It was now
absolutely
necessary to find work, and I remembered a friend of mine, a
Russian waiter named Boris, who might be able to help me.
Russian waiter named Boris, who might be able to help me.
Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
At the far end stood a huge, square
bed, with quilts red like the rest, and on it a girl was lying, dressed in a frock of red
velvet. At the sight of me she shrank away and tried to hide her knees under the short
dress.
‘I had halted by the door. “Come here, my chicken,” I called to her.
‘She gave a whimper of fright. With a bound I was beside the bed; she tried to elude me,
but I seized her by the throat — like this, do you see? — tight! She struggled, she began to
cry out for mercy, but I held her fast, forcing back her head and staring down into her
face. She was twenty years old, perhaps; her face was the broad, dull face of a stupid
child, but it was coated with paint and powder, and her blue, stupid eyes, shining in the
red light, wore that shocked, distorted look that one sees nowhere save in the eyes of
these women. She was some peasant girl, doubtless, whom her parents had sold into
slavery.
‘Without another word I pulled her off the bed and threw her on to the floor. And then I
fell upon her like a tiger! Ah, the joy, the incomparable rapture of that time! There,
MESSIEURS ET DAMES, is what I would expound to you; VOILA L ’AMOUR! There
is the true love, there is the only thing in the world worth striving for; there is the thing
beside which all your arts and ideals, all your philosophies and creeds, all your fine
words and high attitudes, are as pale and profitless as ashes. When one has experienced
love — the true love — what is there in the world that seems more than a mere ghost of
joy?
‘More and more savagely I renewed the attack. Again and again the girl tried to escape;
she cried out for mercy anew, but I laughed at her.
‘“Mercy! ” I said, “do you suppose I have come here to show mercy? Do you suppose I
have paid a thousand francs for that? ” I swear to you, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, that if it
were not for that accursed law that robs us of our liberty, I would have murdered her at
that moment.
‘Ah, how she screamed, with what bitter cries of agony. But there was no one to hear
them; down there under the streets of Paris we were as secure as at the heart of a
pyramid. Tears streamed down the girl’s face, washing away the powder in long, dirty
smears. Ah, that irrecoverable time! You, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, you who have not
cultivated the finer sensibilities of love, for you such pleasure is almost beyond
conception. And I too, now that my youth is gone — ah, youth! — shall never again see life
so beautiful as that. It is finished.
‘Ah yes, it is gone — gone for ever. Ah, the poverty, the shortness, the disappointment of
human joy! For in reality — CAR EN REALITE, what is the duration of the supreme
moment of love. It is nothing, an instant, a second perhaps. A second of ecstasy, and after
that — dust, ashes, nothingness.
‘And so, just for one instant, I captured the supreme happiness, the highest and most
refined emotion to which human beings can attain. And in the same moment it was
finished, and I was left — to what? All my savagery, my passion, were scattered like the
petals of a rose. I was left cold and languid, full of vain regrets; in my revulsion I even
felt a kind of pity for the weeping girl on the floor. Is it not nauseous, that we should be
the prey of such mean emotions? I did not look at the girl again; my sole thought was to
get away. I hastened up the steps of the vault and out into the street. It was dark and
bitterly cold, the streets were empty, the stones echoed under my heels with a hollow,
lonely ring. All my money was gone, I had not even the price of a taxi fare. I walked back
alone to my cold, solitary room.
‘But there, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, that is what I promised to expound to you. That is
Love. That was the happiest day of my life. ’
He was a curious specimen, Charlie. I describe him, just to show what diverse characters
could be found flourishing in the Coq d’Or quarter.
CHAPTER III
I lived in the Coq d’Or quarter for about a year and a half. One day, in summer, I found
that I had just four hundred and fifty francs left, and beyond this nothing but thirty-six
francs a week, which I earned by giving English lessons. Hitherto I had not thought about
the future, but I now realized that I must do something at once. I decided to start looking
for a job, and — very luckily, as it turned out — I took the precaution of paying two
hundred francs for a month’s rent in advance. With the other two hundred and fifty
francs, besides the English lessons, I could live a month, and in a month I should
probably find work. I aimed at becoming a guide to one of the tourist companies, or
perhaps an interpreter. However, a piece of bad luck prevented this.
One day there turned up at the hotel a young Italian who called himself a compositor. He
was rather an ambiguous person, for he wore side whiskers, which are the mark either of
an apache or an intellectual, and nobody was quite certain in which class to put him.
Madame F. did not like the look of him, and made him pay a week’s rent in advance. The
Italian paid the rent and stayed six nights at the hotel. During this time he managed to
prepare some duplicate keys, and on the last night he robbed a dozen rooms, including
mine. Luckily, he did not find the money that was in my pockets, so I was not left
penniless. I was left with just forty-seven francs — that is, seven and tenpence.
This put an end to my plans of looking for work. I had now got to live at the rate of about
six francs a day, and from the start it was too difficult to leave much thought for anything
else. It was now that my experiences of poverty began — for six francs a day, if not actual
poverty, is on the fringe of it. Six francs is a shilling, and you can live on a shilling a day
in Paris if you know how. But it is a complicated business.
It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about
poverty — it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to
you sooner or later; and it, is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would
be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is
merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar LOWNESS of poverty that you discover
first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.
You discover, for instance, the secrecy attaching to poverty. At a sudden stroke you have
been reduced to an income of six francs a day. But of course you dare not admit it — you
have got to pretend that you are living quite as usual. From the start it tangles you in a net
of lies, and even with the lies you can hardly manage it. You stop sending clothes to the
laundry, and the laundress catches you in the street and asks you why; you mumble
something, and she, thinking you are sending the clothes elsewhere, is your enemy for
life. The tobacconist keeps asking why you have cut down your smoking. There are
letters you want to answer, and cannot, because stamps are too expensive. And then there
are your meals — meals are the worst difficulty of all. Every day at meal-times you go
out, ostensibly to a restaurant, and loaf an hour in the Luxembourg Gardens, watching the
pigeons. Afterwards you smuggle your food home in your pockets. Your food is bread
and margarine, or bread and wine, and even the nature of the food is governed by lies.
