’
There were queer characters among the waiters.
There were queer characters among the waiters.
Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
’
‘But what about my wages if I break my contract?
‘Boris banged his stick on the pavement and cried out at such stupidity. ‘Ask to be paid
by the day, then you won’t lose a sou. Do you suppose they would prosecute a
PLONGEUR for breaking Us contract? A PLONGEUR is too low to be prosecuted. ’
I hurried back, found the CHEF DU PERSONNEL, and told him that I would work for a
month, whereat he signed me on. Ibis was my first lesson in PLONGEUR morality. Later
I realized how foolish it had been to have any scruples, for the big hotels are quite
merciless towards their employees. They engage or discharge men as the work demands,
and they all sack ten per cent or more of their staff when the season is over. Nor have
they any difficulty in replacing a man who leaves at short notice, for Paris is thronged by
hotel employees out of work.
CHAPTER XI
As it turned out, I did not break my contract, for it was six weeks before the Auberge de
Jehan Cottard even showed signs of opening. In the meantime I worked at the Hotel X,
four days a week in the cafeterie, one day helping the waiter on the fourth floor, and one
day replacing the woman who washed up for the dining-room. My day off, luckily, was
Sunday, but sometimes another man was ill and I had to work that day as well. The hours
were from seven in the morning till two in the afternoon, and from five in the evening till
nine — eleven hours; but it was a fourteen-hour day when I washed up for the dining-
room. By the ordinary standards of a Paris PLONGEUR, these are exceptionally short
hours. The only hardship of life was the fearful heat and stuffiness of these labyrinthine
cellars. Apart from this the hotel, which was large and well organized, was considered a
comfortable one.
Our cafeterie was a murky cellar measuring twenty feet by seven by eight high, and so
crowded with coffee-urns, breadcutters and the like that one could hardly move without
banging against something. It was lighted by one dim electric bulb, and four or five gas-
fires that sent out a fierce red breath. There was a thermometer there, and the temperature
never fell below 1 10 degrees Fahrenheit — it neared 130 at some times of the day. At one
end were five service lifts, and at the other an ice cupboard where we stored milk and
butter. When you went into the ice cupboard you dropped a hundred degrees of
temperature at a single step; it used to remind me of the hymn about Greenland’s icy
mountains and India’s coral strand. Two men worked in the cafeterie besides Boris and
myself. One was Mario, a huge, excitable Italian — he was like a city policeman with
operatic gestures — and the other, a hairy, uncouth animal whom we called the Magyar; I
think he was a Transylvanian, or something even more remote. Except the Magyar we
were all big men, and at the rush hours we collided incessantly.
The work in the cafeterie was spasmodic. We were never idle, but the real work only
came in bursts of two hours at a time — we called each burst ‘UN COUP DE FEU’. The
first COUP DE FEU came at eight, when the guests upstairs began to wake up and
demand breakfast. At eight a sudden banging and yelling would break out all through the
basement; bells rang on all sides, blue-aproned men rushed through the passages, our
service lifts came down with a simultaneous crash, and the waiters on all five floors
began shouting Italian oaths down the shafts. I don’t remember all our duties, but they
included making tea, coffee and chocolate, fetching meals from the kitchen, wines from
the cellar and fruit and so forth from the dining-room, slicing bread, making toast, rolling
pats of butter, measuring jam, opening milk-cans, counting lumps of sugar, boiling eggs,
cooking porridge, pounding ice, grinding coffee — all this for from a hundred to two
hundred customers. The kitchen was thirty yards away, and the dining-room sixty or
seventy yards. Everything we sent up in the service lifts had to be covered by a voucher,
and the vouchers had to be carefully filed, and there was trouble if even a lump of sugar
was lost. Besides this, we had to supply the staff with bread and coffee, and fetch the
meals for the waiters upstairs. All in all, it was a complicated job.
I calculated that one had to walk and run about fifteen miles during the day, and yet the
strain of the work was more mental than physical. Nothing could be easier, on the face of
it, than this stupid scullion work, but it is astonishingly hard when one is in a hurry. One
has to leap to and fro between a multitude of jobs — it is like sorting a pack of cards
against the clock. You are, for example, making toast, when bang! down comes a service
lift with an order for tea, rolls and three different kinds of jam, and simultaneously bang!
down comes another demanding scrambled eggs, coffee and grapefruit; you run to the
kitchen for the eggs and to the dining-room for the fruit, going like lightning so as to be
back before your toast bums, and having to remember about the tea and coffee, besides
half a dozen other orders that are still pending; and at the same time some waiter is
following you and making trouble about a lost bottle of soda-water, and you are arguing
with him. It needs more brains than one might think. Mario said, no doubt truly, that it
took a year to make a reliable cafetier.
The time between eight and half past ten was a sort of delirium. Sometimes we were
going as though we had only five minutes to live; sometimes there were sudden lulls
when the orders stopped and everything seemed quiet for a moment. Then we swept up
the litter from the floor, threw down fresh sawdust, and swallowed gallipots of wine or
coffee or water — anything, so long as it was wet. Very often we used to break off chunks
of ice and suck them while we worked. The heat among the gas-fires was nauseating; we
swallowed quarts of drink during the day, and after a few hours even our aprons were
drenched with sweat. At times we were hopelessly behind with the work, and some of the
customers would have gone without their breakfast, but Mario always pulled us through.
He had worked fourteen years in the cafeterie, and he had the skill that never wastes a
second between jobs. The Magyar was very stupid and I was inexperienced, and Boris
was inclined to shirk, partly because of his lame leg, partly because he was ashamed of
working in the cafeterie after being a waiter; but Mario was wonderful. The way he
would stretch his great arms right across the cafeterie to fill a coffee-pot with one hand
and boil an egg with the other, at the same time watching toast and shouting directions to
the Magyar, and between whiles singing snatches from RIGOLETTO, was beyond all
praise. The PATRON knew his value, and he was paid a thousand francs a month, instead
of five hundred like the rest of us.
The breakfast pandemonium stopped at half past ten. Then we scrubbed the cafeterie
tables, swept the floor and polished the brasswork, and, on good mornings, went one at a
time to the lavatory for a smoke. This was our slack time — only relatively slack,
however, for we had only ten minutes for lunch, and we never got through it
uninterrupted. The customers’ luncheon hour, between twelve and two, was another
period of turmoil like the breakfast hour. Most of our work was fetching meals from the
kitchen, which meant constant ENGUEULADES from the cooks. By this time the cooks
had sweated in front of their furnaces for four or five hours, and their tempers were all
warmed up.
At two we were suddenly free men. We threw off our aprons and put on our coats,
hurried out of doors, and, when we had money, dived into the nearest BISTRO. It was
strange, coming up into the street from those firelit cellars. The air seemed blindingly
clear and cold, like arctic summer; and how sweet the petrol did smell, after the stenches
of sweat and food! Sometimes we met some of our cooks and waiters in the BISTROS,
and they were friendly and stood us drinks. Indoors we were their slaves, but it is an
etiquette in hotel life that between hours everyone is equal, and the ENGUEULADES do
not count.
At a quarter to five we went back to the hotel. Till half-past six there were no orders, and
we used this time to polish silver, clean out the coffee-urns, and do other odd jobs. Then
the grand turmoil of the day started — the dinner hour. I wish I could be Zola for a little
while, just to describe that dinner hour. The essence of the situation was that a hundred or
two hundred people were demanding individually different meals of five or six courses,
and that fifty or sixty people had to cook and serve them and clean up the mess
afterwards; anyone with experience of catering will know what that means. And at this
time when the work was doubled, the whole staff was tired out, and a number of them
were drunk. I could write pages about the scene without giving a true idea of it. The
chargings to and fro in the narrow passages, the collisions, the yells, the struggling with
crates and trays and blocks of ice, the heat, the darkness, the furious festering quarrels
which there was no time to fight out — they pass description. Anyone coming into the
basement for the first time would have thought himself in a den of maniacs. It was only
later, when I understood the working of a hotel, that I saw order in all this chaos.
At half past eight the work stopped very suddenly. We were not free till nine, but we used
to throw ourselves full length on the floor, and lie there resting our legs, too lazy even to
go to the ice cupboard for a drink. Sometimes the CHEF DU PERSONNEL would come
in with bottles of beer, for the hotel stood us an extra beer when we had had a hard day.
The food we were given was no more than eatable, but the PATRON was not mean about
drink; he allowed us two litres of wine a day each, knowing that if a PLONGEUR is not
given two litres he will steal three. We had the heeltaps of bottles as well, so that we
often drank too much — a good thing, for one seemed to work faster when partially drunk.
Four days of the week passed like this; of the other two working days, one was better and
one worse. After a week of this life I felt in need of a holiday. It was Saturday night, so
the people in our BISTRO were busy getting drunk, and with a free day ahead of me I
was ready to join them. We all went to bed, drunk, at two in the morning, meaning to
sleep till noon. At half past five I was suddenly awakened. A night-watchman, sent from
the hotel, was standing at my bedside. He stripped the clothes back and shook me
roughly.
