I am glad that this happened, for it
destroyed
one of my
illusions, namely, the idea that Frenchmen know good food when they see it.
illusions, namely, the idea that Frenchmen know good food when they see it.
Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
I walked
part of the way home, but I did not feel equal to a scene with Madame F. over the rent, so
I passed the night on a bench on the boulevard. It was very uncomfortable — the arm of
the seat cuts into your back — and much colder than I had expected. There was plenty of
time, in the long boring hours between dawn and work, to think what a fool I had been to
deliver myself into the hands of these Russians.
Then, in the morning, the luck changed. Evidently the PATRON had come to an
understanding with his creditors, for he arrived with money in his pockets, set the
alterations going, and gave me my advance. Boris and I bought macaroni and a piece of
horse’s liver, and had our first hot meal in ten days.
The workmen were brought in and the alterations made, hastily and with incredible
shoddiness. The tables, for instance, were to be covered with baize, but when the
PATRON found that baize was expensive he bought instead disused army blankets,
smelling incorrigibly of sweat. The table cloths (they were check, to go with the
‘Norman’ decorations) would cover them, of course. On the last night we were at work
till two in the morning, getting things ready. The crockery did not arrive till eight, and,
being new, had all to be washed. The cutlery did not arrive till the next morning, nor the
linen either, so that we had to dry the crockery with a shirt of the PATRON’S and an old
pillowslip belonging to the concierge. Boris and I did all the work. Jules was skulking,
and the PATRON and his wife sat in the bar with a dun and some Russian friends,
drinking success to the restaurant. The cook was in the kitchen with her head on the table,
crying, because she was expected to cook for fifty people, and there were not pots and
pans enough for ten. About midnight there was a fearful interview with some duns, who
came intending to seize eight copper saucepans which the PATRON had obtained on
credit. They were bought off with half a bottle of brandy.
Jules and I missed the last Metro home and had to sleep on the floor of the restaurant.
The first thing we saw in the morning were two large rats sitting on the kitchen table,
eating from a ham that stood there. It seemed a bad omen, and I was surer than ever that
the Auberge de Jehan Cottard would turn out a failure.
CHAPTER XX
The PATRON had engaged me as kitchen PLONGEUR; that is, my job was to wash up,
keep the kitchen clean, prepare vegetables, make tea, coffee and sandwiches, do the
simpler cooking, and run errands. The terms were, as usual, five hundred francs a month
and food, but I had no free day and no fixed working hours. At the Hotel X I had seen
catering at its best, with unlimited money and good organization. Now, at the Auberge, I
learned how things are done in a thoroughly bad restaurant. It is worth describing, for
there are hundreds of similar restaurants in Paris, and every visitor feeds in one of them
occasionally.
I should add, by the way, that the Auberge was not the ordinary cheap eating-house
frequented by students and workmen. We did not provide an adequate meal at less than
twenty-five francs, and we were picturesque and artistic, which sent up our social
standing. There were the indecent pictures in the bar, and the Norman decorations — sham
beams on the walls, electric lights done up as candlesticks, ‘peasant’ pottery, even a
mounting-block at the door — and the PATRON and the head waiter were Russian
officers, and many of the customers tided Russian refugees. In short, we were decidedly
chic.
Nevertheless, the conditions behind the kitchen door were suitable for a pigsty. For this is
what our service arrangements were like.
The kitchen measured fifteen feet long by eight broad, and half this space was taken up
by the stoves and tables. All the pots had to be kept on shelves out of reach, and there
was only room for one dustbin. This dustbin used to be crammed full by midday, and the
floor was normally an inch deep in a compost of trampled food.
For firing we had nothing but three gas-stoves, without ovens, and all joints had to be
sent out to the bakery.
There was no larder. Our substitute for one was a half-roofed shed in the yard, with a tree
growing in the middle of it. The meat, vegetables and so forth lay there on the bare earth,
raided by rats and cats.
There was no hot water laid on. Water for washing up had to be heated in pans, and, as
there was no room for these on the stoves when meals were cooking, most of the plates
had to be washed in cold water. This, with soft soap and the hard Paris water, meant
scraping the grease off with bits of newspaper.
We were so short of saucepans that I had to wash each one as soon as it was done with,
instead of leaving them till the evening. This alone wasted probably an hour a day.
Owing to some scamping of expense in the installation, the electric light usually fused at
eight in the evening. The PATRON would only allow us three candles in the kitchen, and
the cook said three were unlucky, so we had only two.
Our coffee-grinder was borrowed from a BISTRO near by, and our dustbin and brooms
from the concierge. After the first week a quantity of linen did not come back from the
wash, as the bill was not paid. We were in trouble with the inspector of labour, who had
discovered that the staff included no Frenchmen; he had several private interviews with
the PATRON, who, I believe, was obliged to bribe him. The electric company was still
dunning us, and when the duns found that we would buy them off with APERITIFS, they
came every morning. We were in debt at the grocery, and credit would have been
stopped, only the grocer’s wife (a moustachio’d woman of sixty) had taken a fancy to
Jules, who was sent every morning to cajole her. Similarly I had to waste an hour every
day haggling over vegetables in the rue du Commerce, to save a few centimes.
These are the results of starting a restaurant on insufficient capital. And in these
conditions the cook and I were expected to serve thirty or forty meals a day, and would
later on be serving a hundred. From the first day it was too much for us. The cook’s
working hours were from eight in the morning till midnight, and mine from seven in the
morning till half past twelve the next morning — seventeen and a half hours, almost
without a break. We never had time to sit down till five in the afternoon, and even then
there was no seat except the top of the dustbin. Boris, who lived near by and had not to
catch the last Metro home, worked from eight in the morning till two the next morning —
eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. Such hours, though not usual, are nothing
extraordinary in Paris.
Life settled at once into a routine that made the Hotel X seem like a holiday. Every
morning at six I drove myself out of bed, did not shave, sometimes washed, hurried up to
the Place d’ltalie and fought for a place on the Metro. By seven I was in the desolation of
the cold, filthy kitchen, with the potato skins and bones and fishtails littered on the floor,
and a pile of plates, stuck together in their grease, waiting from overnight. I could not
start on the plates yet, because the water was cold, and I had to fetch milk and make
coffee, for the others arrived at eight and expected to find coffee ready. Also, there were
always several copper saucepans to clean. Those copper saucepans are the bane of a
PLONGEUR’S life. They have to be scoured with sand and bunches of chain, ten
minutes to each one, and then polished on the outside with Brasso. Fortunately, the art of
making them has been lost and they are gradually vanishing from French kitchens,
though one can still buy them second-hand.
When I had begun on the plates the cook would take me away from the plates to begin
skinning onions, and when I had begun on the onions the PATRON would arrive and
send me out to buy cabbages. When I came back with the cabbages the PATRON’S wife
would tell me to go to some shop half a mile away and buy a pot of rouge; by the time I
came back there would be more vegetables waiting, and the plates were still not done. In
this way our incompetence piled one job on another throughout the day, everything in
arrears.
Till ten, things went comparatively easily, though we were working fast, and no one lost
his temper. The cook would find time to talk about her artistic nature, and say did I not
think Tolstoy was EPATANT, and sing in a fine soprano voice as she minced beef on the
board. But at ten the waiters began clamouring for their lunch, which they had early, and
at eleven the first customers would be arriving. Suddenly everything became hurry and
bad temper. There was not the same furious rushing and yelling as at the Hotel X, but an
atmosphere of muddle, petty spite and exasperation. Discomfort was at the bottom of it. It
was unbearably cramped in the kitchen, and dishes had to be put on the floor, and one
had to be thinking constantly about not stepping on them. The cook’s vast buttocks
banged against me as she moved to and fro. A ceaseless, nagging chorus of orders
streamed from her:
‘Unspeakable idiot! How many times have I told you not to bleed the beetroots? Quick,
let me get to the sink! Put those knives away; get on with the potatoes. What have you
done with my strainer? Oh, leave those potatoes alone. Didn’t I tell you to skim the
BOUILLON? Take that can of water off the stove. Never mind the washing up, chop this
celery. No, not like that, you fool, like this. There! Look at you letting those peas boil
over! Now get to work and scale these herrings. Look, do you call this plate clean? Wipe
it on your apron. Put that salad on the floor. That’s right, put it where I’m bound to step
in it! Look out, that pot’s boiling over! Get me down that saucepan. No, the other one.