You have to buy rye bread instead of household bread, because the rye loaves, though
dearer, are round and can be smuggled in your pockets. This wastes you a franc a day.
Sometimes, to keep up appearances, you have to spend sixty centimes on a drink, and go
correspondingly short of food. Your linen gets filthy, and you run out of soap and razor-
blades. Your hair wants cutting, and you try to cut it yourself, with such fearful results
that you have to go to the barber after all, and spend the equivalent of a day’s food. All
day you arc telling lies, and expensive lies.
You discover the extreme precariousness of your six francs a day. Mean disasters happen
and rob you of food. You have spent your last eighty centimes on half a litre of milk, and
are boiling it over the spirit lamp. While it boils a bug runs down your forearm; you give
the bug a flick with your nail, and it falls, plop! straight into the milk. There is nothing
for it but to throw the milk away and go foodless.
You go to the baker’s to buy a pound of bread, and you wait while the girl cuts a pound
for another customer. She is clumsy, and cuts more than a pound. ‘PARDON,
MONSIEUR,’ she says, ‘I suppose you don’t mind paying two sous extra? ’ Bread is a
franc a pound, and you have exactly a franc. When you think that you too might be asked
to pay two sous extra, and would have to confess that you could not, you bolt in panic. It
is hours before you dare venture into a baker’s shop again.
You go to the greengrocer’s to spend a franc on a kilogram of potatoes. But one of the
pieces that make up the franc is a Belgian piece, and the shopman refuses it. You slink
out of the shop, and can never go there again.
You have strayed into a respectable quarter, and you see a prosperous friend coming. To
avoid him you dodge into the nearest cafe. Once in the cafe you must buy something, so
you spend your last fifty centimes on a glass of black coffee with a dead fly in it. One
could multiply these disasters by the hundred. They are part of the process of being hard
up.
You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margarine in your belly, you go
out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge,
wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter,
strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyere cheeses like grindstones. A
snivelling self-pity comes over you at the sight of so much food. You plan to grab a loaf
and run, swallowing it before they catch you; and you refrain, from pure funk.
You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times when you have
nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing. For half a day at a
time you lie on your bed, feeling like the JEUNE SQUELETTE in Baudelaire’s poem.
Only food could rouse you. You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread
and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.
This — one could describe it further, but it is all in the same style — is life on six francs a
day. Thousands of people in Paris live it — struggling artists and students, prostitutes
when their luck is out, out-of-work people of all kinds. It is the suburbs, as it were, of
poverty.
I continued in this style for about three weeks. The forty-seven francs were soon gone,
and I had to do what I could on thirty-six francs a week from the English lessons. Being
inexperienced, I handled the money badly, and sometimes I was a day without food.
When this happened I used to sell a few of my clothes, smuggling them out of the hotel in
small packets and taking them to a secondhand shop in the rue de la Montagne St
Genevieve. The shopman was a red-haired Jew, an extraordinary disagreeable man, who
used to fall into furious rages at the sight of a client. From his manner one would have
supposed that we had done him some injury by coming to him. ‘MERDE! ’ he used to
shout, ‘YOU here again? What do you think this is? A soup kitchen? ’ And he paid
incredibly low prices. For a hat which I had bought for twenty-five shillings and scarcely
worn he gave five francs; for a good pair of shoes, five francs; for shirts, a franc each. He
always preferred to exchange rather than buy, and he had a trick of thrusting some useless
article into one’s hand and then pretending that one had accepted it. Once 1 saw him take
a good overcoat from an old woman, put two white billiard-balls into her hand, and then
push her rapidly out of the shop before she could protest. It would have been a pleasure to
flatten the Jew’s nose, if only one could have afforded it.
These three weeks were squalid and uncomfortable, and evidently there was worse
coming, for my rent would be due before long. Nevertheless, things were not a quarter as
bad as I had expected. For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery
which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and
the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty:
the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less
money you have, the less you worry. When you have a hundred francs in the world you
are liable to the most craven panics. When you have only three francs you are quite
indifferent; for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than
that. You are bored, but you are not afraid. You think vaguely, ‘I shall be starving in a
day or two — shocking, isn’t it? ’ And then the mind wanders to other topics. A bread and
margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne.
And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who
has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at
knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to
the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it.
It takes off a lot of anxiety,
CHAPTER IV
One day my English lessons ceased abruptly. The weather was getting hot and one of my
pupils, feeling too lazy to go on with his lessons, dismissed me. The other disappeared
from his lodgings without notice, owing me twelve francs. I was left with only thirty
centimes and no tobacco. For a day and a half I had nothing to cat or smoke, and then, too
hungry to put it off any longer, I packed my remaining clothes into my suitcase and took
them to the pawnshop. This put an end to all pretence of being in funds, for I could not
take my clothes out of the hotel without asking Madame F. ‘s leave. I remember, however,
how surprised she was at my asking her instead of removing the clothes on the sly,
shooting the moon being a common trick in our quarter.
It was the first time that I had been in a French pawnshop. One went through grandiose
stone portals (marked, of course, ‘FIBERTE, EGATITE, FRATERNITE’ they write that
even over the police stations in France) into a large, bare room like a school classroom,
with a counter and rows of benches. Forty or fifty people were waiting. One handed one’s
pledge over the counter and sat down. Presently, when the clerk had assessed its value he
would call out, ‘NUMERO such and such, will you take fifty francs? ’ Sometimes it was
only fifteen francs, or ten, or five — whatever it was, the whole room knew it. As I Came
in the clerk called with an air of offence, ‘NUMERO 83 — here! ’ and gave a little whistle
and a beckon, as though calling a dog. NUMERO 83 stepped to the counter; he was an
old bearded man, with an overcoat buttoned up at the neck and frayed trouser-ends.