‘Get up! ’ he said. ‘TU T’ES BIEN SAOULE LA GNEULE, EH? Well, never mind that,
the hotel’s a man short. You’ve got to work today. ’
‘Why should I work? ’ I protested. ‘This is my day off. ’
‘Day off, nothing! The work’s got to be done. Get up! ’
I got up and went out, feeling as though my back were broken and my skull fdled with
hot cinders. I did not think that I could possibly do a day’s work. And yet, after only an
hour in the basement, I found that I was perfectly well. It seemed that in the heat of those
cellars, as in a turkish bath, one could sweat out almost any quantity of drink.
PLONGEURS know this, and count on it. The power of swallowing quarts of wine, and
then sweating it out before it can do much damage, is one of the compensations of their
life.
CHAPTER XII
By far my best time at the hotel was when I went to help the waiter on the fourth floor.
We worked in a small pantry which communicated with the cafeterie by service lifts. It
was delightfully cool after the cellars, and the work was chiefly polishing silver and
glasses, which is a humane job. Valenti, the waiter, was a decent sort, and treated me
almost as an equal when we were alone, though he had to speak roughly when there was
anyone else present, for it does not do for a waiter to be friendly with PLONGEURS. He
used sometimes to tip me five francs when he had had a good day. He was a comely
youth, aged twenty-four but looking eighteen, and, like most waiters, he carried himself
well and knew how to wear his clothes. With his black tail-coat and white tie, fresh face
and sleek brown hair, he looked just like an Eton boy; yet he had earned his living since
he was twelve, and worked his way up literally from the gutter. Grossing the Italian
frontier without a passport, and selling chestnuts from a barrow on the northern
boulevards, and being given fifty days’ imprisonment in London for working without a
pennit, and being made love to by a rich old woman in a hotel, who gave him a diamond
ring and afterwards accused him of stealing it, were among his experiences. I used to
enjoy talking to him, at slack times when we sat smoking down the lift shaft.
My bad day was when I washed up for the dining-room. I had not to wash the plates,
which were done in the kitchen, but only the other crockery, silver, knives and glasses;
yet, even so, it meant thirteen hours’ work, and I used between thirty and forty dishcloths
during the day. The antiquated methods used in France double the work of washing up.
Plate-racks are unheard-of, and there are no soap-flakes, only the treacly soft soap, which
refuses to lather in the hard, Paris water. I worked in a dirty, crowded little den, a pantry
and scullery combined, which gave straight on the dining-room. Besides washing up, I
had to fetch the waiters’ food and serve them at table; most of them were intolerably
insolent, and I had to use my fists more than once to get common civility. The person
who normally washed up was a woman, and they made her life a misery.
It was amusing to look round the filthy little scullery and think that only a double door
was between us and the dining-room. There sat the customers in all their splendour —
spotless table-cloths, bowls of flowers, mirrors and gilt cornices and painted cherubim;
and here, just a few feet away, we in our disgusting filth. For it really was disgusting
filth. There was no time to sweep the floor till evening, and we slithered about in a
compound of soapy water, lettuce-leaves, tom paper and trampled food. A dozen waiters
with their coats off, showing their sweaty armpits, sat at the table mixing salads and
sticking their thumbs into the cream pots. The room had a dirty, mixed smell of food and
sweat. Everywhere in the cupboards, behind the piles of crockery, were squalid stores of
food that the waiters had stolen. There were only two sinks, and no washing basin, and it
was nothing unusual for a waiter to wash his face in the water in which clean crockery
was rinsing. But the customers saw nothing of this. There were a coco-nut mat and a
mirror outside the dining-room door, and the waiters used to preen themselves up and go
in looking the picture of cleanliness.
It is an instructive sight to see a waiter going into a hotel dining-room. As he passes the
door a sudden change comes over him. The set of his shoulders alters; all the dirt and
hurry and irritation have dropped off in an instant. He glides over the carpet, with a
solemn priest-like air. I remember our assistant MAITRE D’ HOTEL, a fiery Italian,
pausing at the dining-room door to address an apprentice who had broken a bottle of
wine. Shaking his fist above his head he yelled (luckily the door was more or less
soundproof):
‘TU ME FAIS — Do you call yourself a waiter, you young bastard? You a waiter! You’re
not fit to scrub floors in the brothel your mother came from. MAQUEREAU! ’
Words failing him, he turned to the door; and as he opened it he delivered a final insult in
the same manner as Squire Western in TOM JONES.
Then he entered the dining-room and sailed across it dish in hand, graceful as a swan.
Ten seconds later he was bowing reverently to a customer. And you could not help
thinking, as you saw him bow and smile, with that benign smile of the trained waiter, that
the customer was put to shame by having such an aristocrat to serve him.
This washing up was a thoroughly odious job — not hard, but boring and silly beyond
words. It is dreadful to think that some people spend their whole decades at such
occupations. The woman whom I replaced was quite sixty years old, and she stood at the
sink thirteen hours a day, six days a week, the year round; she was, in addition, horribly
bullied by the waiters. She gave out that she had once been an actress — actually, I
imagine, a prostitute; most prostitutes end as charwomen. It was strange to see that in
spite of her age and her life she still wore a bright blonde wig, and darkened her eyes and
painted her face like a girl of twenty. So apparently even a seventy-eight-hour week can
leave one with some vitality.
CHAPTER XIII
On my third day at the hotel the CHEF DU PERSONNEL, who had generally spoken to
me in quite a pleasant tone, called me up and said sharply:
‘Here, you, shave that moustache off at once! NOM DE DIEU, who ever heard of a
PLONGEUR with a moustache? ’
I began to protest, but he cut me short. ‘A PLONGEUR with a moustache — nonsense!
Take care I don’t see you with it tomorrow. ’
On the way home I asked Boris what this meant. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘You must
do what he says, MON AMI. No one in the hotel wears a moustache, except the cooks. I
should have thought you would have noticed it. Reason? There is no reason. It is the
custom. ’
I saw that it was an etiquette, like not wearing a white tie with a dinner-jacket, and
shaved off my moustache. Afterwards I found out the explanation of the custom, which is
this: waiters in good hotels do not wear moustaches, and to show their superiority they
decree that PLONGEURS shall not wear them either; and the cooks wear their
moustaches to show their contempt for the waiters.
This gives some idea of the elaborate caste system existing in a hotel. Our staff,
amounting to about a hundred and ten, had their prestige graded as accurately as that of
soldiers, and a cook or waiter was as much above a PLONGEUR as a captain above a
private. Highest of all came the manager, who could sack anybody, even the cooks. We
never saw the PATRON, and all we knew of him was that his meals had to be prepared
more carefully than that of the customers; all the discipline of the hotel depended on the
manager. He was a conscientious man, and always on the lookout for slackness, but we
were too clever for him. A system of service bells ran through the hotel, and the whole
staff used these for signalling to one another. A long ring and a short ring, followed by
two more long rings, meant that the manager was coming, and when we heard it we took
care to look busy.
Below the manager came the MAITRE D’HOTEL. He did not serve at table, unless to a
lord or someone of that kind, but directed the other waiters and helped with the catering.
His tips, and his bonus from the champagne companies (it was two francs for each cork
he returned to them), came to two hundred francs a day. He was in a position quite apart
from the rest of the staff, and took his meals in a private room, with silver on the table
and two apprentices in clean white jackets to serve him. A little below the head waiter
came the head cook, drawing about five thousand francs a month; he dined in the kitchen,
but at a separate table, and one of the apprentice cooks waited on him. Then came the
CHEF DU PERSONNEL; he drew only fifteen hundred francs a month, but he wore a
black coat and did no manual work, and he could sack PLONGEURS and fine waiters.
Then came the other cooks, drawing anything between three thousand and seven hundred
and fifty A francs a month; then the waiters, making about seventy francs a day in tips,
besides a small retaining fee; then the laundresses and sewing women; then the
apprentice waiters, who received no tips, but were paid seven hundred and fifty francs a
month; then the PLONGEURS, also at seven hundred and fifty francs; then the
chambermaids, at five or six hundred francs a month; and lastly the cafetiers, at five
hundred a month. We of the cafeterie were the very dregs of the hotel, despised and
TUTOIED by everyone.
There were various others — the office employees, called generally couriers, the
storekeeper, the cellannan, some porters and pages, the ice man, the bakers, the night-
watchman, the doorkeeper. Different jobs were done by different races. The office
employees and the cooks and sewing-women were French, the waiters Italians and
Germans (there is hardly such a thing as a French waiter in Paris), the PLONGEURS of
every race in Europe, beside Arabs and Negroes. French was the lingua franca, even the
Italians speaking it to one another.