Put this on the grill. Throw those potatoes away. Don’t waste time, throw them on the
floor. Tread them in. Now throw down some sawdust; this Hoor’s like a skating-rink.
Look, you fool, that steak’s burning! MON DIEU, why did they send me an idiot for a
PLONGEUR? Who are you talking to? Do you realize that my aunt was a Russian
countess? ’ etc. etc. etc.
This went on till three o’clock without much variation, except that about eleven the cook
usually had a CRISE DE NERFS and a flood of tears. From three to live was a fairly
slack time for the waiters, but the cook was still busy, and I was working my fastest, for
there was a pile of dirty plates waiting, and it was a race to get them done, or partly done,
before dinner began. The washing up was doubled by the primitive conditions — a
cramped draining-board, tepid water, sodden cloths, and a sink that got blocked once in
an hour. By five the cook and I were feeling unsteady on our feet, not having eaten or sat
down since seven. We used to collapse, she on the dustbin and I on the floor, drink a
bottle of beer, and apologize for some of the things we had said in the morning. Tea was
what kept us going. We took care to have a pot always stewing, and drank pints during
the day.
At half-past five the hurry and quarrelling began again, and now worse than before,
because everyone was tired out. The cook had a CRISE DE NERFS at six and another at
nine; they came on so regularly that one could have told the time by them. She would
flop down on the dustbin, begin weeping hysterically, and cry out that never, no, never
had she thought to come to such a life as this; her nerves would not stand it; she had
studied music at Vienna; she had a bedridden husband to support, etc. etc. At another
time one would have been sorry for her, but, tired as we all were, her whimpering voice
merely infuriated us. Jules used to stand in the doorway and mimic her weeping. The
PATRON’S wife nagged, and Boris and Jules quarrelled all day, because Jules shirked
his work, and Boris, as head waiter, claimed the larger share of the tips. Only the second
day after the restaurant opened, they came to blows in the kitchen over a two-franc tip,
and the cook and I had to separate them. The only person who never forgot Us manners
was the PATRON. He kept the same hours as the rest of us, but he had no work to do, for
it was his wife who really managed things. His sole job, besides ordering the supplies,
was to stand in the bar smoking cigarettes and looking gentlemanly, and he did that to
perfection.
The cook and I generally found time to eat our dinner between ten and eleven o’clock. At
midnight the cook would steal a packet of food for her husband, stow it under her clothes,
and make off, whimpering that these hours would kill her and she would give notice in
the morning. Jules also left at midnight, usually after a dispute with Boris, who had to
look after the bar till two. Between twelve and half past I did what I could to finish the
washing up. There was no time to attempt doing the work properly, and I used simply to
rub the grease off the plates with table-napkins. As for the dirt on the floor, I let it lie, or
swept the worst of it out of sight under the stoves.
At half past twelve I would put on my coat and hurry out. The PATRON, bland as ever,
would stop me as I went down the alley-way past the bar. ‘MAIS, MON CHER
MONSIEUR, how tired you look! Please do me the favour of accepting this glass of
brandy. ’
He would hand me the glass of brandy as courteously as though I had been a Russian
duke instead of a PLONGEUR. He treated all of us like this. It was our compensation for
working seventeen hours a day.
As a rule the last Metro was almost empty — a great advantage, for one could sit down
and sleep for a quarter of an hour. Generally I was in bed by half past one. Sometimes I
missed the train and had to sleep on the floor of the restaurant, but it hardly mattered, for
I could have slept on cobblestones at that time.
CHAPTER XXI
This life went on for about a fortnight, with a slight increase of work as more customers
came to the restaurant. I could have saved an hour a day by taking a room near the
restaurant, but it seemed impossible to find time to change lodgings — or, for that matter,
to get my hair cut, look at a newspaper, or even undress completely. After ten days I
managed to find a free quarter of an hour, and wrote to my friend B. in London asking
him if he could get me a job of some sort — anything, so long as it allowed more than five
hours sleep. I was simply not equal to going on with a seventeen-hour day, though there
are plenty of people who think nothing of it. When one is overworked, it is a good cure
for self-pity to think of the thousands of people in Paris restaurants who work such hours,
and will go on doing it, not for a few weeks, but for years. There was a girl in a BISTRO
near my hotel who worked from seven in the morning till midnight for a whole year, only
sitting down to her meals. I remember once asking her to come to a dance, and she
laughed and said that she had not been farther than the street comer for several months.
She was consumptive, and died about the time I left Paris.
After only a week we were all neurasthenic with fatigue, except Jules, who skulked
persistently. The quarrels, intennittent at first, had now become continuous. For hours’
one would keep up a drizzle of useless nagging, rising into storms of abuse every few
minutes. ‘Get me down that saucepan, idiot! ’ the cook would cry (she was not tall enough
to reach the shelves where the saucepans were kept). ‘Get it down yourself, you old
whore,’ I would answer. Such remarks seemed to be generated spontaneously from the
air of the kitchen.
We quarrelled over things of inconceivable pettiness. The dustbin, for instance, was an
unending source of quarrels — whether it should be put where I wanted it, which was in
the cook’s way, or where she wanted it, which was between me and the sink. Once she
nagged and nagged until at last, in pure spite, I lifted the dustbin up and put it out in the
middle of the floor, where she was bound to trip over it.
‘Now, you cow,’ I said, ‘move it yourself. ’
Poor old woman, it was too heavy for her to lift, and she sat down, put her head on the
table and burst out crying. And I jeered at her. This is the kind of effect that fatigue has
upon one’s manners.
After a few days the cook had ceased talking about Tolstoy and her artistic nature, and
she and I were not on speaking terms, except for the purposes of work, and Boris and
Jules were not on speaking terms, and neither of them was on speaking terms with the
cook. Even Boris and I were barely on speaking terms. We had agreed beforehand that
the ENGUEULADES of working hours did not count between times; but we had called
each other things too bad to be forgotten — and besides, there were no between times.
Jules grew lazier and lazier, and he stole food constantly — from a sense of duty, he said.
He called the rest of us JAUNE — blackleg — when we would not join with him in
stealing. He had a curious, malignant spirit. He told me, as a matter of pride, that he had
sometimes wrung a dirty dishcloth into a customer’s soup before taking it in, just to be
revenged upon a member of the bourgeoisie.
The kitchen grew dirtier and the rats bolder, though we trapped a few of them. Looking
round that filthy room, with raw meat lying among refuse on the floor, and cold, clotted
saucepans sprawling everywhere, and the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used to
wonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world as bad as ours. But the other
three all said that they had been in dirtier places. Jules took a positive pleasure in seeings
things dirty. In the afternoon, when he had not much to do, he used to stand in the kitchen
doorway jeering at us for working too hard:
‘Fool! Why do you wash that plate? Wipe it on your trousers. Who cares about the
customers? THEY don’t know what’s going on. What is restaurant work? You are
carving a chicken and it falls on the floor. You apologize, you bow, you go out; and in
five minutes you come back by another door — with the same chicken. That is restaurant
work,’ etc.
And, strange to say, in spite of all this filth and incompetence, the Auberge de Jehan
Cottard was actually a success. For the first few days all our customers were Russians,
friends of the PATRON, and these were followed by Americans and other foreigners — no
Frenchmen. Then one night there was tremendous excitement, because our first
Frenchman had arrived. For a moment our quarrels were forgotten and we all united in
the effort to serve a good dinner. Boris tiptoed into the kitchen, jerked his thumb over his
shoulder and whispered conspiratorially:
‘SH! ATTENTION, UN FRANCAIS! ’
A moment later the PATRON’S wife came and whispered:
‘ATTENTION, UN FRANCAIS! See that he gets a double portion of all vegetables. ’
While the Frenchman ate, the PATRON’S wife stood behind the grille of the kitchen
door and watched the expression of his face. Next night the Frenchman came back with
two other Frenchmen. This meant that we were earning a good name; the surest sign of a
bad restaurant is to be frequented only by foreigners. Probably part of the reason for our
success was that the PATRON, with the sole gleam of sense he had shown in fitting out
the restaurant, had bought very sharp table-knives. Sharp knives, of course, are THE
secret of a successful restaurant.