Without a word the clerk shot the bundle across the counter — evidently it was worth
nothing. It fell to the ground and came open, displaying four pairs of men’s woollen
pants. No one could help laughing. Poor NUMERO 83 gathered up his pants and
shambled out, muttering to himself.
The clothes I was pawning, together with the suitcase, had cost over twenty pounds, and
were in good condition. I thought they must be worth ten pounds, and a quarter of this
(one expects quarter value at a pawnshop) was two hundred and fifty or three hundred
francs. I waited without anxiety, expecting two hundred francs at the worst.
At last the clerk called my number: ‘NUMERO 97! ’
‘Yes,’ I said, standing up.
‘Seventy francs? ’
Seventy francs for ten pounds’ worth of clothes! But it was no use arguing; I had seen
someone else attempt to argue, and the clerk had instantly refused the pledge. I took the
money and the pawnticket and walked out. I had now no clothes except what I stood up
in — the coat badly out at the elbow — an overcoat, moderately pawnable, and one spare
shirt. Afterwards, when it was too late, I learned that it was wiser to go to a pawnshop in
the afternoon. The clerks are French, and, like most French people, are in a bad temper
till they have eaten their lunch.
When I got home, Madame F. was sweeping the BISTRO floor. She came up the steps to
meet me. I could see in her eye that she was uneasy about my rent.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘what did you get for your clothes? Not much, eh? ’
‘Two hundred francs,’ I said promptly.
‘TIENS! ’ she said, surprised; ‘well, THAT’S not bad. How expensive those English
clothes must be! ’
The lie saved a lot of trouble, and, strangely enough, it came true. A few days later I did
receive exactly two hundred francs due to me for a newspaper article, and, though it hurt
to do it, I at once paid every penny of it in rent. So, though I came near to starving in the
following weeks, I was hardly ever without a roof.
It was now absolutely necessary to find work, and I remembered a friend of mine, a
Russian waiter named Boris, who might be able to help me. I had first met him in the
public ward of a hospital, where he was being treated for arthritis in the left leg. He had
told me to come to him if I were ever in difficulties.
I must say something about Boris, for he was a curious character and my close friend for
a long time. He was a big, soldierly man of about thirty-five, and had been good looking,
but since his illness he had grown immensely fat from lying in bed. Like most Russian
refugees, he had had an adventurous life. His parents, killed in the Revolution, had been
rich people, and he had served through the war in the Second Siberian Rifles, which,
according to him, was the best regiment in the Russian Army. After the war he had first
worked in a brush factory, then as a porter at Les Halles, then had become a dishwasher,
and had finally worked his way up to be a waiter. When he fell ill he was at the Hotel
Scribe, and taking a hundred francs a day in tips. His ambition was to become a MAITRE
D ’HOTEL, save fifty thousand francs, and set up a small, select restaurant on the Right
Bank.
Boris always talked of the war as the happiest time of his life. War and soldiering were
his passion; he had read innumerable books of strategy and military history, and could
tell you all about the theories of Napoleon, Kutuzof, Clausewitz, Moltke and Foch.
Anything to do with soldiers pleased him. His favourite cafe was the Gloserie des Lilas in
Montparnasse, simply because the statue of Marshal Ney stands outside it. Later on,
Boris and I sometimes went to the rue du Commerce together. If we went by Metro, Boris
always got out at Cambronne station instead of Commerce, though Commerce was
nearer; he liked the association with General Cambronne, who was called on to surrender
at Waterloo, and answered simply, ‘MERDE! ’
The only things left to Boris by the Revolution were his medals and some photographs of
his old regiment; he had kept these when everything else went to the pawnshop. Almost
every day he would spread the photographs out on the bed and talk about them:
‘VOILA, MON AML There you see me at the head of my company. Fine big men, eh?
Not like these little rats of Frenchmen. A captain at twenty — not bad, eh? Yes, a captain
in the Second Siberian Rifles; and my father was a colonel.
‘AH, MAIS, MON AMI, the ups and downs of life! A captain in the Russian Army, and
then, piffl the Revolution — every penny gone. In 1916 I stayed a week at the Hotel
Edouard Sept; in 1920 I was trying for a job as night watchman there. I have been night
watchman, cellannan, floor scrubber, dishwasher, porter, lavatory attendant. I have tipped
waiters, and I have been tipped by waiters.
‘Ah, but I have known what it is to live like a gentleman, MON AMI. I do not say it to
boast, but the other day I was trying to compute how many mistresses I have had in my
life, and I made it out to be over two hundred. Yes, at least two hundred. . . Ah, well, CA
REVIENDRA. Victory is to him who fights the longest. Courage! ’ etc. etc.
Boris had a queer, changeable nature. He always wished himself back in the army, but he
had also been a waiter long enough to acquire the waiter’s outlook. Though he had never
saved more than a few thousand francs, he took it for granted that in the end he would be
able to set up his own restaurant and grow rich. All waiters, I afterwards found, talk and
think of this; it is what reconciles them to being waiters. Boris used to talk interestingly
about Hotel life:
‘Waiting is a gamble,’ he used to say; ‘you may die poor, you may make your fortune in
a year. You are not paid wages, you depend on tips — ten per cent of the bill, and a
commission from the wine companies on champagne corks. Sometimes the tips are
enonnous. The bannan at Maxim’s, for instance, makes five hundred francs a day. More
than five hundred, in the season. . . I have made two hundred francs a day myself. It was at
a Hotel in Biarritz, in the season. The whole staff, from the manager down to the
PLONGEURS, was working twenty-one hours a day. Twenty-one hours’ work and two
and a half hours in bed, for a month on end. Still, it was worth it, at two hundred francs a
day.