All the departments had their special perquisites. In all Paris hotels it is the custom to sell
the broken bread to bakers for eight sous a pound, and the kitchen scraps to pigkeepers
for a trifle, and to divide the proceeds of this among the PLONGEURS. There was much
pilfering, too. The waiters all stole food — in fact, I seldom saw a waiter trouble to eat the
rations provided for him by the hotel — and the cooks did it on a larger scale in the
kitchen, and we in the cafeterie swilled illicit tea and coffee. The cellannan stole brandy.
By a rule of the hotel the waiters were not allowed to keep stores of spirits, but had to go
to the cellannan for each drink as it was ordered. As the cellannan poured out the drinks
he would set aside perhaps a teaspoonful from each glass, and he amassed quantities in
this way. He would sell you the stolen brandy for five sous a swig if he thought he could
trust you.
There were thieves among the staff, and if you left money in your coat pockets it was
generally taken. The doorkeeper, who paid our wages and searched us for stolen food,
was the greatest thief in the hotel. Out of my five hundred francs a month, this man
actually managed to cheat me of a hundred and fourteen francs in six weeks. I had asked
to be paid daily, so the doorkeeper paid me sixteen francs each evening, and, by not
paying for Sundays (for which of course payment was due), pocketed sixty-four francs.
Also, I sometimes worked on a Sunday, for which, though I did not know it, I was
entitled to an extra twenty-five francs. The doorkeeper never paid me this either, and so
made away with another seventy-five francs. I only realized during my last week that I
was being cheated, and, as I could prove nothing, only twenty-five francs were refunded.
The doorkeeper played similar tricks on any employee who was fool enough to be taken
in. He called himself a Greek, but in reality he was an Annenian. After knowing him I
saw the force of the proverb ‘Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but
don’t trust an Armenian.
’
There were queer characters among the waiters. One was a gentleman — a youth who had
been educated at a university, and had had a well-paid job in a business office. He had
caught a venereal disease, lost his job, drifted, and now considered himself lucky to be a
waiter. Many of the waiters had slipped into France without passports, and one or two of
them were spies — it is a common profession for a spy to adopt. One day there was a
fearful row in the waiters’ dining-room between Morandi, a dangerous-looking man with
eyes set too far apart, and another Italian. It appeared that Morandi had taken the other
man’s mistress. The other man, a weakling and obviously frightened of Morandi, was
threatening vaguely.
Morandi jeered at him. ‘Well, what are you going to do about it? I’ve slept with your girl,
slept with her three times. It was fine. What can you do, eh? ’
‘I can denounce you to the secret police. You are an Italian spy. ’
Morandi did not deny it. He simply produced a razor from his tail pocket and made two
swift strokes in the air, as though slashing a man’s cheeks open. Whereat the other waiter
took it back.
The queerest type I ever saw in the hotel was an ‘extra’. He had been engaged at twenty-
five francs for the day to replace the Magyar, who was ill. He was a Serbian, a thick-set
nimble fellow of about twenty-five, speaking six languages, including English. He
seemed to know all about hotel work, and up till midday he worked like a slave. Then, as
soon as it had struck twelve, he turned sulky, shirked Us work, stole wine, and finally
crowned all by loafing about openly with a pipe in his mouth. Smoking, of course, was
forbidden under severe penalties. The manager himself heard of it and came down to
interview the Serbian, fuming with rage.
‘What the devil do you mean by smoking here? ’ he cried.
‘What the devil do you mean by having a face like that? ’ answered the Serbian, calmly.
I cannot convey the blasphemy of such a remark. The head cook, if a PLONGEUR had
spoken to him like that, would have thrown a saucepan of hot soup in his face. The
manager said instantly, ‘You’re sacked! ’ and at two o’clock the Serbian was given his
twenty-five francs and duly sacked. Before he went out Boris asked him in Russian what
game he was playing. He said the Serbian answered:
‘Look here, MON VIEUX, they’ve got to pay me a day’s wages if I work up to midday,
haven’t they? That’s the law. And where’s the sense of working after I get my wages? So
I’ll tell you what I do. I go to a hotel and get a job as an extra, and up to midday I work
hard. Then, the moment it’s struck twelve, I start raising such hell that they’ve no choice
but to sack me. Neat, eh? Most days I’m sacked by half past twelve; today it was two
o’clock; but I don’t care, I’ve saved four hours’ work. The only trouble is, one can’t do it
at the same hotel twice. ’
It appeared that he had played this game at half the hotels and restaurants in Paris. It is
probably quite an easy game to play during the summer, though the hotels protect
themselves against it as well as they can by means of a black list.
CHAPTER XIV
In a few days I had grasped the main principles on which the hotel was run. The thing
that would astonish anyone coming for the first time into the service quarters of a hotel
would be the fearful noise and disorder during the rush hours. It is something so different
from the steady work in a shop or a factory that it looks at first sight like mere bad
management. But it is really quite unavoidable, and for this reason. Hotel work is not
particularly hard, but by its nature it comes in rushes and cannot be economized. You
cannot, for instance, grill a steak two hours before it is wanted; you have to wait till the
last moment, by which time a mass of other work has accumulated, and then do it all
together, in frantic haste. The result is that at mealtimes everyone is doing two men’s
work, which is impossible without noise and quarrelling. Indeed the quarrels are a
necessary part of the process, for the pace would never be kept up if everyone did not
accuse everyone else of idling. It was for this reason that during the rush hours the whole
staff raged and cursed like demons. At those times there was scarcely a verb in the hotel
except FOUTRE. A girl in the bakery, aged sixteen, used oaths that would have defeated
a cabman. (Did not Hamlet say ‘cursing like a scullion’? No doubt Shakespeare had
watched scullions at work. ) But we are not losing our heads and wasting time; we were
just stimulating one another for the effort of packing four hours’ work into two hours.
What keeps a hotel going is the fact that the employees take a genuine pride in their
work, beastly and silly though it is. If a man idles, the others soon find him out, and
conspire against him to get him sacked. Cooks, waiters and PLONGEURS differ greatly
in outlook, but they are all alike in being proud of their efficiency.
Undoubtedly the most workmanlike class, and the least servile, are the cooks. They do
not earn quite so much as waiters, but their prestige is higher and their employment
steadier. The cook does not look upon himself as a servant, but as a skilled workman; he
is generally called ‘UN OUVRIER’ which a waiter never is. He knows his power —
knows that he alone makes or mars a restaurant, and that if he is five minutes late
everything is out of gear. He despises the whole non-cooking staff, and makes it a point
of honour to insult everyone below the head waiter. And he takes a genuine artistic pride
in his work, which demands very great skill. It is not the cooking that is so difficult, but
the doing everything to time. Between breakfast and luncheon the head cook at the Hotel
X would receive orders for several hundred dishes, all to be served at different times; he
cooked few of them himself, but he gave instructions about all of them and inspected
them before they were sent up. His memory was wonderful. The vouchers were pinned
on a board, but the head cook seldom looked at them; everything was stored in his mind,
and exactly to the minute, as each dish fell due, he would call out, ‘FAITES MARCHER
UNE COTELETTE DE VEAU’ (or whatever it was) unfailingly. He was an insufferable
bully, but he was also an artist. It is for their punctuality, and not for any superiority in
technique, that men cooks arc preferred to women.
The waiter’s outlook is quite different. He too is proud in a way of his skill, but his skill
is chiefly in being servile. His work gives him the mentality, not of a workman, but of a
snob. He lives perpetually in sight of rich people, stands at their tables, listens to their
conversation, sucks up to them with smiles and discreet little jokes. He has the pleasure
of spending money by proxy. Moreover, there is always the chance that he may become
rich himself, for, though most waiters die poor, they have long runs of luck occasionally.
At some cafes on the Grand Boulevard there is so much money to be made that the
waiters actually pay the PATRON for their employment. The result is that between
constantly seeing money, and hoping to get it, the waiter comes to identify himself to
some extent with his employers. He will take pains to serve a meal in style, because he
feels that he is participating in the meal himself.
I remember Valenti telling me of some banquet at Nice at which he had once served, and
of how it cost two hundred thousand francs and was talked of for months afterwards. ‘It
was splendid, MON P’TIT, MAIS MAGNIFIQUE! Jesus Christ! The champagne, the
silver, the orchids — I have never seen anything like them, and I have seen some things.
Ah, it was glorious! ’
‘But,’ I said, ‘you were only there to wait? ’
‘Oh, of course. But still, it was splendid. ’
The moral is, never be sorry for a waiter. Sometimes when you sit in a restaurant, still
stuffing yourself half an hour after closing time, you feel that the tired waiter at your side
must surely be despising you. But he is not. He is not thinking as he looks at you, ‘What
an overfed lout’; he is thinking, ‘One day, when I have saved enough money, I shall be
able to imitate that man. ’ He is ministering to a kind of pleasure he thoroughly
understands and admires. And that is why waiters are seldom Socialists, have no effective
trade union, and will work twelve hours a day — they work fifteen hours, seven days a
week, in many cafes. They are snobs, and they find the servile nature of their work rather
congenial.