I am glad that this happened, for it destroyed one of my
illusions, namely, the idea that Frenchmen know good food when they see it. Or perhaps
we WERE a fairly good restaurant by Paris standards; in which case the bad ones must be
past imagining.
In a very few days after I had written to B he replied to say that there was a job he could
get for me. It was to look after a congenital imbecile, which sounded a splendid rest cure
after the Auberge de Jehan Cottard. I pictured myself loafing in the country lanes,
knocking thistle-heads off with my stick, feeding on roast lamb and treacle tart, and
sleeping ten hours a night in sheets smelling of lavender. B sent me a fiver to pay my
passage and get my clothes out of the pawn, and as soon as the money arrived I gave one
day’s notice and left the restaurant. My leaving so suddenly embarrassed the PATRON,
for as usual he was penniless, and he had to pay my wages thirty francs short. However
he stood me a glass of Courvoisier ‘48 brandy, and I think he felt that this made up the
difference. They engaged a Czech, a thoroughly competent PLONGEUR, in my place,
and the poor old cook was sacked a few weeks later. Afterwards I heard that, with two
first-rate people in the kitchen, the PLONGEUR’ S work had been cut down to fifteen
hours a day. Below that no one could have cut it, short of modernizing the kitchen.
CHAPTER XXII
For what they are worth I want to give my opinions about the life of a Paris PLONGEUR.
When one comes to think of it, it is strange that thousands of people in a great modem
city should spend their waking hours swabbing dishes in hot dens underground. The
question I am raising is why this life goes on — what purpose it serves, and who wants it
to continue, and why I am not taking the merely rebellious, FAINEANT attitude. I am
trying to consider the social significance of a PLONGEUR’ S life.
I think one should start by saying that a PLONGEUR is one of the slaves of the modem
world. Not that there is any need to whine over him, for he is better off than many manual
workers, but still, he is no freer than if he were bought and sold. His work is servile and
without art; he is paid just enough to keep him alive; his only holiday is the sack. He is
cut off from marriage, or, if he marries, his wife must work too. Except by a lucky
chance, he has no escape from this life, save into prison. At this moment there are men
with university degrees scrubbing dishes in Paris for ten or fifteen hours a day. One
cannot say that it is mere idleness on their part, for an idle man cannot be a PLONGEUR;
they have simply been trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible. If
PLONGEURS thought at all, they would long ago have formed a union and gone on
strike for better treatment. But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their
life has made slaves of them.
The question is, why does this slavery continue? People have a way of taking it for
granted that all work is done for a sound purpose. They see somebody else doing a
disagreeable job, and think that they have solved things by saying that the job is
necessary. Coal-mining, for example, is hard work, but it is necessary — we must have
coal. Working in the sewers is unpleasant, but somebody must work in the sewers. And
similarly with a PLONGEUR’ S work. Some people must feed in restaurants, and so other
people must swab dishes for eighty hours a week. It is the work of civilization, therefore
unquestionable. This point is worth considering.
Is a PLONGEUR’ S work really necessary to civilization? We have a feeling that it must
be ‘honest’ work, because it is hard and disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish
of manual work. We see a man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a
social need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he may only be
cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue. I believe it is the same
with a PLONGEUR. He earns his bread in the sweat of his brow, but it does not follow
that he is doing anything useful; he may be only supplying a luxury which, very often, is
not a luxury.
As an example of what I mean by luxuries which are not luxuries, take an extreme case,
such as one hardly sees in Europe. Take an Indian rickshaw puller, or a gharry pony. In
any Far Eastern town there are rickshaw pullers by the hundred, black wretches weighing
eight stone, clad in loin-cloths. Some of them are diseased; some of them are fifty years
old. For miles on end they trot in the sun or rain, head down, dragging at the shafts, with
the sweat dripping from their grey moustaches. When they go too slowly the passenger
calls them BAHINCHUT. They earn thirty or forty rupees a month, and cough their lungs
out after a few years. The gharry ponies are gaunt, vicious things that have been sold
cheap as having a few years’ work left in them. Their master looks on the whip as a
substitute for food. Their work expresses itself in a sort of equation — whip plus food
equals energy; generally it is about sixty per cent whip and forty per cent food.
Sometimes their necks are encircled by one vast sore, so that they drag all day on raw
flesh. It is still possible to make them work, however; it is just a question of thrashing
them so hard that the pain behind outweighs the pain in front. After a few years even the
whip loses its virtue, and the pony goes to the knacker. These are instances of
unnecessary work, for there is no real need for gharries and rickshaws; they only exist
because Orientals consider it vulgar to walk. They are luxuries, and, as anyone who has
ridden in them knows, very poor luxuries. They afford a small amount of convenience,
which cannot possibly balance the suffering of the men and animals.
Similarly with the PLONGEUR. He is a king compared with a rickshaw puller or a
gharry pony, but his case is analogous. He is the slave of a hotel or a restaurant, and his
slavery is more or less useless. For, after all, where is the REAL need of big hotels and
smart restaurants? They are supposed to provide luxury, but in reality they provide only a
cheap, shoddy imitation of it. Nearly everyone hates hotels. Some restaurants are better
than others, but it is impossible to get as good a meal in a restaurant as one can get, for
the same expense, in a private house. No doubt hotels and restaurants must exist, but
there is no need that they should enslave hundreds of people. What makes the work in
them is not the essentials; it is the shams that are supposed to represent luxury.
Smartness, as it is called, means, in effect, merely that the staff work more and the
customers pay more; no one benefits except the proprietor, who will presently buy
himself a striped villa at Deauville. Essentially, a ‘smart’ hotel is a place where a hundred
people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they
do not really want. If the nonsense were cut out of hotels and restaurants, and the work
done with simple efficiency, PLONGEURS might work six or eight hours a day instead
often or fifteen.
Suppose it is granted that a PLONGEUR’S work is more or less useless. Then the
question follows, Why does anyone want him to go on working? I am trying to go
beyond the immediate economic cause, and to consider what pleasure it can give anyone
to think of men swabbing dishes for life. For there is no doubt that people — comfortably
situated people — do find a pleasure in such thoughts. A slave, Marcus Gato said, should
be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is needed or not,
he must work, because work in itself is good — for slaves, at least. This sentiment still
survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery.
I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the
mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if
they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be
intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions,
usually says something like this:
‘We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy
harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do
anything about it. We are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a, cat with
the mange, but we will fight like devils against any improvement of your condition. We
feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are
not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear
brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be
damned to you. ’
This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the
substance of it in a hundred essays. Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four
hundred pounds a year, and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that
any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty. Foreseeing some dismal
Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are.
Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very much, but he supposes that even the
vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the
poor, and that he had better stand by them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob
that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some
mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two
different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference.
The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else,
and the. average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change
places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has
mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that
intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal
opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know
about poverty? In my copy of Villon’s poems the editor has actually thought it necessary
to explain the line ‘NE PAIN NE VOYENT QU’AUX FENESTRES’ by a footnote; so
remote is even hunger from the educated man’s experience.
From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated
man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house, burn his
books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. ‘Anything,’ he
thinks, ‘any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose. ’ He does not see that since there is
no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob
loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and — in the shape of rich men — is using its power to
set up enonnous treadmills of boredom, such as ‘smart’ hotels.