‘You never know when a stroke of luck is coming. Once when I was at the Hotel Royal
an American customer sent for me before dinner and ordered twenty-four brandy
cocktails. I brought them all together on a tray, in twenty-four glasses. “Now,
GUARCON,” said the customer (he was drunk), “Til drink twelve and you’ll drink
twelve, and if you can walk to the door afterwards you get a hundred francs. ” I walked to
the door, and he gave me a hundred francs. And every night for six days he did the same
thing; twelve brandy cocktails, then a hundred francs. A few months later I heard he had
been extradited by the American Government — embezzlement. There is something fine,
do you not think, about these Americans? ’
I liked Boris, and we had interesting times together, playing chess and talking about war
and Hotels. Boris used often to suggest that I should become a waiter. ‘The life would
suit you,’ he used to say; ‘when you are in work, with a hundred francs a day and a nice
mistress, it’s not bad. You say you go in for writing. Writing is bosh. There is only one
way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher’s daughter. But you
would make a good waiter if you shaved that moustache off. You are tall and you speak
English — those are the chief things a waiter needs. Wait till I can bend this accursed leg,
MON AMI. And then, if you are ever out of a job, come to me. ’
Now that I was short of my rent, and getting hungry, I remembered Boris’s promise, and
decided to look him up at once. I did not hope to become a waiter so easily as he had
promised, but of course I knew how to scrub dishes, and no doubt he could get me a job
in the kitchen. He had said that dishwashing jobs were to be had for the asking during the
summer. It was a great relief to remember that I had after all one influential friend to fall
back on.
CHAPTER V
A short time before, Boris had given me an address in the rue du Marche des Blancs
Manteaux. All he had said in his letter was that ‘things were not marching too badly’, and
I assumed that he was back at the Hotel Scribe, touching his hundred francs a day. I was
full of hope, and wondered why I had been fool enough not to go to Boris before. I saw
myself in a cosy restaurant, with jolly cooks singing love-songs as they broke eggs into
the pan, and five solid meals a day. I even squandered two francs fifty on a packet of
Gaulois Bleu, in anticipation of my wages.
In the morning I walked down to the rue du Marche des Blancs Manteaux; with a shock, I
found it a shimmy back street-as bad as my own. Boris’s hotel was the dirtiest hotel in the
street. From its dark doorway there came out a vile, sour odour, a mixture of slops and
synthetic soup — it was Bouillon Zip, twenty-five centimes a packet. A misgiving came
over me. People who drink Bouillon Zip are starving, or near it. Could Boris possibly be
earning a hundred francs a day? A surly PATRON, sitting in the office, said to me. Yes,
the Russian was at home — in the attic. I went up six nights of narrow, winding stairs, the
Bouillon Zip growing stronger as one got higher. Boris did not answer when I knocked at
his door, so I opened it and went in.
The room was an attic, ten feet square, lighted only by a skylight, its sole furniture a
narrow iron bedstead, a chair, and a wash hand- stand with one game leg. A long S-shaped
chain of bugs marched slowly across the wall above the bed. Boris was lying asleep,
naked, his large belly making a mound under the grimy sheet. His chest was spotted with
insect bites. As I came in he woke up, rubbed his eyes, and groaned deeply.
‘Name of Jesus Christ! ’ he exclaimed, ‘oh, name of Jesus Christ, my back! Curse it, I
believe my back is broken! ’
‘What’s the matter? ’ I exclaimed.
‘My back is broken, that is all. I have spent the night on the floor. Oh, name of Jesus
Christ! If you knew what my back feels like! ’
‘My dear Boris, are you ill? ’
‘Not ill, only starving — yes, starving to death if this goes on much longer. Besides
sleeping on the floor, I have lived on two francs a day for weeks past. It is fearful. You
have come at a bad moment, MON AMI. ’
It did not seem much use to ask whether Boris still had his job at the Hotel Scribe. I
hurried downstairs and bought a loaf of bread. Boris threw himself on the bread and ate
half of it, after which he felt better, sat up in bed, and told me what was the matter with
him. He had failed to get a job after leaving the hospital, because he was still very lame,
and he had spent all his money and pawned everything, and finally starved for several
days. He had slept a week on the quay under the Font d’Austerlitz, among some empty
wine barrels. For the past fortnight he had been living in this room, together with a Jew, a
mechanic. It appeared (there was some complicated explanation. ) that the Jew owed
Boris three hundred francs, and was repaying this by letting him sleep on the floor and
allowing him two francs a day for food. Two francs would buy a bowl of coffee and three
rolls. The Jew went to work at seven in the mornings, and after that Boris would leave his
sleeping-place (it was beneath the skylight, which let in the rain) and get into the bed. He
could not sleep much even there owing to the bugs, but it rested his back after the floor.
It was a great disappointment, when I had come to Boris for help, to find him even worse
off than myself. I explained that I had only about sixty francs left and must get a job
immediately. By this time, however, Boris had eaten the rest of the bread and was feeling
cheerful and talkative. He said carelessly:
‘Good heavens, what are you worrying about? Sixty francs — why, it’s a fortune! Please
hand me that shoe, MON AMI. I’m going to smash some of those bugs if they come
within reach. ’
‘But do you think there’s any chance of getting a job? ’
‘Chance? It’s a certainty. In fact, I have got something already. There is a new Russian
restaurant which is to open in a few days in the rue du Commerce. It is UNE CHOSE
ENTENDUE that I am to be MAITRE D’HOTEL. I can easily get you a job in the
kitchen. Five hundred francs a month and your food — tips, too, if you are lucky. ’
‘But in the meantime? I’ve got to pay my rent before long. ’
‘Oh, we shall find something. I have got a few cards-up my sleeve. There are people who
owe me money, for instance — Paris is full of them. One of them is bound to pay up
before long. Then think of all the women who have been my mistress! A woman never
forgets, you know — I have only to ask and they will help me. Besides, the Jew tells me he
is going to steal some magnetos from the garage where he works, and he will pay us five
francs a day to clean them before he sells them. That alone would keep us. Never worry,
MON AMI. Nothing is easier to get than money. ’
‘Well, let’s go out now and look for a job. ’
‘Presently, MON AMI. We shan’t starve, don’t you fear. This is only the fortune of
war — I’ve been in a worse hole scores of times. It’s only a question of persisting.