The PLONGEURS, again, have a different outlook. Theirs is a job which offers no
prospects, is intensely exhausting, and at the same time has not a trace of skill or interest;
the sort of job that would always be done by women if women were strong enough. All
that is required of them is to be constantly on the run, and to put up with long hours and a
stuffy atmosphere. They have no way of escaping from this life, for they cannot save a
penny from their wages, and working from sixty to a hundred hours a week leaves them
no time to train for anything else. The best they can hope for is to find a slightly softer
job as night-watchman or lavatory attendant.
And yet the PLONGEURS, low as they are, also have a kind of pride. It is the pride of
the drudge — the man who is equal to no matter what quantity of work. At that level, the
mere power to go on working like an ox is about the only virtue attainable.
DEBROUILLARD is what every PLONGEUR wants to be called. A DEBROUILLARD
is a man who, even when he is told to do the impossible, will SE DEBROUILLER — get
it done somehow. One of the kitchen PLONGEURS at the Hotel X, a German, was well
known as a DEBROUILLARD. One night an English lord came to the hotel, and the
waiters were in despair, for the lord had asked for peaches, and there were none in stock;
it was late at night, and the shops would be shut. ‘Leave it to me,’ said the German. He
went out, and in ten minutes he was back with four peaches. He had gone into a
neighbouring restaurant and stolen them. That is what is meant by a DEBROUILLARD.
The English lord paid for the peaches at twenty francs each.
Mario, who was in charge of the cafeterie, had the typical drudge mentality. All he
thought of was getting through the ‘BOULOT’, and he defied you to give him too much
of it. Fourteen years underground had left him with about as much natural laziness as a
piston rod. ‘FAUT ETRE DUR,’ he used to say when anyone complained. You will often
hear PLONGEURS boast, ‘JE SUIS DUR’ — as though they were soldiers, not male
charwomen.
Thus everyone in the hotel had his sense of honour, and when the press of work came we
were all ready for a grand concerted effort to get through it. The constant war between
the different departments also made for efficiency, for everyone clung to his own
privileges and tried to stop the others idling and pilfering.
This is the good side of hotel work. In a hotel a huge and complicated machine is kept
running by an inadequate staff, because every man has a well-defined job and does it
scrupulously. But there is a weak point, and it is this — that the job the staff are doing is
not necessarily what the customer pays for. The customer pays, as he sees it, for good
service; the employee is paid, as he sees it, for the BOULOT — meaning, as a rule, an
imitation of good service. The result is that, though hotels are miracles of punctuality,
they are worse than the worst private houses in the things that matter.
Take cleanliness, for example. The dirt in the Hotel X, as soon as one penetrated into the
service quarters, was revolting. Our cafeterie had year-old filth in all the dark corners,
and the bread-bin was infested with cockroaches. Once I suggested killing these beasts to
Mario. ‘Why kill the poor animals? ’ he said reproachfully. The others laughed when I
wanted to wash my hands before touching the butter. Yet we were clean where we
recognized cleanliness as part of the BOULOT. We scrubbed the tables and polished the
brasswork regularly, because we had orders to do that; but we had no orders to be
genuinely clean, and in any case we had no time for it. We were simply carrying out our
duties; and as our first duty was punctuality, we saved time by being dirty.
In the kitchen the dirt was worse. It is not a figure of speech, it is a mere statement of fact
to say that a French cook will spit in the soup — that is, if he is not going to drink it
himself. He is an artist, but his art is not cleanliness. To a certain extent he is even dirty
because he is an artist, for food, to look smart, needs dirty treatment. When a steak, for
instance, is brought up for the head cook’s inspection, he does not handle it with a fork.
He picks it up in his fingers and slaps it down, runs his thumb round the dish and licks it
to taste the gravy, runs it round and licks again, then steps back and contemplates the
piece of meat like an artist judging a picture, then presses it lovingly into place with his
fat, pink fingers, every one of which he has licked a hundred times that morning. When
he is satisfied, he takes a cloth and wipes his fingerprints from the dish, and hands it to
the waiter. And the waiter, of course, dips HIS fingers into the gravy — his nasty, greasy
fingers which he is for ever running through his brilliantined hair. Whenever one pays
more than, say, ten francs for a dish of meat in Paris, one may be certain that it has been
fingered in this manner. In very cheap restaurants it is different; there, the same trouble is
not taken over the food, and it is just forked out of the pan and flung on to a plate,
without handling. Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and
spittle one is obliged to eat with it.
Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because sound food is sacrificed to
punctuality and smartness. The hotel employee is too busy getting food ready to
remember that it is meant to be eaten. A meal is simply ‘UNE COMMANDE’ to him,
just as a man dying of cancer is simply ‘a case’ to the doctor. A customer orders, for
example, a piece of toast. Somebody, pressed with work in a cellar deep underground,
has to prepare it. How can he stop and say to himself, ‘This toast is to be eaten — I must
make it eatable’? All he knows is that it must look right and must be ready in three
minutes. Some large drops of sweat fall from his forehead on to the toast. Why should he
worry? Presently the toast falls among the filthy sawdust on the floor. Why trouble to
make a new piece? It is much quicker to wipe the sawdust off. On the way upstairs the
toast falls again, butter side down. Another wipe is all it needs. And so with everything.
The only food at the Hotel X which was ever prepared cleanly was the staffs, and the
PATRON’S. The maxim, repeated by everyone, was: ‘Look out for the PATRON, and as
for the clients, S’EN F — PAS MALI’ Everywhere in the service quarters dirt festered — a
secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel like the intestines through a
man’s body.
Apart from the dirt, the PATRON swindled the customers wholeheartedly. For the most
part the materials of the food were very bad, though the cooks knew how to serve it up in
style. The meat was at best ordinary, and as to the vegetables, no good housekeeper
would have looked at them in the market. The cream, by a standing order, was diluted
with milk. The tea and coffee were of inferior sorts, and the jam was synthetic stuff out of
vast, unlabelled tins. All the cheaper wines, according to Boris, were corked VIN
ORDINAIRE. There was a rule that employees must pay for anything they spoiled, and
in consequence damaged things were seldom thrown away. Once the waiter on the third
floor dropped a roast chicken down the shaft of our service lift, where it fell into a litter
of broken bread, tom paper and so forth at the bottom. We simply wiped it with a cloth
and sent it up again. Upstairs there were dirty tales of once-used sheets not being washed,
but simply damped, ironed and put back on the beds. The PATRON was as mean to us as
to the customers. Throughout the vast hotel there was not, for instance, such a thing as a
brush and pan; one had to manage with a broom and a piece of cardboard. And the staff
lavatory was worthy of Central Asia, and there was no place to wash one’s hands, except
the si nk s used for washing crockery.
In spite of all this the Hotel X was one of the dozen most expensive hotels in Paris, and
the customers paid startling prices. The ordinary charge for a night’s lodging, not
including breakfast, was two hundred francs. All wine and tobacco were sold at exactly
double shop prices, though of course the PATRON bought at the wholesale price. If a
customer had a title, or was reputed to be a millionaire, all his charges went up
automatically. One morning on the fourth floor an American who was on diet wanted
only salt and hot water for his breakfast. Valenti was furious. ‘Jesus Christ! ’ he said,
‘what about my ten per cent? Ten per cent of salt and water! ’ And he charged twenty- five
francs for the breakfast. The customer paid without a murmur.
According to Boris, the same kind of thing went on in all Paris hotels, or at least in all the
big, expensive ones. But I imagine that the customers at the Hotel X were especially easy
to swindle, for they were mostly Americans, with a sprinkling of English — no French —
and seemed to know nothing whatever about good food. They would stuff themselves
with disgusting American ‘cereals’, and eat marmalade at tea, and drink vennouth after
dinner, and order a POULET A LA REINE at a hundred francs and then souse it in
Worcester sauce. One customer, from Pittsburg, dined every night in his bedroom on
grape-nuts, scrambled eggs and cocoa. Perhaps it hardly matters whether such o people
are swindled or not.
CHAPTER XV
I heard queer tales in the hotel. There were tales of dope fiends, of old debauchees who
frequented hotels in search of pretty page boys, of thefts and blackmail. Mario told me of
a hotel in which he had been, where a chambermaid stole a priceless diamond ring from
an American lady. For days the staff were searched as they left work, and two detectives
searched the hotel from top to bottom, but the ring was never found. The chambermaid
had a lover in the bakery, and he had baked the ring into a roll, where it lay unsuspected
until the search was over.
Once Valenti, at a slack time, told me a story about himself.
‘You know, MON P’TIT, this hotel life is all very well, but it’s the devil when you’re out
of work. I expect you know what it is to go without eating, eh?
