant and grow rich. All waiters, I afterwards found, talk and
think of this; it is what reconciles them to being waiters. Boris used to talk interestingly
about Hotel life:
‘Waiting is a gamble,’ he used to say; ‘you may die poor, you may make your fortune in
a year. You are not paid wages, you depend on tips — ten per cent of the bill, and a
commission from the wine companies on champagne corks. Sometimes the tips are
enonnous. The bannan at Maxim’s, for instance, makes five hundred francs a day.