Remember Foch’s maxim: “ATTAQUEZ! ATTAQUEZ! ATTAQUEZ! ”’
It was midday before Boris decided to get up. All the clothes he now had left were one
suit, with one shirt, collar and tie, a pair of shoes almost worn out, and a pair of socks all
holes. He had also an overcoat which was to be pawned in the last extremity. He had a
suitcase, a wretched twenty-franc cardboard thing, but very important, because the
PATRON of the hotel believed that it was full of clothes — without that, he would
probably have turned Boris out of doors. What it actually contained were the medals and
photographs, various odds and ends, and huge bundles of love-letters. In spite of all this
Boris managed to keep a fairly smart appearance. He shaved without soap and with a
razor-blade two months old, tied his tie so that the holes did not show, and carefully
stuffed the soles of his shoes with newspaper. Finally, when he was dressed, he produced
an i nk -bottle and inked the skin of his ankles where it showed through his socks. You
would never have thought, when it was finished, that he had recently been sleeping under
the Seine bridges.
We went to a small cafe off the rue de Rivoli, a well-known rendezvous of hotel
managers and employees. At the back was a dark, cave-like room where all kinds of hotel
workers were sitting — smart young waiters, others not so smart and clearly hungry, fat
pink cooks, greasy dish-washers, battered old scrubbing-women. Everyone had an
untouched glass of black coffee in front of him. The place was, in effect, an employment
bureau, and the money spent on drinks was the PATRON’S commission. Sometimes a
stout, important-looking man, obviously a restaurateur, would come in and speak to the
bannan, and the bannan would call to one of the people at the back of the cafe. But he
never called to Boris or me, and we left after two hours, as the etiquette was that you
could only stay two hours for one drink. We learned afterwards, when it was too late, that
the dodge was to bribe the barman; if you could afford twenty francs he would generally
get you a job.
We went to the Hotel Scribe and waited an hour on the pavement, hoping that the
manager would come out, but he never did. Then we dragged ourselves down to the rue
du Commerce, only to find that the new restaurant, which was being redecorated, was
shut up and the PATRON away. It was now night. We had walked fourteen kilometres
over pavement, and we were so tired that we had to waste one franc fifty on going home
by Metro. Walking was agony to Boris with his game leg, and his optimism wore thinner
and thinner as the day went on. When he got out of the Metro at the Place d’ltalie he was
in despair. He began to say that it was no use looking for work — there was nothing for it
but to try crime.
‘Sooner rob than starve, MON AMI. I have often planned it. A fat, rich American — some
dark corner down Montparnasse way — a cobblestone in a stocking — bang! And then go
through his pockets and bolt. It is feasible, do you not think? I would not flinch — I have
been a soldier, remember. ’
He decided against the plan in the end, because we were both foreigners and easily
recognized.
When we had got back to my room we spent another one franc fifty on bread and
chocolate. Boris devoured his share, and at once cheered up like magic; food seemed to
act on his system as rapidly as a cocktail. He took out a pencil and began making a list of
the people who would probably give us jobs. There were dozens of them, he said.
‘Tomorrow we shall find something, MON AMI, I know it in my bones. The luck always
changes. Besides, we both have brains — a man with brains can’t starve.
‘What things a man can do with brains! Brains will make money out of anything. I had a
friend once, a Pole, a real man of genius; and what do you think he used to do? He would
buy a gold ring and pawn it for fifteen francs. Then — you know how carelessly the clerks
fill up the tickets — where the clerk had written “EN OR” he would add “ET
DIAMANTS” and he would change “fifteen francs” to “fifteen thousand”. Neat, eh?
Then, you see, he could borrow a thousand francs on the security of the ticket. That is
what I mean by brains. .
bed, with quilts red like the rest, and on it a girl was lying, dressed in a frock of red
velvet. At the sight of me she shrank away and tried to hide her knees under the short
dress.
‘I had halted by the door. “Come here, my chicken,” I called to her.
‘She gave a whimper of fright. With a bound I was beside the bed; she tried to elude me,
but I seized her by the throat — like this, do you see? — tight! She struggled, she began to
cry out for mercy, but I held her fast, forcing back her head and staring down into her
face. She was twenty years old, perhaps; her face was the broad, dull face of a stupid
child, but it was coated with paint and powder, and her blue, stupid eyes, shining in the
red light, wore that shocked, distorted look that one sees nowhere save in the eyes of
these women. She was some peasant girl, doubtless, whom her parents had sold into
slavery.
‘Without another word I pulled her off the bed and threw her on to the floor. And then I
fell upon her like a tiger! Ah, the joy, the incomparable rapture of that time! There,
MESSIEURS ET DAMES, is what I would expound to you; VOILA L ’AMOUR! There
is the true love, there is the only thing in the world worth striving for; there is the thing
beside which all your arts and ideals, all your philosophies and creeds, all your fine
words and high attitudes, are as pale and profitless as ashes. When one has experienced
love — the true love — what is there in the world that seems more than a mere ghost of
joy?
‘More and more savagely I renewed the attack. Again and again the girl tried to escape;
she cried out for mercy anew, but I laughed at her.
‘“Mercy! ” I said, “do you suppose I have come here to show mercy? Do you suppose I
have paid a thousand francs for that? ” I swear to you, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, that if it
were not for that accursed law that robs us of our liberty, I would have murdered her at
that moment.