‘But what about my wages if I break my contract?
‘Boris banged his stick on the pavement and cried out at such stupidity. ‘Ask to be paid
by the day, then you won’t lose a sou. Do you suppose they would prosecute a
PLONGEUR for breaking Us contract? A PLONGEUR is too low to be prosecuted. ’
I hurried back, found the CHEF DU PERSONNEL, and told him that I would work for a
month, whereat he signed me on. Ibis was my first lesson in PLONGEUR morality. Later
I realized how foolish it had been to have any scruples, for the big hotels are quite
merciless towards their employees. They engage or discharge men as the work demands,
and they all sack ten per cent or more of their staff when the season is over. Nor have
they any difficulty in replacing a man who leaves at short notice, for Paris is thronged by
hotel employees out of work.
CHAPTER XI
As it turned out, I did not break my contract, for it was six weeks before the Auberge de
Jehan Cottard even showed signs of opening. In the meantime I worked at the Hotel X,
four days a week in the cafeterie, one day helping the waiter on the fourth floor, and one
day replacing the woman who washed up for the dining-room. My day off, luckily, was
Sunday, but sometimes another man was ill and I had to work that day as well. The hours
were from seven in the morning till two in the afternoon, and from five in the evening till
nine — eleven hours; but it was a fourteen-hour day when I washed up for the dining-
room. By the ordinary standards of a Paris PLONGEUR, these are exceptionally short
hours. The only hardship of life was the fearful heat and stuffiness of these labyrinthine
cellars. Apart from this the hotel, which was large and well organized, was considered a
comfortable one.
Our cafeterie was a murky cellar measuring twenty feet by seven by eight high, and so
crowded with coffee-urns, breadcutters and the like that one could hardly move without
banging against something. It was lighted by one dim electric bulb, and four or five gas-
fires that sent out a fierce red breath. There was a thermometer there, and the temperature
never fell below 1 10 degrees Fahrenheit — it neared 130 at some times of the day. At one
end were five service lifts, and at the other an ice cupboard where we stored milk and
butter. When you went into the ice cupboard you dropped a hundred degrees of
temperature at a single step; it used to remind me of the hymn about Greenland’s icy
mountains and India’s coral strand. Two men worked in the cafeterie besides Boris and
myself. One was Mario, a huge, excitable Italian — he was like a city policeman with
operatic gestures — and the other, a hairy, uncouth animal whom we called the Magyar; I
think he was a Transylvanian, or something even more remote. Except the Magyar we
were all big men, and at the rush hours we collided incessantly.
The work in the cafeterie was spasmodic. We were never idle, but the real work only
came in bursts of two hours at a time — we called each burst ‘UN COUP DE FEU’. The
first COUP DE FEU came at eight, when the guests upstairs began to wake up and
demand breakfast. At eight a sudden banging and yelling would break out all through the
basement; bells rang on all sides, blue-aproned men rushed through the passages, our
service lifts came down with a simultaneous crash, and the waiters on all five floors
began shouting Italian oaths down the shafts. I don’t remember all our duties, but they
included making tea, coffee and chocolate, fetching meals from the kitchen, wines from
the cellar and fruit and so forth from the dining-room, slicing bread, making toast, rolling
pats of butter, measuring jam, opening milk-cans, counting lumps of sugar, boiling eggs,
cooking porridge, pounding ice, grinding coffee — all this for from a hundred to two
hundred customers. The kitchen was thirty yards away, and the dining-room sixty or
seventy yards. Everything we sent up in the service lifts had to be covered by a voucher,
and the vouchers had to be carefully filed, and there was trouble if even a lump of sugar
was lost. Besides this, we had to supply the staff with bread and coffee, and fetch the
meals for the waiters upstairs. All in all, it was a complicated job.
I calculated that one had to walk and run about fifteen miles during the day, and yet the
strain of the work was more mental than physical. Nothing could be easier, on the face of
it, than this stupid scullion work, but it is astonishingly hard when one is in a hurry. One
has to leap to and fro between a multitude of jobs — it is like sorting a pack of cards
against the clock. You are, for example, making toast, when bang! down comes a service
lift with an order for tea, rolls and three different kinds of jam, and simultaneously bang!
down comes another demanding scrambled eggs, coffee and grapefruit; you run to the
kitchen for the eggs and to the dining-room for the fruit, going like lightning so as to be
back before your toast bums, and having to remember about the tea and coffee, besides
half a dozen other orders that are still pending; and at the same time some waiter is
following you and making trouble about a lost bottle of soda-water, and you are arguing
with him. It needs more brains than one might think. Mario said, no doubt truly, that it
took a year to make a reliable cafetier.
The time between eight and half past ten was a sort of delirium. Sometimes we were
going as though we had only five minutes to live; sometimes there were sudden lulls
when the orders stopped and everything seemed quiet for a moment. Then we swept up
the litter from the floor, threw down fresh sawdust, and swallowed gallipots of wine or
coffee or water — anything, so long as it was wet. Very often we used to break off chunks
of ice and suck them while we worked. The heat among the gas-fires was nauseating; we
swallowed quarts of drink during the day, and after a few hours even our aprons were
drenched with sweat. At times we were hopelessly behind with the work, and some of the
customers would have gone without their breakfast, but Mario always pulled us through.
He had worked fourteen years in the cafeterie, and he had the skill that never wastes a
second between jobs. The Magyar was very stupid and I was inexperienced, and Boris
was inclined to shirk, partly because of his lame leg, partly because he was ashamed of
working in the cafeterie after being a waiter; but Mario was wonderful. The way he
would stretch his great arms right across the cafeterie to fill a coffee-pot with one hand
and boil an egg with the other, at the same time watching toast and shouting directions to
the Magyar, and between whiles singing snatches from RIGOLETTO, was beyond all
praise. The PATRON knew his value, and he was paid a thousand francs a month, instead
of five hundred like the rest of us.
The breakfast pandemonium stopped at half past ten. Then we scrubbed the cafeterie
tables, swept the floor and polished the brasswork, and, on good mornings, went one at a
time to the lavatory for a smoke. This was our slack time — only relatively slack,
however, for we had only ten minutes for lunch, and we never got through it
uninterrupted. The customers’ luncheon hour, between twelve and two, was another
period of turmoil like the breakfast hour. Most of our work was fetching meals from the
kitchen, which meant constant ENGUEULADES from the cooks. By this time the cooks
had sweated in front of their furnaces for four or five hours, and their tempers were all
warmed up.
At two we were suddenly free men. We threw off our aprons and put on our coats,
hurried out of doors, and, when we had money, dived into the nearest BISTRO. It was
strange, coming up into the street from those firelit cellars. The air seemed blindingly
clear and cold, like arctic summer; and how sweet the petrol did smell, after the stenches
of sweat and food! Sometimes we met some of our cooks and waiters in the BISTROS,
and they were friendly and stood us drinks. Indoors we were their slaves, but it is an
etiquette in hotel life that between hours everyone is equal, and the ENGUEULADES do
not count.
At a quarter to five we went back to the hotel. Till half-past six there were no orders, and
we used this time to polish silver, clean out the coffee-urns, and do other odd jobs. Then
the grand turmoil of the day started — the dinner hour. I wish I could be Zola for a little
while, just to describe that dinner hour. The essence of the situation was that a hundred or
two hundred people were demanding individually different meals of five or six courses,
and that fifty or sixty people had to cook and serve them and clean up the mess
afterwards; anyone with experience of catering will know what that means. And at this
time when the work was doubled, the whole staff was tired out, and a number of them
were drunk. I could write pages about the scene without giving a true idea of it. The
chargings to and fro in the narrow passages, the collisions, the yells, the struggling with
crates and trays and blocks of ice, the heat, the darkness, the furious festering quarrels
which there was no time to fight out — they pass description. Anyone coming into the
basement for the first time would have thought himself in a den of maniacs. It was only
later, when I understood the working of a hotel, that I saw order in all this chaos.
At half past eight the work stopped very suddenly. We were not free till nine, but we used
to throw ourselves full length on the floor, and lie there resting our legs, too lazy even to
go to the ice cupboard for a drink. Sometimes the CHEF DU PERSONNEL would come
in with bottles of beer, for the hotel stood us an extra beer when we had had a hard day.
The food we were given was no more than eatable, but the PATRON was not mean about
drink; he allowed us two litres of wine a day each, knowing that if a PLONGEUR is not
given two litres he will steal three. We had the heeltaps of bottles as well, so that we
often drank too much — a good thing, for one seemed to work faster when partially drunk.
Four days of the week passed like this; of the other two working days, one was better and
one worse. After a week of this life I felt in need of a holiday. It was Saturday night, so
the people in our BISTRO were busy getting drunk, and with a free day ahead of me I
was ready to join them. We all went to bed, drunk, at two in the morning, meaning to
sleep till noon. At half past five I was suddenly awakened. A night-watchman, sent from
the hotel, was standing at my bedside. He stripped the clothes back and shook me
roughly.