To sum up. A PLONGEUR is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely
unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he
would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side,
acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are
afraid of him. I say this of the PLONGEUR because it is his case I have been
considering; it would apply equally to numberless other types of worker. These are only
my own ideas about the basic facts of a PLONGEUR’S life, made without reference to
immediate economic questions, and no doubt largely platitudes. I present them as a
sample of the thoughts that are put into one’s head by working in an hotel.
CHAPTER XXIII
As soon as I left the Auberge de Jehan Cottard I went to bed and slept the clock round, all
but one hour. Then I washed my teeth for the first time in a fortnight, bathed and had my
hair cut, and got my clothes out of pawn. I had two glorious days of loafing. I even went
in my best suit to the Auberge, leant against the bar and spent five francs on a bottle of
English beer. It is a curious sensation, being a customer where you have been a slave’s
slave. Boris was sorry that I had left the restaurant just at the moment when we were
LANCES and there was a chance of making money. I have heard from him since, and he
tells me that he is making a hundred francs a day and has set up a girl who is TRES
SERIEUSE and never smells of garlic.
I spent a day wandering about our quarter, saying good-bye to everyone. It was on this
day that Charlie told me about the death of old Roucolle the miser, who had once lived in
the quarter. Very likely Charlie was lying as usual, but it was a good story.
Roucolle died, aged seventy-four, a year or two before I went to Paris, but the people in
the quarter still talked of him while I was there. He never equalled Daniel Dancer or
anyone of that kind, but he was an interesting character. He went to Les Halles every
morning to pick up damaged vegetables, and ate cat’s meat, and wore newspaper instead
of underclothes, and used the wainscoting of his room for firewood, and made himself a
pair of trousers out of a sack — all this with half a million francs invested. I should like
very much to have known him.
Like many misers, Roucolle came to a bad end through putting his money into a wildcat
scheme. One day a Jew appeared in the quarter, an alert, business-like young chap who
had a first-rate plan for smuggling cocaine into England. It is easy enough, of course, to
buy cocaine in Paris, and the smuggling would be quite simple in itself, only there is
always some spy who betrays the plan to the customs or the police. It is said that this is
often done by the very people who sell the cocaine, because the smuggling trade is in the
hands of a large combine, who do not want competition. The Jew, however, swore that
there was no danger. He knew a way of getting cocaine direct from Vienna, not through
the usual channels, and there would be no blackmail to pay. He had got into touch with
Roucolle through a young Pole, a student at the Sorbonne, who was going to put four
thousand francs into the scheme if Roucolle would put six thousand. For this they could
buy ten pounds of cocaine, which would be worth a small fortune in England.
The Pole and the Jew had a tremendous struggle to get the money from between old
Roucolle’s claws. Six thousand francs was not much — he had more than that sewn into
the mattress in his room — but it was agony for him to part with a sou. The Pole and the
Jew were at him for weeks on end, explaining, bullying, coaxing, arguing, going down on
their knees and imploring him to produce the money. The old man was half frantic
between greed and fear. His bowels yearned at the thought of getting, perhaps, fifty
thousand francs’ profit, and yet he could not bring himself to risk the money. He used to
sit in a comer with his head in his hands, groaning and sometimes yelling out in agony,
and often he would kneel down (he was very pious) and pray for strength, but still he
couldn’t do it. But at last, more from exhaustion than anything else, he gave in quite
suddenly; he slit open the mattress where his money was concealed and handed over six
thousand francs to the Jew.
The Jew delivered the cocaine the same day, and promptly vanished. And meanwhile, as
was not surprising after the fuss Roucolle had made, the affair had been noised all over
the quarter. The very next morning the hotel was raided and searched by the police.
Roucolle and the Pole were in agonies. The police were downstairs, working their way up
and searching every room in turn, and there was the great packet of cocaine on the table,
with no place to hide it and no chance of escaping down the stairs. The Pole was for
throwing the stuff out of the window, but Roucolle would not hear of it. Charlie told me
that he had been present at the scene. He said that when they tried to take the packet from
Roucolle he clasped it to his breast and struggled like a madman, although he was
seventy-four years old. He was wild with fright, but he would go to prison rather than
throw his money away.
At last, when the police were searching only one floor below, somebody had an idea. A
man on Roucolle’s floor had a dozen tins of face-powder which he was selling on
commission; it was suggested that the cocaine could be put into the tins and passed off as
face-powder. The powder was hastily thrown out of the window and the cocaine
substituted, and the tins were put openly on Roucolle’s table, as though there there were
nothing to conceal. A few minutes later the police came to search Roucolle’s room. They
tapped the walls and looked up the chimney and turned out the drawers and examined the
floorboards, and then, just as they were about to give it up, having found nothing, the
inspector noticed the tins on the table.
‘TIENS,’ he said, ‘have a look at those tins. I hadn’t noticed them. What’s in them, eh? ’
‘Face-powder,’ said the Pole as calmly as he could manage. But at the same instant
Roucolle let out a loud groaning noise, from alann, and the police became suspicious
immediately. They opened one of the tins and tipped out the contents, and after smelling
it, the inspector said that he believed it was cocaine. Roucolle and the Pole began
swearing on the names of the saints that it was only face-powder; but it was no use, the
more they protested the more suspicious the police became. The two men were arrested
and led off to the police station, followed by half the quarter.
At the station, Roucolle and the Pole were interrogated by the Commissaire while a tin of
the cocaine was sent away to be analysed. Charlie said that the scene Roucolle made was
beyond description. He wept, prayed, made contradictory statements and denounced the
Pole all at once, so loud that he could be heard half a street away. The policemen almost
burst with laughing at him.
After an hour a policeman came back with the tin of cocaine and a note from the analyst.
He was laughing.
‘This is not cocaine, MONSIEUR,’ he said.
‘What, not cocaine? ’ said the Commissaire. ‘MAIS, ALORS — what is it, then? ’
‘It is face-powder. ’
Roucolle and the Pole were released at once, entirely exonerated but very angry. The Jew
had double-crossed them. Afterwards, when the excitement was over, it turned out that he
had played the same trick on two other people in the quarter.
The Pole was glad enough to escape, even though he had lost his four thousand francs,
but poor old Roucolle was utterly broken down. He took to his bed at once, and all that
day and half the night they could hear him thrashing about, mumbling, and sometimes
yelling out at the top of his voice:
‘Six thousand francs! NOM DE JESUS-CHRIST! Six thousand francs! ’
Three days later he had some kind of stroke, and in a fortnight he was dead — of a broken
heart, Charlie said.
CHAPTER XXIV
I travelled to England third class via Dunkirk and Tilbury, which is the cheapest and not
the worst way of crossing the Channel. You had to pay extra for a cabin, so I slept in the
saloon, together with most of the third-class passengers. I find this entry in my diary for
that day:
‘Sleeping in the saloon, twenty-seven men, sixteen women. Of the women, not a single
one has washed her face this morning. The men mostly went to the bathroom; the women
merely produced vanity cases and covered the dirt with powder. Q. A secondary sexual
difference? ’
On the journey I fell in with a couple of Roumanians, mere children, who were going to
England on their honeymoon trip. They asked innumerable questions about England, and
I told them some startling lies. I was so pleased to be getting home, after being hard up
for months in a foreign city, that England seemed to me a sort of Paradise. There are,
indeed, many things in England that make you glad to get home; bathrooms, armchairs,
mint sauce, new potatoes properly cooked, brown bread, marmalade, beer made with
veritable hops — they are all splendid, if you can pay for them. England is a very good
country when you are not poor; and, of course, with a tame imbecile to look after, I was
not going to be poor. The thought of not being poor made me very patriotic. The more
questions the Roumanians asked, the more I praised England; the climate, the scenery,
the art, the literature, the laws — everything in England was perfect.
Was the architecture in England good? the Roumanians asked. ‘Splendid! ’ I said. ‘And
you should just see the London statues! Paris is vulgar — half grandiosity and half slums.