‘Ah, how she screamed, with what bitter cries of agony. But there was no one to hear
them; down there under the streets of Paris we were as secure as at the heart of a
pyramid. Tears streamed down the girl’s face, washing away the powder in long, dirty
smears. Ah, that irrecoverable time! You, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, you who have not
cultivated the finer sensibilities of love, for you such pleasure is almost beyond
conception. And I too, now that my youth is gone — ah, youth! — shall never again see life
so beautiful as that. It is finished.
‘Ah yes, it is gone — gone for ever. Ah, the poverty, the shortness, the disappointment of
human joy! For in reality — CAR EN REALITE, what is the duration of the supreme
moment of love. It is nothing, an instant, a second perhaps. A second of ecstasy, and after
that — dust, ashes, nothingness.
‘And so, just for one instant, I captured the supreme happiness, the highest and most
refined emotion to which human beings can attain. And in the same moment it was
finished, and I was left — to what? All my savagery, my passion, were scattered like the
petals of a rose. I was left cold and languid, full of vain regrets; in my revulsion I even
felt a kind of pity for the weeping girl on the floor. Is it not nauseous, that we should be
the prey of such mean emotions? I did not look at the girl again; my sole thought was to
get away. I hastened up the steps of the vault and out into the street. It was dark and
bitterly cold, the streets were empty, the stones echoed under my heels with a hollow,
lonely ring. All my money was gone, I had not even the price of a taxi fare. I walked back
alone to my cold, solitary room.
‘But there, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, that is what I promised to expound to you. That is
Love. That was the happiest day of my life. ’
He was a curious specimen, Charlie. I describe him, just to show what diverse characters
could be found flourishing in the Coq d’Or quarter.
CHAPTER III
I lived in the Coq d’Or quarter for about a year and a half. One day, in summer, I found
that I had just four hundred and fifty francs left, and beyond this nothing but thirty-six
francs a week, which I earned by giving English lessons. Hitherto I had not thought about
the future, but I now realized that I must do something at once. I decided to start looking
for a job, and — very luckily, as it turned out — I took the precaution of paying two
hundred francs for a month’s rent in advance. With the other two hundred and fifty
francs, besides the English lessons, I could live a month, and in a month I should
probably find work. I aimed at becoming a guide to one of the tourist companies, or
perhaps an interpreter. However, a piece of bad luck prevented this.
One day there turned up at the hotel a young Italian who called himself a compositor. He
was rather an ambiguous person, for he wore side whiskers, which are the mark either of
an apache or an intellectual, and nobody was quite certain in which class to put him.
Madame F. did not like the look of him, and made him pay a week’s rent in advance. The
Italian paid the rent and stayed six nights at the hotel. During this time he managed to
prepare some duplicate keys, and on the last night he robbed a dozen rooms, including
mine. Luckily, he did not find the money that was in my pockets, so I was not left
penniless. I was left with just forty-seven francs — that is, seven and tenpence.
This put an end to my plans of looking for work. I had now got to live at the rate of about
six francs a day, and from the start it was too difficult to leave much thought for anything
else. It was now that my experiences of poverty began — for six francs a day, if not actual
poverty, is on the fringe of it. Six francs is a shilling, and you can live on a shilling a day
in Paris if you know how. But it is a complicated business.
It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about
poverty — it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to
you sooner or later; and it, is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would
be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is
merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar LOWNESS of poverty that you discover
first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.
You discover, for instance, the secrecy attaching to poverty. At a sudden stroke you have
been reduced to an income of six francs a day. But of course you dare not admit it — you
have got to pretend that you are living quite as usual. From the start it tangles you in a net
of lies, and even with the lies you can hardly manage it. You stop sending clothes to the
laundry, and the laundress catches you in the street and asks you why; you mumble
something, and she, thinking you are sending the clothes elsewhere, is your enemy for
life. The tobacconist keeps asking why you have cut down your smoking. There are
letters you want to answer, and cannot, because stamps are too expensive. And then there
are your meals — meals are the worst difficulty of all. Every day at meal-times you go
out, ostensibly to a restaurant, and loaf an hour in the Luxembourg Gardens, watching the
pigeons. Afterwards you smuggle your food home in your pockets. Your food is bread
and margarine, or bread and wine, and even the nature of the food is governed by lies.
You have to buy rye bread instead of household bread, because the rye loaves, though
dearer, are round and can be smuggled in your pockets. This wastes you a franc a day.
Sometimes, to keep up appearances, you have to spend sixty centimes on a drink, and go
correspondingly short of food. Your linen gets filthy, and you run out of soap and razor-
blades. Your hair wants cutting, and you try to cut it yourself, with such fearful results
that you have to go to the barber after all, and spend the equivalent of a day’s food. All
day you arc telling lies, and expensive lies.
You discover the extreme precariousness of your six francs a day. Mean disasters happen
and rob you of food. You have spent your last eighty centimes on half a litre of milk, and
are boiling it over the spirit lamp. While it boils a bug runs down your forearm; you give
the bug a flick with your nail, and it falls, plop! straight into the milk. There is nothing
for it but to throw the milk away and go foodless.
You go to the baker’s to buy a pound of bread, and you wait while the girl cuts a pound
for another customer. She is clumsy, and cuts more than a pound. ‘PARDON,
MONSIEUR,’ she says, ‘I suppose you don’t mind paying two sous extra? ’ Bread is a
franc a pound, and you have exactly a franc. When you think that you too might be asked
to pay two sous extra, and would have to confess that you could not, you bolt in panic. It
is hours before you dare venture into a baker’s shop again.
You go to the greengrocer’s to spend a franc on a kilogram of potatoes. But one of the
pieces that make up the franc is a Belgian piece, and the shopman refuses it. You slink
out of the shop, and can never go there again.