‘Get up! ’ he said. ‘TU T’ES BIEN SAOULE LA GNEULE, EH? Well, never mind that,
the hotel’s a man short. You’ve got to work today. ’
‘Why should I work? ’ I protested. ‘This is my day off. ’
‘Day off, nothing! The work’s got to be done. Get up! ’
I got up and went out, feeling as though my back were broken and my skull fdled with
hot cinders. I did not think that I could possibly do a day’s work. And yet, after only an
hour in the basement, I found that I was perfectly well. It seemed that in the heat of those
cellars, as in a turkish bath, one could sweat out almost any quantity of drink.
PLONGEURS know this, and count on it. The power of swallowing quarts of wine, and
then sweating it out before it can do much damage, is one of the compensations of their
life.
CHAPTER XII
By far my best time at the hotel was when I went to help the waiter on the fourth floor.
We worked in a small pantry which communicated with the cafeterie by service lifts. It
was delightfully cool after the cellars, and the work was chiefly polishing silver and
glasses, which is a humane job. Valenti, the waiter, was a decent sort, and treated me
almost as an equal when we were alone, though he had to speak roughly when there was
anyone else present, for it does not do for a waiter to be friendly with PLONGEURS. He
used sometimes to tip me five francs when he had had a good day. He was a comely
youth, aged twenty-four but looking eighteen, and, like most waiters, he carried himself
well and knew how to wear his clothes. With his black tail-coat and white tie, fresh face
and sleek brown hair, he looked just like an Eton boy; yet he had earned his living since
he was twelve, and worked his way up literally from the gutter. Grossing the Italian
frontier without a passport, and selling chestnuts from a barrow on the northern
boulevards, and being given fifty days’ imprisonment in London for working without a
pennit, and being made love to by a rich old woman in a hotel, who gave him a diamond
ring and afterwards accused him of stealing it, were among his experiences. I used to
enjoy talking to him, at slack times when we sat smoking down the lift shaft.
My bad day was when I washed up for the dining-room. I had not to wash the plates,
which were done in the kitchen, but only the other crockery, silver, knives and glasses;
yet, even so, it meant thirteen hours’ work, and I used between thirty and forty dishcloths
during the day. The antiquated methods used in France double the work of washing up.
Plate-racks are unheard-of, and there are no soap-flakes, only the treacly soft soap, which
refuses to lather in the hard, Paris water. I worked in a dirty, crowded little den, a pantry
and scullery combined, which gave straight on the dining-room. Besides washing up, I
had to fetch the waiters’ food and serve them at table; most of them were intolerably
insolent, and I had to use my fists more than once to get common civility. The person
who normally washed up was a woman, and they made her life a misery.
It was amusing to look round the filthy little scullery and think that only a double door
was between us and the dining-room. There sat the customers in all their splendour —
spotless table-cloths, bowls of flowers, mirrors and gilt cornices and painted cherubim;
and here, just a few feet away, we in our disgusting filth. For it really was disgusting
filth. There was no time to sweep the floor till evening, and we slithered about in a
compound of soapy water, lettuce-leaves, tom paper and trampled food. A dozen waiters
with their coats off, showing their sweaty armpits, sat at the table mixing salads and
sticking their thumbs into the cream pots. The room had a dirty, mixed smell of food and
sweat. Everywhere in the cupboards, behind the piles of crockery, were squalid stores of
food that the waiters had stolen. There were only two sinks, and no washing basin, and it
was nothing unusual for a waiter to wash his face in the water in which clean crockery
was rinsing. But the customers saw nothing of this. There were a coco-nut mat and a
mirror outside the dining-room door, and the waiters used to preen themselves up and go
in looking the picture of cleanliness.
It is an instructive sight to see a waiter going into a hotel dining-room. As he passes the
door a sudden change comes over him. The set of his shoulders alters; all the dirt and
hurry and irritation have dropped off in an instant. He glides over the carpet, with a
solemn priest-like air. I remember our assistant MAITRE D’ HOTEL, a fiery Italian,
pausing at the dining-room door to address an apprentice who had broken a bottle of
wine. Shaking his fist above his head he yelled (luckily the door was more or less
soundproof):
‘TU ME FAIS — Do you call yourself a waiter, you young bastard? You a waiter! You’re
not fit to scrub floors in the brothel your mother came from. MAQUEREAU! ’
Words failing him, he turned to the door; and as he opened it he delivered a final insult in
the same manner as Squire Western in TOM JONES.
Then he entered the dining-room and sailed across it dish in hand, graceful as a swan.
Ten seconds later he was bowing reverently to a customer. And you could not help
thinking, as you saw him bow and smile, with that benign smile of the trained waiter, that
the customer was put to shame by having such an aristocrat to serve him.
This washing up was a thoroughly odious job — not hard, but boring and silly beyond
words. It is dreadful to think that some people spend their whole decades at such
occupations. The woman whom I replaced was quite sixty years old, and she stood at the
sink thirteen hours a day, six days a week, the year round; she was, in addition, horribly
bullied by the waiters. She gave out that she had once been an actress — actually, I
imagine, a prostitute; most prostitutes end as charwomen. It was strange to see that in
spite of her age and her life she still wore a bright blonde wig, and darkened her eyes and
painted her face like a girl of twenty. So apparently even a seventy-eight-hour week can
leave one with some vitality.
CHAPTER XIII
On my third day at the hotel the CHEF DU PERSONNEL, who had generally spoken to
me in quite a pleasant tone, called me up and said sharply:
‘Here, you, shave that moustache off at once! NOM DE DIEU, who ever heard of a
PLONGEUR with a moustache? ’
I began to protest, but he cut me short. ‘A PLONGEUR with a moustache — nonsense!
Take care I don’t see you with it tomorrow. ’
On the way home I asked Boris what this meant. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘You must
do what he says, MON AMI. No one in the hotel wears a moustache, except the cooks. I
should have thought you would have noticed it. Reason? There is no reason. It is the
custom. ’
I saw that it was an etiquette, like not wearing a white tie with a dinner-jacket, and
shaved off my moustache. Afterwards I found out the explanation of the custom, which is
this: waiters in good hotels do not wear moustaches, and to show their superiority they
decree that PLONGEURS shall not wear them either; and the cooks wear their
moustaches to show their contempt for the waiters.
This gives some idea of the elaborate caste system existing in a hotel. Our staff,
amounting to about a hundred and ten, had their prestige graded as accurately as that of
soldiers, and a cook or waiter was as much above a PLONGEUR as a captain above a
private. Highest of all came the manager, who could sack anybody, even the cooks. We
never saw the PATRON, and all we knew of him was that his meals had to be prepared
more carefully than that of the customers; all the discipline of the hotel depended on the
manager. He was a conscientious man, and always on the lookout for slackness, but we
were too clever for him. A system of service bells ran through the hotel, and the whole
staff used these for signalling to one another. A long ring and a short ring, followed by
two more long rings, meant that the manager was coming, and when we heard it we took
care to look busy.
Below the manager came the MAITRE D’HOTEL. He did not serve at table, unless to a
lord or someone of that kind, but directed the other waiters and helped with the catering.
His tips, and his bonus from the champagne companies (it was two francs for each cork
he returned to them), came to two hundred francs a day. He was in a position quite apart
from the rest of the staff, and took his meals in a private room, with silver on the table
and two apprentices in clean white jackets to serve him. A little below the head waiter
came the head cook, drawing about five thousand francs a month; he dined in the kitchen,
but at a separate table, and one of the apprentice cooks waited on him. Then came the
CHEF DU PERSONNEL; he drew only fifteen hundred francs a month, but he wore a
black coat and did no manual work, and he could sack PLONGEURS and fine waiters.
Then came the other cooks, drawing anything between three thousand and seven hundred
and fifty A francs a month; then the waiters, making about seventy francs a day in tips,
besides a small retaining fee; then the laundresses and sewing women; then the
apprentice waiters, who received no tips, but were paid seven hundred and fifty francs a
month; then the PLONGEURS, also at seven hundred and fifty francs; then the
chambermaids, at five or six hundred francs a month; and lastly the cafetiers, at five
hundred a month. We of the cafeterie were the very dregs of the hotel, despised and
TUTOIED by everyone.
There were various others — the office employees, called generally couriers, the
storekeeper, the cellannan, some porters and pages, the ice man, the bakers, the night-
watchman, the doorkeeper. Different jobs were done by different races. The office
employees and the cooks and sewing-women were French, the waiters Italians and
Germans (there is hardly such a thing as a French waiter in Paris), the PLONGEURS of
every race in Europe, beside Arabs and Negroes. French was the lingua franca, even the
Italians speaking it to one another.