But London — ’
Then the boat drew alongside Tilbury pier. The first building we saw on the waterside
was one of those huge hotels, all stucco and pinnacles, which stare from the English coast
like idiots staring over an asylum wall. I saw the Roumanians, too polite to say anything,
cocking their eyes at the hotel.
part of the way home, but I did not feel equal to a scene with Madame F. over the rent, so
I passed the night on a bench on the boulevard. It was very uncomfortable — the arm of
the seat cuts into your back — and much colder than I had expected. There was plenty of
time, in the long boring hours between dawn and work, to think what a fool I had been to
deliver myself into the hands of these Russians.
Then, in the morning, the luck changed. Evidently the PATRON had come to an
understanding with his creditors, for he arrived with money in his pockets, set the
alterations going, and gave me my advance. Boris and I bought macaroni and a piece of
horse’s liver, and had our first hot meal in ten days.
The workmen were brought in and the alterations made, hastily and with incredible
shoddiness. The tables, for instance, were to be covered with baize, but when the
PATRON found that baize was expensive he bought instead disused army blankets,
smelling incorrigibly of sweat. The table cloths (they were check, to go with the
‘Norman’ decorations) would cover them, of course. On the last night we were at work
till two in the morning, getting things ready. The crockery did not arrive till eight, and,
being new, had all to be washed. The cutlery did not arrive till the next morning, nor the
linen either, so that we had to dry the crockery with a shirt of the PATRON’S and an old
pillowslip belonging to the concierge. Boris and I did all the work. Jules was skulking,
and the PATRON and his wife sat in the bar with a dun and some Russian friends,
drinking success to the restaurant. The cook was in the kitchen with her head on the table,
crying, because she was expected to cook for fifty people, and there were not pots and
pans enough for ten. About midnight there was a fearful interview with some duns, who
came intending to seize eight copper saucepans which the PATRON had obtained on
credit. They were bought off with half a bottle of brandy.
Jules and I missed the last Metro home and had to sleep on the floor of the restaurant.
The first thing we saw in the morning were two large rats sitting on the kitchen table,
eating from a ham that stood there. It seemed a bad omen, and I was surer than ever that
the Auberge de Jehan Cottard would turn out a failure.
CHAPTER XX
The PATRON had engaged me as kitchen PLONGEUR; that is, my job was to wash up,
keep the kitchen clean, prepare vegetables, make tea, coffee and sandwiches, do the
simpler cooking, and run errands. The terms were, as usual, five hundred francs a month
and food, but I had no free day and no fixed working hours. At the Hotel X I had seen
catering at its best, with unlimited money and good organization. Now, at the Auberge, I
learned how things are done in a thoroughly bad restaurant. It is worth describing, for
there are hundreds of similar restaurants in Paris, and every visitor feeds in one of them
occasionally.
I should add, by the way, that the Auberge was not the ordinary cheap eating-house
frequented by students and workmen. We did not provide an adequate meal at less than
twenty-five francs, and we were picturesque and artistic, which sent up our social
standing. There were the indecent pictures in the bar, and the Norman decorations — sham
beams on the walls, electric lights done up as candlesticks, ‘peasant’ pottery, even a
mounting-block at the door — and the PATRON and the head waiter were Russian
officers, and many of the customers tided Russian refugees. In short, we were decidedly
chic.
Nevertheless, the conditions behind the kitchen door were suitable for a pigsty. For this is
what our service arrangements were like.
The kitchen measured fifteen feet long by eight broad, and half this space was taken up
by the stoves and tables. All the pots had to be kept on shelves out of reach, and there
was only room for one dustbin. This dustbin used to be crammed full by midday, and the
floor was normally an inch deep in a compost of trampled food.
For firing we had nothing but three gas-stoves, without ovens, and all joints had to be
sent out to the bakery.
There was no larder. Our substitute for one was a half-roofed shed in the yard, with a tree
growing in the middle of it. The meat, vegetables and so forth lay there on the bare earth,
raided by rats and cats.
There was no hot water laid on. Water for washing up had to be heated in pans, and, as
there was no room for these on the stoves when meals were cooking, most of the plates
had to be washed in cold water. This, with soft soap and the hard Paris water, meant
scraping the grease off with bits of newspaper.
We were so short of saucepans that I had to wash each one as soon as it was done with,
instead of leaving them till the evening. This alone wasted probably an hour a day.
Owing to some scamping of expense in the installation, the electric light usually fused at
eight in the evening. The PATRON would only allow us three candles in the kitchen, and
the cook said three were unlucky, so we had only two.
Our coffee-grinder was borrowed from a BISTRO near by, and our dustbin and brooms
from the concierge. After the first week a quantity of linen did not come back from the
wash, as the bill was not paid. We were in trouble with the inspector of labour, who had
discovered that the staff included no Frenchmen; he had several private interviews with
the PATRON, who, I believe, was obliged to bribe him. The electric company was still
dunning us, and when the duns found that we would buy them off with APERITIFS, they
came every morning. We were in debt at the grocery, and credit would have been
stopped, only the grocer’s wife (a moustachio’d woman of sixty) had taken a fancy to
Jules, who was sent every morning to cajole her. Similarly I had to waste an hour every
day haggling over vegetables in the rue du Commerce, to save a few centimes.
These are the results of starting a restaurant on insufficient capital. And in these
conditions the cook and I were expected to serve thirty or forty meals a day, and would
later on be serving a hundred. From the first day it was too much for us. The cook’s
working hours were from eight in the morning till midnight, and mine from seven in the
morning till half past twelve the next morning — seventeen and a half hours, almost
without a break. We never had time to sit down till five in the afternoon, and even then
there was no seat except the top of the dustbin. Boris, who lived near by and had not to
catch the last Metro home, worked from eight in the morning till two the next morning —
eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. Such hours, though not usual, are nothing
extraordinary in Paris.
Life settled at once into a routine that made the Hotel X seem like a holiday. Every
morning at six I drove myself out of bed, did not shave, sometimes washed, hurried up to
the Place d’ltalie and fought for a place on the Metro. By seven I was in the desolation of
the cold, filthy kitchen, with the potato skins and bones and fishtails littered on the floor,
and a pile of plates, stuck together in their grease, waiting from overnight. I could not
start on the plates yet, because the water was cold, and I had to fetch milk and make
coffee, for the others arrived at eight and expected to find coffee ready. Also, there were
always several copper saucepans to clean. Those copper saucepans are the bane of a
PLONGEUR’S life. They have to be scoured with sand and bunches of chain, ten
minutes to each one, and then polished on the outside with Brasso. Fortunately, the art of
making them has been lost and they are gradually vanishing from French kitchens,
though one can still buy them second-hand.
When I had begun on the plates the cook would take me away from the plates to begin
skinning onions, and when I had begun on the onions the PATRON would arrive and
send me out to buy cabbages. When I came back with the cabbages the PATRON’S wife
would tell me to go to some shop half a mile away and buy a pot of rouge; by the time I
came back there would be more vegetables waiting, and the plates were still not done. In
this way our incompetence piled one job on another throughout the day, everything in
arrears.
Till ten, things went comparatively easily, though we were working fast, and no one lost
his temper. The cook would find time to talk about her artistic nature, and say did I not
think Tolstoy was EPATANT, and sing in a fine soprano voice as she minced beef on the
board. But at ten the waiters began clamouring for their lunch, which they had early, and
at eleven the first customers would be arriving. Suddenly everything became hurry and
bad temper. There was not the same furious rushing and yelling as at the Hotel X, but an
atmosphere of muddle, petty spite and exasperation. Discomfort was at the bottom of it. It
was unbearably cramped in the kitchen, and dishes had to be put on the floor, and one
had to be thinking constantly about not stepping on them. The cook’s vast buttocks
banged against me as she moved to and fro. A ceaseless, nagging chorus of orders
streamed from her:
‘Unspeakable idiot! How many times have I told you not to bleed the beetroots? Quick,
let me get to the sink! Put those knives away; get on with the potatoes. What have you
done with my strainer? Oh, leave those potatoes alone. Didn’t I tell you to skim the
BOUILLON? Take that can of water off the stove. Never mind the washing up, chop this
celery. No, not like that, you fool, like this. There! Look at you letting those peas boil
over! Now get to work and scale these herrings. Look, do you call this plate clean? Wipe
it on your apron. Put that salad on the floor. That’s right, put it where I’m bound to step
in it! Look out, that pot’s boiling over! Get me down that saucepan. No, the other one.