You have strayed into a respectable quarter, and you see a prosperous friend coming. To
avoid him you dodge into the nearest cafe. Once in the cafe you must buy something, so
you spend your last fifty centimes on a glass of black coffee with a dead fly in it. One
could multiply these disasters by the hundred. They are part of the process of being hard
up.
You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margarine in your belly, you go
out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge,
wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter,
strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyere cheeses like grindstones. A
snivelling self-pity comes over you at the sight of so much food. You plan to grab a loaf
and run, swallowing it before they catch you; and you refrain, from pure funk.
You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times when you have
nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing. For half a day at a
time you lie on your bed, feeling like the JEUNE SQUELETTE in Baudelaire’s poem.
Only food could rouse you. You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread
and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.
This — one could describe it further, but it is all in the same style — is life on six francs a
day. Thousands of people in Paris live it — struggling artists and students, prostitutes
when their luck is out, out-of-work people of all kinds. It is the suburbs, as it were, of
poverty.
I continued in this style for about three weeks. The forty-seven francs were soon gone,
and I had to do what I could on thirty-six francs a week from the English lessons. Being
inexperienced, I handled the money badly, and sometimes I was a day without food.
When this happened I used to sell a few of my clothes, smuggling them out of the hotel in
small packets and taking them to a secondhand shop in the rue de la Montagne St
Genevieve. The shopman was a red-haired Jew, an extraordinary disagreeable man, who
used to fall into furious rages at the sight of a client. From his manner one would have
supposed that we had done him some injury by coming to him. ‘MERDE! ’ he used to
shout, ‘YOU here again? What do you think this is? A soup kitchen? ’ And he paid
incredibly low prices. For a hat which I had bought for twenty-five shillings and scarcely
worn he gave five francs; for a good pair of shoes, five francs; for shirts, a franc each. He
always preferred to exchange rather than buy, and he had a trick of thrusting some useless
article into one’s hand and then pretending that one had accepted it. Once 1 saw him take
a good overcoat from an old woman, put two white billiard-balls into her hand, and then
push her rapidly out of the shop before she could protest. It would have been a pleasure to
flatten the Jew’s nose, if only one could have afforded it.
These three weeks were squalid and uncomfortable, and evidently there was worse
coming, for my rent would be due before long. Nevertheless, things were not a quarter as
bad as I had expected. For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery
which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and
the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty:
the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less
money you have, the less you worry. When you have a hundred francs in the world you
are liable to the most craven panics. When you have only three francs you are quite
indifferent; for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than
that. You are bored, but you are not afraid. You think vaguely, ‘I shall be starving in a
day or two — shocking, isn’t it? ’ And then the mind wanders to other topics. A bread and
margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne.
And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who
has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at
knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to
the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it.
It takes off a lot of anxiety,
CHAPTER IV
One day my English lessons ceased abruptly. The weather was getting hot and one of my
pupils, feeling too lazy to go on with his lessons, dismissed me. The other disappeared
from his lodgings without notice, owing me twelve francs. I was left with only thirty
centimes and no tobacco. For a day and a half I had nothing to cat or smoke, and then, too
hungry to put it off any longer, I packed my remaining clothes into my suitcase and took
them to the pawnshop. This put an end to all pretence of being in funds, for I could not
take my clothes out of the hotel without asking Madame F. ‘s leave. I remember, however,
how surprised she was at my asking her instead of removing the clothes on the sly,
shooting the moon being a common trick in our quarter.
It was the first time that I had been in a French pawnshop. One went through grandiose
stone portals (marked, of course, ‘FIBERTE, EGATITE, FRATERNITE’ they write that
even over the police stations in France) into a large, bare room like a school classroom,
with a counter and rows of benches. Forty or fifty people were waiting. One handed one’s
pledge over the counter and sat down. Presently, when the clerk had assessed its value he
would call out, ‘NUMERO such and such, will you take fifty francs? ’ Sometimes it was
only fifteen francs, or ten, or five — whatever it was, the whole room knew it. As I Came
in the clerk called with an air of offence, ‘NUMERO 83 — here! ’ and gave a little whistle
and a beckon, as though calling a dog. NUMERO 83 stepped to the counter; he was an
old bearded man, with an overcoat buttoned up at the neck and frayed trouser-ends.
Without a word the clerk shot the bundle across the counter — evidently it was worth
nothing. It fell to the ground and came open, displaying four pairs of men’s woollen
pants. No one could help laughing. Poor NUMERO 83 gathered up his pants and
shambled out, muttering to himself.
The clothes I was pawning, together with the suitcase, had cost over twenty pounds, and
were in good condition. I thought they must be worth ten pounds, and a quarter of this
(one expects quarter value at a pawnshop) was two hundred and fifty or three hundred
francs. I waited without anxiety, expecting two hundred francs at the worst.
At last the clerk called my number: ‘NUMERO 97! ’
‘Yes,’ I said, standing up.
‘Seventy francs? ’
Seventy francs for ten pounds’ worth of clothes! But it was no use arguing; I had seen
someone else attempt to argue, and the clerk had instantly refused the pledge. I took the
money and the pawnticket and walked out. I had now no clothes except what I stood up
in — the coat badly out at the elbow — an overcoat, moderately pawnable, and one spare
shirt. Afterwards, when it was too late, I learned that it was wiser to go to a pawnshop in
the afternoon. The clerks are French, and, like most French people, are in a bad temper
till they have eaten their lunch.
When I got home, Madame F. was sweeping the BISTRO floor. She came up the steps to
meet me. I could see in her eye that she was uneasy about my rent.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘what did you get for your clothes? Not much, eh? ’
‘Two hundred francs,’ I said promptly.
‘TIENS! ’ she said, surprised; ‘well, THAT’S not bad. How expensive those English
clothes must be! ’
The lie saved a lot of trouble, and, strangely enough, it came true. A few days later I did
receive exactly two hundred francs due to me for a newspaper article, and, though it hurt
to do it, I at once paid every penny of it in rent. So, though I came near to starving in the
following weeks, I was hardly ever without a roof.