All the departments had their special perquisites. In all Paris hotels it is the custom to sell
the broken bread to bakers for eight sous a pound, and the kitchen scraps to pigkeepers
for a trifle, and to divide the proceeds of this among the PLONGEURS. There was much
pilfering, too. The waiters all stole food — in fact, I seldom saw a waiter trouble to eat the
rations provided for him by the hotel — and the cooks did it on a larger scale in the
kitchen, and we in the cafeterie swilled illicit tea and coffee. The cellannan stole brandy.
By a rule of the hotel the waiters were not allowed to keep stores of spirits, but had to go
to the cellannan for each drink as it was ordered. As the cellannan poured out the drinks
he would set aside perhaps a teaspoonful from each glass, and he amassed quantities in
this way. He would sell you the stolen brandy for five sous a swig if he thought he could
trust you.
There were thieves among the staff, and if you left money in your coat pockets it was
generally taken. The doorkeeper, who paid our wages and searched us for stolen food,
was the greatest thief in the hotel. Out of my five hundred francs a month, this man
actually managed to cheat me of a hundred and fourteen francs in six weeks. I had asked
to be paid daily, so the doorkeeper paid me sixteen francs each evening, and, by not
paying for Sundays (for which of course payment was due), pocketed sixty-four francs.
Also, I sometimes worked on a Sunday, for which, though I did not know it, I was
entitled to an extra twenty-five francs. The doorkeeper never paid me this either, and so
made away with another seventy-five francs. I only realized during my last week that I
was being cheated, and, as I could prove nothing, only twenty-five francs were refunded.
The doorkeeper played similar tricks on any employee who was fool enough to be taken
in. He called himself a Greek, but in reality he was an Annenian. After knowing him I
saw the force of the proverb ‘Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but
don’t trust an Armenian.
’
There were queer characters among the waiters. One was a gentleman — a youth who had
been educated at a university, and had had a well-paid job in a business office. He had
caught a venereal disease, lost his job, drifted, and now considered himself lucky to be a
waiter. Many of the waiters had slipped into France without passports, and one or two of
them were spies — it is a common profession for a spy to adopt. One day there was a
fearful row in the waiters’ dining-room between Morandi, a dangerous-looking man with
eyes set too far apart, and another Italian. It appeared that Morandi had taken the other
man’s mistress. The other man, a weakling and obviously frightened of Morandi, was
threatening vaguely.
Morandi jeered at him. ‘Well, what are you going to do about it? I’ve slept with your girl,
slept with her three times. It was fine. What can you do, eh? ’
‘I can denounce you to the secret police. You are an Italian spy. ’
Morandi did not deny it. He simply produced a razor from his tail pocket and made two
swift strokes in the air, as though slashing a man’s cheeks open. Whereat the other waiter
took it back.
The queerest type I ever saw in the hotel was an ‘extra’. He had been engaged at twenty-
five francs for the day to replace the Magyar, who was ill. He was a Serbian, a thick-set
nimble fellow of about twenty-five, speaking six languages, including English. He
seemed to know all about hotel work, and up till midday he worked like a slave. Then, as
soon as it had struck twelve, he turned sulky, shirked Us work, stole wine, and finally
crowned all by loafing about openly with a pipe in his mouth. Smoking, of course, was
forbidden under severe penalties. The manager himself heard of it and came down to
interview the Serbian, fuming with rage.
‘What the devil do you mean by smoking here? ’ he cried.
‘What the devil do you mean by having a face like that? ’ answered the Serbian, calmly.
I cannot convey the blasphemy of such a remark. The head cook, if a PLONGEUR had
spoken to him like that, would have thrown a saucepan of hot soup in his face. The
manager said instantly, ‘You’re sacked! ’ and at two o’clock the Serbian was given his
twenty-five francs and duly sacked. Before he went out Boris asked him in Russian what
game he was playing. He said the Serbian answered:
‘Look here, MON VIEUX, they’ve got to pay me a day’s wages if I work up to midday,
haven’t they? That’s the law. And where’s the sense of working after I get my wages? So
I’ll tell you what I do. I go to a hotel and get a job as an extra, and up to midday I work
hard. Then, the moment it’s struck twelve, I start raising such hell that they’ve no choice
but to sack me. Neat, eh? Most days I’m sacked by half past twelve; today it was two
o’clock; but I don’t care, I’ve saved four hours’ work. The only trouble is, one can’t do it
at the same hotel twice. ’
It appeared that he had played this game at half the hotels and restaurants in Paris. It is
probably quite an easy game to play during the summer, though the hotels protect
themselves against it as well as they can by means of a black list.
CHAPTER XIV
In a few days I had grasped the main principles on which the hotel was run. The thing
that would astonish anyone coming for the first time into the service quarters of a hotel
would be the fearful noise and disorder during the rush hours. It is something so different
from the steady work in a shop or a factory that it looks at first sight like mere bad
management. But it is really quite unavoidable, and for this reason. Hotel work is not
particularly hard, but by its nature it comes in rushes and cannot be economized. You
cannot, for instance, grill a steak two hours before it is wanted; you have to wait till the
last moment, by which time a mass of other work has accumulated, and then do it all
together, in frantic haste. The result is that at mealtimes everyone is doing two men’s
work, which is impossible without noise and quarrelling. Indeed the quarrels are a
necessary part of the process, for the pace would never be kept up if everyone did not
accuse everyone else of idling. It was for this reason that during the rush hours the whole
staff raged and cursed like demons. At those times there was scarcely a verb in the hotel
except FOUTRE. A girl in the bakery, aged sixteen, used oaths that would have defeated
a cabman. (Did not Hamlet say ‘cursing like a scullion’? No doubt Shakespeare had
watched scullions at work. ) But we are not losing our heads and wasting time; we were
just stimulating one another for the effort of packing four hours’ work into two hours.
What keeps a hotel going is the fact that the employees take a genuine pride in their
work, beastly and silly though it is. If a man idles, the others soon find him out, and
conspire against him to get him sacked. Cooks, waiters and PLONGEURS differ greatly
in outlook, but they are all alike in being proud of their efficiency.
Undoubtedly the most workmanlike class, and the least servile, are the cooks. They do
not earn quite so much as waiters, but their prestige is higher and their employment
steadier. The cook does not look upon himself as a servant, but as a skilled workman; he
is generally called ‘UN OUVRIER’ which a waiter never is. He knows his power —
knows that he alone makes or mars a restaurant, and that if he is five minutes late
everything is out of gear. He despises the whole non-cooking staff, and makes it a point
of honour to insult everyone below the head waiter. And he takes a genuine artistic pride
in his work, which demands very great skill. It is not the cooking that is so difficult, but
the doing everything to time. Between breakfast and luncheon the head cook at the Hotel
X would receive orders for several hundred dishes, all to be served at different times; he
cooked few of them himself, but he gave instructions about all of them and inspected
them before they were sent up. His memory was wonderful. The vouchers were pinned
on a board, but the head cook seldom looked at them; everything was stored in his mind,
and exactly to the minute, as each dish fell due, he would call out, ‘FAITES MARCHER
UNE COTELETTE DE VEAU’ (or whatever it was) unfailingly. He was an insufferable
bully, but he was also an artist. It is for their punctuality, and not for any superiority in
technique, that men cooks arc preferred to women.
The waiter’s outlook is quite different. He too is proud in a way of his skill, but his skill
is chiefly in being servile. His work gives him the mentality, not of a workman, but of a
snob. He lives perpetually in sight of rich people, stands at their tables, listens to their
conversation, sucks up to them with smiles and discreet little jokes. He has the pleasure
of spending money by proxy. Moreover, there is always the chance that he may become
rich himself, for, though most waiters die poor, they have long runs of luck occasionally.
At some cafes on the Grand Boulevard there is so much money to be made that the
waiters actually pay the PATRON for their employment. The result is that between
constantly seeing money, and hoping to get it, the waiter comes to identify himself to
some extent with his employers. He will take pains to serve a meal in style, because he
feels that he is participating in the meal himself.
I remember Valenti telling me of some banquet at Nice at which he had once served, and
of how it cost two hundred thousand francs and was talked of for months afterwards. ‘It
was splendid, MON P’TIT, MAIS MAGNIFIQUE! Jesus Christ! The champagne, the
silver, the orchids — I have never seen anything like them, and I have seen some things.
Ah, it was glorious! ’
‘But,’ I said, ‘you were only there to wait? ’
‘Oh, of course. But still, it was splendid. ’
The moral is, never be sorry for a waiter. Sometimes when you sit in a restaurant, still
stuffing yourself half an hour after closing time, you feel that the tired waiter at your side
must surely be despising you. But he is not. He is not thinking as he looks at you, ‘What
an overfed lout’; he is thinking, ‘One day, when I have saved enough money, I shall be
able to imitate that man. ’ He is ministering to a kind of pleasure he thoroughly
understands and admires. And that is why waiters are seldom Socialists, have no effective
trade union, and will work twelve hours a day — they work fifteen hours, seven days a
week, in many cafes. They are snobs, and they find the servile nature of their work rather
congenial.