Put this on the grill. Throw those potatoes away. Don’t waste time, throw them on the
floor. Tread them in. Now throw down some sawdust; this Hoor’s like a skating-rink.
Look, you fool, that steak’s burning! MON DIEU, why did they send me an idiot for a
PLONGEUR? Who are you talking to? Do you realize that my aunt was a Russian
countess? ’ etc. etc. etc.
This went on till three o’clock without much variation, except that about eleven the cook
usually had a CRISE DE NERFS and a flood of tears. From three to live was a fairly
slack time for the waiters, but the cook was still busy, and I was working my fastest, for
there was a pile of dirty plates waiting, and it was a race to get them done, or partly done,
before dinner began. The washing up was doubled by the primitive conditions — a
cramped draining-board, tepid water, sodden cloths, and a sink that got blocked once in
an hour. By five the cook and I were feeling unsteady on our feet, not having eaten or sat
down since seven. We used to collapse, she on the dustbin and I on the floor, drink a
bottle of beer, and apologize for some of the things we had said in the morning. Tea was
what kept us going. We took care to have a pot always stewing, and drank pints during
the day.
At half-past five the hurry and quarrelling began again, and now worse than before,
because everyone was tired out. The cook had a CRISE DE NERFS at six and another at
nine; they came on so regularly that one could have told the time by them. She would
flop down on the dustbin, begin weeping hysterically, and cry out that never, no, never
had she thought to come to such a life as this; her nerves would not stand it; she had
studied music at Vienna; she had a bedridden husband to support, etc. etc. At another
time one would have been sorry for her, but, tired as we all were, her whimpering voice
merely infuriated us. Jules used to stand in the doorway and mimic her weeping. The
PATRON’S wife nagged, and Boris and Jules quarrelled all day, because Jules shirked
his work, and Boris, as head waiter, claimed the larger share of the tips. Only the second
day after the restaurant opened, they came to blows in the kitchen over a two-franc tip,
and the cook and I had to separate them. The only person who never forgot Us manners
was the PATRON. He kept the same hours as the rest of us, but he had no work to do, for
it was his wife who really managed things. His sole job, besides ordering the supplies,
was to stand in the bar smoking cigarettes and looking gentlemanly, and he did that to
perfection.
The cook and I generally found time to eat our dinner between ten and eleven o’clock. At
midnight the cook would steal a packet of food for her husband, stow it under her clothes,
and make off, whimpering that these hours would kill her and she would give notice in
the morning. Jules also left at midnight, usually after a dispute with Boris, who had to
look after the bar till two. Between twelve and half past I did what I could to finish the
washing up. There was no time to attempt doing the work properly, and I used simply to
rub the grease off the plates with table-napkins. As for the dirt on the floor, I let it lie, or
swept the worst of it out of sight under the stoves.
At half past twelve I would put on my coat and hurry out. The PATRON, bland as ever,
would stop me as I went down the alley-way past the bar. ‘MAIS, MON CHER
MONSIEUR, how tired you look! Please do me the favour of accepting this glass of
brandy. ’
He would hand me the glass of brandy as courteously as though I had been a Russian
duke instead of a PLONGEUR. He treated all of us like this. It was our compensation for
working seventeen hours a day.
As a rule the last Metro was almost empty — a great advantage, for one could sit down
and sleep for a quarter of an hour. Generally I was in bed by half past one. Sometimes I
missed the train and had to sleep on the floor of the restaurant, but it hardly mattered, for
I could have slept on cobblestones at that time.
CHAPTER XXI
This life went on for about a fortnight, with a slight increase of work as more customers
came to the restaurant. I could have saved an hour a day by taking a room near the
restaurant, but it seemed impossible to find time to change lodgings — or, for that matter,
to get my hair cut, look at a newspaper, or even undress completely. After ten days I
managed to find a free quarter of an hour, and wrote to my friend B. in London asking
him if he could get me a job of some sort — anything, so long as it allowed more than five
hours sleep. I was simply not equal to going on with a seventeen-hour day, though there
are plenty of people who think nothing of it. When one is overworked, it is a good cure
for self-pity to think of the thousands of people in Paris restaurants who work such hours,
and will go on doing it, not for a few weeks, but for years. There was a girl in a BISTRO
near my hotel who worked from seven in the morning till midnight for a whole year, only
sitting down to her meals. I remember once asking her to come to a dance, and she
laughed and said that she had not been farther than the street comer for several months.
She was consumptive, and died about the time I left Paris.
After only a week we were all neurasthenic with fatigue, except Jules, who skulked
persistently. The quarrels, intennittent at first, had now become continuous. For hours’
one would keep up a drizzle of useless nagging, rising into storms of abuse every few
minutes. ‘Get me down that saucepan, idiot! ’ the cook would cry (she was not tall enough
to reach the shelves where the saucepans were kept). ‘Get it down yourself, you old
whore,’ I would answer. Such remarks seemed to be generated spontaneously from the
air of the kitchen.
We quarrelled over things of inconceivable pettiness. The dustbin, for instance, was an
unending source of quarrels — whether it should be put where I wanted it, which was in
the cook’s way, or where she wanted it, which was between me and the sink. Once she
nagged and nagged until at last, in pure spite, I lifted the dustbin up and put it out in the
middle of the floor, where she was bound to trip over it.
‘Now, you cow,’ I said, ‘move it yourself. ’
Poor old woman, it was too heavy for her to lift, and she sat down, put her head on the
table and burst out crying. And I jeered at her. This is the kind of effect that fatigue has
upon one’s manners.
After a few days the cook had ceased talking about Tolstoy and her artistic nature, and
she and I were not on speaking terms, except for the purposes of work, and Boris and
Jules were not on speaking terms, and neither of them was on speaking terms with the
cook. Even Boris and I were barely on speaking terms. We had agreed beforehand that
the ENGUEULADES of working hours did not count between times; but we had called
each other things too bad to be forgotten — and besides, there were no between times.
Jules grew lazier and lazier, and he stole food constantly — from a sense of duty, he said.
He called the rest of us JAUNE — blackleg — when we would not join with him in
stealing. He had a curious, malignant spirit. He told me, as a matter of pride, that he had
sometimes wrung a dirty dishcloth into a customer’s soup before taking it in, just to be
revenged upon a member of the bourgeoisie.
The kitchen grew dirtier and the rats bolder, though we trapped a few of them. Looking
round that filthy room, with raw meat lying among refuse on the floor, and cold, clotted
saucepans sprawling everywhere, and the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used to
wonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world as bad as ours. But the other
three all said that they had been in dirtier places. Jules took a positive pleasure in seeings
things dirty. In the afternoon, when he had not much to do, he used to stand in the kitchen
doorway jeering at us for working too hard:
‘Fool! Why do you wash that plate? Wipe it on your trousers. Who cares about the
customers? THEY don’t know what’s going on. What is restaurant work? You are
carving a chicken and it falls on the floor. You apologize, you bow, you go out; and in
five minutes you come back by another door — with the same chicken. That is restaurant
work,’ etc.
And, strange to say, in spite of all this filth and incompetence, the Auberge de Jehan
Cottard was actually a success. For the first few days all our customers were Russians,
friends of the PATRON, and these were followed by Americans and other foreigners — no
Frenchmen. Then one night there was tremendous excitement, because our first
Frenchman had arrived. For a moment our quarrels were forgotten and we all united in
the effort to serve a good dinner. Boris tiptoed into the kitchen, jerked his thumb over his
shoulder and whispered conspiratorially:
‘SH! ATTENTION, UN FRANCAIS! ’
A moment later the PATRON’S wife came and whispered:
‘ATTENTION, UN FRANCAIS! See that he gets a double portion of all vegetables. ’
While the Frenchman ate, the PATRON’S wife stood behind the grille of the kitchen
door and watched the expression of his face. Next night the Frenchman came back with
two other Frenchmen. This meant that we were earning a good name; the surest sign of a
bad restaurant is to be frequented only by foreigners. Probably part of the reason for our
success was that the PATRON, with the sole gleam of sense he had shown in fitting out
the restaurant, had bought very sharp table-knives. Sharp knives, of course, are THE
secret of a successful restaurant.
I am glad that this happened, for it destroyed one of my
illusions, namely, the idea that Frenchmen know good food when they see it. Or perhaps
we WERE a fairly good restaurant by Paris standards; in which case the bad ones must be
past imagining.
In a very few days after I had written to B he replied to say that there was a job he could
get for me. It was to look after a congenital imbecile, which sounded a splendid rest cure
after the Auberge de Jehan Cottard. I pictured myself loafing in the country lanes,
knocking thistle-heads off with my stick, feeding on roast lamb and treacle tart, and
sleeping ten hours a night in sheets smelling of lavender. B sent me a fiver to pay my
passage and get my clothes out of the pawn, and as soon as the money arrived I gave one
day’s notice and left the restaurant. My leaving so suddenly embarrassed the PATRON,
for as usual he was penniless, and he had to pay my wages thirty francs short. However
he stood me a glass of Courvoisier ‘48 brandy, and I think he felt that this made up the
difference. They engaged a Czech, a thoroughly competent PLONGEUR, in my place,
and the poor old cook was sacked a few weeks later. Afterwards I heard that, with two
first-rate people in the kitchen, the PLONGEUR’ S work had been cut down to fifteen
hours a day. Below that no one could have cut it, short of modernizing the kitchen.
CHAPTER XXII
For what they are worth I want to give my opinions about the life of a Paris PLONGEUR.
When one comes to think of it, it is strange that thousands of people in a great modem
city should spend their waking hours swabbing dishes in hot dens underground. The
question I am raising is why this life goes on — what purpose it serves, and who wants it
to continue, and why I am not taking the merely rebellious, FAINEANT attitude. I am
trying to consider the social significance of a PLONGEUR’ S life.
I think one should start by saying that a PLONGEUR is one of the slaves of the modem
world. Not that there is any need to whine over him, for he is better off than many manual
workers, but still, he is no freer than if he were bought and sold. His work is servile and
without art; he is paid just enough to keep him alive; his only holiday is the sack. He is
cut off from marriage, or, if he marries, his wife must work too. Except by a lucky
chance, he has no escape from this life, save into prison. At this moment there are men
with university degrees scrubbing dishes in Paris for ten or fifteen hours a day. One
cannot say that it is mere idleness on their part, for an idle man cannot be a PLONGEUR;
they have simply been trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible. If
PLONGEURS thought at all, they would long ago have formed a union and gone on
strike for better treatment. But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their
life has made slaves of them.
The question is, why does this slavery continue? People have a way of taking it for
granted that all work is done for a sound purpose. They see somebody else doing a
disagreeable job, and think that they have solved things by saying that the job is
necessary. Coal-mining, for example, is hard work, but it is necessary — we must have
coal. Working in the sewers is unpleasant, but somebody must work in the sewers. And
similarly with a PLONGEUR’ S work. Some people must feed in restaurants, and so other
people must swab dishes for eighty hours a week. It is the work of civilization, therefore
unquestionable. This point is worth considering.
Is a PLONGEUR’ S work really necessary to civilization? We have a feeling that it must
be ‘honest’ work, because it is hard and disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish
of manual work. We see a man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a
social need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he may only be
cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue. I believe it is the same
with a PLONGEUR. He earns his bread in the sweat of his brow, but it does not follow
that he is doing anything useful; he may be only supplying a luxury which, very often, is
not a luxury.
As an example of what I mean by luxuries which are not luxuries, take an extreme case,
such as one hardly sees in Europe. Take an Indian rickshaw puller, or a gharry pony. In
any Far Eastern town there are rickshaw pullers by the hundred, black wretches weighing
eight stone, clad in loin-cloths. Some of them are diseased; some of them are fifty years
old. For miles on end they trot in the sun or rain, head down, dragging at the shafts, with
the sweat dripping from their grey moustaches. When they go too slowly the passenger
calls them BAHINCHUT. They earn thirty or forty rupees a month, and cough their lungs
out after a few years. The gharry ponies are gaunt, vicious things that have been sold
cheap as having a few years’ work left in them. Their master looks on the whip as a
substitute for food. Their work expresses itself in a sort of equation — whip plus food
equals energy; generally it is about sixty per cent whip and forty per cent food.
Sometimes their necks are encircled by one vast sore, so that they drag all day on raw
flesh. It is still possible to make them work, however; it is just a question of thrashing
them so hard that the pain behind outweighs the pain in front. After a few years even the
whip loses its virtue, and the pony goes to the knacker. These are instances of
unnecessary work, for there is no real need for gharries and rickshaws; they only exist
because Orientals consider it vulgar to walk. They are luxuries, and, as anyone who has
ridden in them knows, very poor luxuries. They afford a small amount of convenience,
which cannot possibly balance the suffering of the men and animals.
Similarly with the PLONGEUR. He is a king compared with a rickshaw puller or a
gharry pony, but his case is analogous. He is the slave of a hotel or a restaurant, and his
slavery is more or less useless. For, after all, where is the REAL need of big hotels and
smart restaurants? They are supposed to provide luxury, but in reality they provide only a
cheap, shoddy imitation of it. Nearly everyone hates hotels. Some restaurants are better
than others, but it is impossible to get as good a meal in a restaurant as one can get, for
the same expense, in a private house. No doubt hotels and restaurants must exist, but
there is no need that they should enslave hundreds of people. What makes the work in
them is not the essentials; it is the shams that are supposed to represent luxury.
Smartness, as it is called, means, in effect, merely that the staff work more and the
customers pay more; no one benefits except the proprietor, who will presently buy
himself a striped villa at Deauville. Essentially, a ‘smart’ hotel is a place where a hundred
people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they
do not really want. If the nonsense were cut out of hotels and restaurants, and the work
done with simple efficiency, PLONGEURS might work six or eight hours a day instead
often or fifteen.
Suppose it is granted that a PLONGEUR’S work is more or less useless. Then the
question follows, Why does anyone want him to go on working? I am trying to go
beyond the immediate economic cause, and to consider what pleasure it can give anyone
to think of men swabbing dishes for life. For there is no doubt that people — comfortably
situated people — do find a pleasure in such thoughts. A slave, Marcus Gato said, should
be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is needed or not,
he must work, because work in itself is good — for slaves, at least. This sentiment still
survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery.
I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the
mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if
they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be
intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions,
usually says something like this:
‘We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy
harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do
anything about it. We are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a, cat with
the mange, but we will fight like devils against any improvement of your condition. We
feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are
not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear
brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be
damned to you. ’
This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the
substance of it in a hundred essays. Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four
hundred pounds a year, and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that
any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty. Foreseeing some dismal
Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are.
Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very much, but he supposes that even the
vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the
poor, and that he had better stand by them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob
that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some
mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two
different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference.
The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else,
and the. average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change
places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has
mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that
intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal
opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know
about poverty? In my copy of Villon’s poems the editor has actually thought it necessary
to explain the line ‘NE PAIN NE VOYENT QU’AUX FENESTRES’ by a footnote; so
remote is even hunger from the educated man’s experience.
From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated
man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house, burn his
books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. ‘Anything,’ he
thinks, ‘any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose. ’ He does not see that since there is
no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob
loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and — in the shape of rich men — is using its power to
set up enonnous treadmills of boredom, such as ‘smart’ hotels.
To sum up. A PLONGEUR is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely
unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he
would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side,
acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are
afraid of him. I say this of the PLONGEUR because it is his case I have been
considering; it would apply equally to numberless other types of worker. These are only
my own ideas about the basic facts of a PLONGEUR’S life, made without reference to
immediate economic questions, and no doubt largely platitudes. I present them as a
sample of the thoughts that are put into one’s head by working in an hotel.