The PLONGEURS, again, have a different outlook. Theirs is a job which offers no
prospects, is intensely exhausting, and at the same time has not a trace of skill or interest;
the sort of job that would always be done by women if women were strong enough. All
that is required of them is to be constantly on the run, and to put up with long hours and a
stuffy atmosphere. They have no way of escaping from this life, for they cannot save a
penny from their wages, and working from sixty to a hundred hours a week leaves them
no time to train for anything else. The best they can hope for is to find a slightly softer
job as night-watchman or lavatory attendant.
And yet the PLONGEURS, low as they are, also have a kind of pride. It is the pride of
the drudge — the man who is equal to no matter what quantity of work. At that level, the
mere power to go on working like an ox is about the only virtue attainable.
DEBROUILLARD is what every PLONGEUR wants to be called. A DEBROUILLARD
is a man who, even when he is told to do the impossible, will SE DEBROUILLER — get
it done somehow. One of the kitchen PLONGEURS at the Hotel X, a German, was well
known as a DEBROUILLARD. One night an English lord came to the hotel, and the
waiters were in despair, for the lord had asked for peaches, and there were none in stock;
it was late at night, and the shops would be shut. ‘Leave it to me,’ said the German. He
went out, and in ten minutes he was back with four peaches. He had gone into a
neighbouring restaurant and stolen them. That is what is meant by a DEBROUILLARD.
The English lord paid for the peaches at twenty francs each.
Mario, who was in charge of the cafeterie, had the typical drudge mentality. All he
thought of was getting through the ‘BOULOT’, and he defied you to give him too much
of it. Fourteen years underground had left him with about as much natural laziness as a
piston rod. ‘FAUT ETRE DUR,’ he used to say when anyone complained. You will often
hear PLONGEURS boast, ‘JE SUIS DUR’ — as though they were soldiers, not male
charwomen.
Thus everyone in the hotel had his sense of honour, and when the press of work came we
were all ready for a grand concerted effort to get through it. The constant war between
the different departments also made for efficiency, for everyone clung to his own
privileges and tried to stop the others idling and pilfering.
This is the good side of hotel work. In a hotel a huge and complicated machine is kept
running by an inadequate staff, because every man has a well-defined job and does it
scrupulously. But there is a weak point, and it is this — that the job the staff are doing is
not necessarily what the customer pays for. The customer pays, as he sees it, for good
service; the employee is paid, as he sees it, for the BOULOT — meaning, as a rule, an
imitation of good service. The result is that, though hotels are miracles of punctuality,
they are worse than the worst private houses in the things that matter.
Take cleanliness, for example. The dirt in the Hotel X, as soon as one penetrated into the
service quarters, was revolting. Our cafeterie had year-old filth in all the dark corners,
and the bread-bin was infested with cockroaches. Once I suggested killing these beasts to
Mario. ‘Why kill the poor animals? ’ he said reproachfully. The others laughed when I
wanted to wash my hands before touching the butter. Yet we were clean where we
recognized cleanliness as part of the BOULOT. We scrubbed the tables and polished the
brasswork regularly, because we had orders to do that; but we had no orders to be
genuinely clean, and in any case we had no time for it. We were simply carrying out our
duties; and as our first duty was punctuality, we saved time by being dirty.
In the kitchen the dirt was worse. It is not a figure of speech, it is a mere statement of fact
to say that a French cook will spit in the soup — that is, if he is not going to drink it
himself. He is an artist, but his art is not cleanliness. To a certain extent he is even dirty
because he is an artist, for food, to look smart, needs dirty treatment. When a steak, for
instance, is brought up for the head cook’s inspection, he does not handle it with a fork.
He picks it up in his fingers and slaps it down, runs his thumb round the dish and licks it
to taste the gravy, runs it round and licks again, then steps back and contemplates the
piece of meat like an artist judging a picture, then presses it lovingly into place with his
fat, pink fingers, every one of which he has licked a hundred times that morning. When
he is satisfied, he takes a cloth and wipes his fingerprints from the dish, and hands it to
the waiter. And the waiter, of course, dips HIS fingers into the gravy — his nasty, greasy
fingers which he is for ever running through his brilliantined hair. Whenever one pays
more than, say, ten francs for a dish of meat in Paris, one may be certain that it has been
fingered in this manner. In very cheap restaurants it is different; there, the same trouble is
not taken over the food, and it is just forked out of the pan and flung on to a plate,
without handling. Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and
spittle one is obliged to eat with it.
Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because sound food is sacrificed to
punctuality and smartness. The hotel employee is too busy getting food ready to
remember that it is meant to be eaten. A meal is simply ‘UNE COMMANDE’ to him,
just as a man dying of cancer is simply ‘a case’ to the doctor. A customer orders, for
example, a piece of toast. Somebody, pressed with work in a cellar deep underground,
has to prepare it. How can he stop and say to himself, ‘This toast is to be eaten — I must
make it eatable’? All he knows is that it must look right and must be ready in three
minutes. Some large drops of sweat fall from his forehead on to the toast. Why should he
worry? Presently the toast falls among the filthy sawdust on the floor. Why trouble to
make a new piece? It is much quicker to wipe the sawdust off. On the way upstairs the
toast falls again, butter side down. Another wipe is all it needs. And so with everything.
The only food at the Hotel X which was ever prepared cleanly was the staffs, and the
PATRON’S. The maxim, repeated by everyone, was: ‘Look out for the PATRON, and as
for the clients, S’EN F — PAS MALI’ Everywhere in the service quarters dirt festered — a
secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel like the intestines through a
man’s body.
Apart from the dirt, the PATRON swindled the customers wholeheartedly. For the most
part the materials of the food were very bad, though the cooks knew how to serve it up in
style. The meat was at best ordinary, and as to the vegetables, no good housekeeper
would have looked at them in the market. The cream, by a standing order, was diluted
with milk. The tea and coffee were of inferior sorts, and the jam was synthetic stuff out of
vast, unlabelled tins. All the cheaper wines, according to Boris, were corked VIN
ORDINAIRE. There was a rule that employees must pay for anything they spoiled, and
in consequence damaged things were seldom thrown away. Once the waiter on the third
floor dropped a roast chicken down the shaft of our service lift, where it fell into a litter
of broken bread, tom paper and so forth at the bottom. We simply wiped it with a cloth
and sent it up again. Upstairs there were dirty tales of once-used sheets not being washed,
but simply damped, ironed and put back on the beds. The PATRON was as mean to us as
to the customers. Throughout the vast hotel there was not, for instance, such a thing as a
brush and pan; one had to manage with a broom and a piece of cardboard. And the staff
lavatory was worthy of Central Asia, and there was no place to wash one’s hands, except
the si nk s used for washing crockery.
In spite of all this the Hotel X was one of the dozen most expensive hotels in Paris, and
the customers paid startling prices. The ordinary charge for a night’s lodging, not
including breakfast, was two hundred francs. All wine and tobacco were sold at exactly
double shop prices, though of course the PATRON bought at the wholesale price. If a
customer had a title, or was reputed to be a millionaire, all his charges went up
automatically. One morning on the fourth floor an American who was on diet wanted
only salt and hot water for his breakfast. Valenti was furious. ‘Jesus Christ! ’ he said,
‘what about my ten per cent? Ten per cent of salt and water! ’ And he charged twenty- five
francs for the breakfast. The customer paid without a murmur.
According to Boris, the same kind of thing went on in all Paris hotels, or at least in all the
big, expensive ones. But I imagine that the customers at the Hotel X were especially easy
to swindle, for they were mostly Americans, with a sprinkling of English — no French —
and seemed to know nothing whatever about good food. They would stuff themselves
with disgusting American ‘cereals’, and eat marmalade at tea, and drink vennouth after
dinner, and order a POULET A LA REINE at a hundred francs and then souse it in
Worcester sauce. One customer, from Pittsburg, dined every night in his bedroom on
grape-nuts, scrambled eggs and cocoa. Perhaps it hardly matters whether such o people
are swindled or not.
CHAPTER XV
I heard queer tales in the hotel. There were tales of dope fiends, of old debauchees who
frequented hotels in search of pretty page boys, of thefts and blackmail. Mario told me of
a hotel in which he had been, where a chambermaid stole a priceless diamond ring from
an American lady. For days the staff were searched as they left work, and two detectives
searched the hotel from top to bottom, but the ring was never found. The chambermaid
had a lover in the bakery, and he had baked the ring into a roll, where it lay unsuspected
until the search was over.
Once Valenti, at a slack time, told me a story about himself.
‘You know, MON P’TIT, this hotel life is all very well, but it’s the devil when you’re out
of work. I expect you know what it is to go without eating, eh?