CHAPTER XXIII
As soon as I left the Auberge de Jehan Cottard I went to bed and slept the clock round, all
but one hour. Then I washed my teeth for the first time in a fortnight, bathed and had my
hair cut, and got my clothes out of pawn. I had two glorious days of loafing. I even went
in my best suit to the Auberge, leant against the bar and spent five francs on a bottle of
English beer. It is a curious sensation, being a customer where you have been a slave’s
slave. Boris was sorry that I had left the restaurant just at the moment when we were
LANCES and there was a chance of making money. I have heard from him since, and he
tells me that he is making a hundred francs a day and has set up a girl who is TRES
SERIEUSE and never smells of garlic.
I spent a day wandering about our quarter, saying good-bye to everyone. It was on this
day that Charlie told me about the death of old Roucolle the miser, who had once lived in
the quarter. Very likely Charlie was lying as usual, but it was a good story.
Roucolle died, aged seventy-four, a year or two before I went to Paris, but the people in
the quarter still talked of him while I was there. He never equalled Daniel Dancer or
anyone of that kind, but he was an interesting character. He went to Les Halles every
morning to pick up damaged vegetables, and ate cat’s meat, and wore newspaper instead
of underclothes, and used the wainscoting of his room for firewood, and made himself a
pair of trousers out of a sack — all this with half a million francs invested. I should like
very much to have known him.
Like many misers, Roucolle came to a bad end through putting his money into a wildcat
scheme. One day a Jew appeared in the quarter, an alert, business-like young chap who
had a first-rate plan for smuggling cocaine into England. It is easy enough, of course, to
buy cocaine in Paris, and the smuggling would be quite simple in itself, only there is
always some spy who betrays the plan to the customs or the police. It is said that this is
often done by the very people who sell the cocaine, because the smuggling trade is in the
hands of a large combine, who do not want competition. The Jew, however, swore that
there was no danger. He knew a way of getting cocaine direct from Vienna, not through
the usual channels, and there would be no blackmail to pay. He had got into touch with
Roucolle through a young Pole, a student at the Sorbonne, who was going to put four
thousand francs into the scheme if Roucolle would put six thousand. For this they could
buy ten pounds of cocaine, which would be worth a small fortune in England.
The Pole and the Jew had a tremendous struggle to get the money from between old
Roucolle’s claws. Six thousand francs was not much — he had more than that sewn into
the mattress in his room — but it was agony for him to part with a sou. The Pole and the
Jew were at him for weeks on end, explaining, bullying, coaxing, arguing, going down on
their knees and imploring him to produce the money. The old man was half frantic
between greed and fear. His bowels yearned at the thought of getting, perhaps, fifty
thousand francs’ profit, and yet he could not bring himself to risk the money. He used to
sit in a comer with his head in his hands, groaning and sometimes yelling out in agony,
and often he would kneel down (he was very pious) and pray for strength, but still he
couldn’t do it. But at last, more from exhaustion than anything else, he gave in quite
suddenly; he slit open the mattress where his money was concealed and handed over six
thousand francs to the Jew.
The Jew delivered the cocaine the same day, and promptly vanished. And meanwhile, as
was not surprising after the fuss Roucolle had made, the affair had been noised all over
the quarter. The very next morning the hotel was raided and searched by the police.
Roucolle and the Pole were in agonies. The police were downstairs, working their way up
and searching every room in turn, and there was the great packet of cocaine on the table,
with no place to hide it and no chance of escaping down the stairs. The Pole was for
throwing the stuff out of the window, but Roucolle would not hear of it. Charlie told me
that he had been present at the scene. He said that when they tried to take the packet from
Roucolle he clasped it to his breast and struggled like a madman, although he was
seventy-four years old. He was wild with fright, but he would go to prison rather than
throw his money away.
At last, when the police were searching only one floor below, somebody had an idea. A
man on Roucolle’s floor had a dozen tins of face-powder which he was selling on
commission; it was suggested that the cocaine could be put into the tins and passed off as
face-powder. The powder was hastily thrown out of the window and the cocaine
substituted, and the tins were put openly on Roucolle’s table, as though there there were
nothing to conceal. A few minutes later the police came to search Roucolle’s room. They
tapped the walls and looked up the chimney and turned out the drawers and examined the
floorboards, and then, just as they were about to give it up, having found nothing, the
inspector noticed the tins on the table.
‘TIENS,’ he said, ‘have a look at those tins. I hadn’t noticed them. What’s in them, eh? ’
‘Face-powder,’ said the Pole as calmly as he could manage. But at the same instant
Roucolle let out a loud groaning noise, from alann, and the police became suspicious
immediately. They opened one of the tins and tipped out the contents, and after smelling
it, the inspector said that he believed it was cocaine. Roucolle and the Pole began
swearing on the names of the saints that it was only face-powder; but it was no use, the
more they protested the more suspicious the police became. The two men were arrested
and led off to the police station, followed by half the quarter.
At the station, Roucolle and the Pole were interrogated by the Commissaire while a tin of
the cocaine was sent away to be analysed. Charlie said that the scene Roucolle made was
beyond description. He wept, prayed, made contradictory statements and denounced the
Pole all at once, so loud that he could be heard half a street away. The policemen almost
burst with laughing at him.
After an hour a policeman came back with the tin of cocaine and a note from the analyst.
He was laughing.
‘This is not cocaine, MONSIEUR,’ he said.
‘What, not cocaine? ’ said the Commissaire. ‘MAIS, ALORS — what is it, then? ’
‘It is face-powder. ’
Roucolle and the Pole were released at once, entirely exonerated but very angry. The Jew
had double-crossed them. Afterwards, when the excitement was over, it turned out that he
had played the same trick on two other people in the quarter.
The Pole was glad enough to escape, even though he had lost his four thousand francs,
but poor old Roucolle was utterly broken down. He took to his bed at once, and all that
day and half the night they could hear him thrashing about, mumbling, and sometimes
yelling out at the top of his voice:
‘Six thousand francs! NOM DE JESUS-CHRIST! Six thousand francs! ’
Three days later he had some kind of stroke, and in a fortnight he was dead — of a broken
heart, Charlie said.
CHAPTER XXIV
I travelled to England third class via Dunkirk and Tilbury, which is the cheapest and not
the worst way of crossing the Channel. You had to pay extra for a cabin, so I slept in the
saloon, together with most of the third-class passengers. I find this entry in my diary for
that day:
‘Sleeping in the saloon, twenty-seven men, sixteen women. Of the women, not a single
one has washed her face this morning. The men mostly went to the bathroom; the women
merely produced vanity cases and covered the dirt with powder. Q. A secondary sexual
difference? ’
On the journey I fell in with a couple of Roumanians, mere children, who were going to
England on their honeymoon trip. They asked innumerable questions about England, and
I told them some startling lies. I was so pleased to be getting home, after being hard up
for months in a foreign city, that England seemed to me a sort of Paradise. There are,
indeed, many things in England that make you glad to get home; bathrooms, armchairs,
mint sauce, new potatoes properly cooked, brown bread, marmalade, beer made with
veritable hops — they are all splendid, if you can pay for them. England is a very good
country when you are not poor; and, of course, with a tame imbecile to look after, I was
not going to be poor. The thought of not being poor made me very patriotic. The more
questions the Roumanians asked, the more I praised England; the climate, the scenery,
the art, the literature, the laws — everything in England was perfect.
Was the architecture in England good? the Roumanians asked. ‘Splendid! ’ I said. ‘And
you should just see the London statues! Paris is vulgar — half grandiosity and half slums.
But London — ’
Then the boat drew alongside Tilbury pier. The first building we saw on the waterside
was one of those huge hotels, all stucco and pinnacles, which stare from the English coast
like idiots staring over an asylum wall. I saw the Roumanians, too polite to say anything,
cocking their eyes at the hotel.