It was now absolutely necessary to find work, and I remembered a friend of mine, a
Russian waiter named Boris, who might be able to help me. I had first met him in the
public ward of a hospital, where he was being treated for arthritis in the left leg. He had
told me to come to him if I were ever in difficulties.
I must say something about Boris, for he was a curious character and my close friend for
a long time. He was a big, soldierly man of about thirty-five, and had been good looking,
but since his illness he had grown immensely fat from lying in bed. Like most Russian
refugees, he had had an adventurous life. His parents, killed in the Revolution, had been
rich people, and he had served through the war in the Second Siberian Rifles, which,
according to him, was the best regiment in the Russian Army. After the war he had first
worked in a brush factory, then as a porter at Les Halles, then had become a dishwasher,
and had finally worked his way up to be a waiter. When he fell ill he was at the Hotel
Scribe, and taking a hundred francs a day in tips. His ambition was to become a MAITRE
D ’HOTEL, save fifty thousand francs, and set up a small, select restaurant on the Right
Bank.
Boris always talked of the war as the happiest time of his life. War and soldiering were
his passion; he had read innumerable books of strategy and military history, and could
tell you all about the theories of Napoleon, Kutuzof, Clausewitz, Moltke and Foch.
Anything to do with soldiers pleased him. His favourite cafe was the Gloserie des Lilas in
Montparnasse, simply because the statue of Marshal Ney stands outside it. Later on,
Boris and I sometimes went to the rue du Commerce together. If we went by Metro, Boris
always got out at Cambronne station instead of Commerce, though Commerce was
nearer; he liked the association with General Cambronne, who was called on to surrender
at Waterloo, and answered simply, ‘MERDE! ’
The only things left to Boris by the Revolution were his medals and some photographs of
his old regiment; he had kept these when everything else went to the pawnshop. Almost
every day he would spread the photographs out on the bed and talk about them:
‘VOILA, MON AML There you see me at the head of my company. Fine big men, eh?
Not like these little rats of Frenchmen. A captain at twenty — not bad, eh? Yes, a captain
in the Second Siberian Rifles; and my father was a colonel.
‘AH, MAIS, MON AMI, the ups and downs of life! A captain in the Russian Army, and
then, piffl the Revolution — every penny gone. In 1916 I stayed a week at the Hotel
Edouard Sept; in 1920 I was trying for a job as night watchman there. I have been night
watchman, cellannan, floor scrubber, dishwasher, porter, lavatory attendant. I have tipped
waiters, and I have been tipped by waiters.
‘Ah, but I have known what it is to live like a gentleman, MON AMI. I do not say it to
boast, but the other day I was trying to compute how many mistresses I have had in my
life, and I made it out to be over two hundred. Yes, at least two hundred. . . Ah, well, CA
REVIENDRA. Victory is to him who fights the longest. Courage! ’ etc. etc.
Boris had a queer, changeable nature. He always wished himself back in the army, but he
had also been a waiter long enough to acquire the waiter’s outlook. Though he had never
saved more than a few thousand francs, he took it for granted that in the end he would be
able to set up his own restaurant and grow rich. All waiters, I afterwards found, talk and
think of this; it is what reconciles them to being waiters. Boris used to talk interestingly
about Hotel life:
‘Waiting is a gamble,’ he used to say; ‘you may die poor, you may make your fortune in
a year. You are not paid wages, you depend on tips — ten per cent of the bill, and a
commission from the wine companies on champagne corks. Sometimes the tips are
enonnous. The bannan at Maxim’s, for instance, makes five hundred francs a day. More
than five hundred, in the season. . . I have made two hundred francs a day myself. It was at
a Hotel in Biarritz, in the season. The whole staff, from the manager down to the
PLONGEURS, was working twenty-one hours a day. Twenty-one hours’ work and two
and a half hours in bed, for a month on end. Still, it was worth it, at two hundred francs a
day.
‘You never know when a stroke of luck is coming. Once when I was at the Hotel Royal
an American customer sent for me before dinner and ordered twenty-four brandy
cocktails. I brought them all together on a tray, in twenty-four glasses. “Now,
GUARCON,” said the customer (he was drunk), “Til drink twelve and you’ll drink
twelve, and if you can walk to the door afterwards you get a hundred francs. ” I walked to
the door, and he gave me a hundred francs. And every night for six days he did the same
thing; twelve brandy cocktails, then a hundred francs. A few months later I heard he had
been extradited by the American Government — embezzlement. There is something fine,
do you not think, about these Americans? ’
I liked Boris, and we had interesting times together, playing chess and talking about war
and Hotels. Boris used often to suggest that I should become a waiter. ‘The life would
suit you,’ he used to say; ‘when you are in work, with a hundred francs a day and a nice
mistress, it’s not bad. You say you go in for writing. Writing is bosh. There is only one
way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher’s daughter. But you
would make a good waiter if you shaved that moustache off. You are tall and you speak
English — those are the chief things a waiter needs. Wait till I can bend this accursed leg,
MON AMI. And then, if you are ever out of a job, come to me. ’
Now that I was short of my rent, and getting hungry, I remembered Boris’s promise, and
decided to look him up at once. I did not hope to become a waiter so easily as he had
promised, but of course I knew how to scrub dishes, and no doubt he could get me a job
in the kitchen. He had said that dishwashing jobs were to be had for the asking during the
summer. It was a great relief to remember that I had after all one influential friend to fall
back on.
CHAPTER V
A short time before, Boris had given me an address in the rue du Marche des Blancs
Manteaux. All he had said in his letter was that ‘things were not marching too badly’, and
I assumed that he was back at the Hotel Scribe, touching his hundred francs a day. I was
full of hope, and wondered why I had been fool enough not to go to Boris before. I saw
myself in a cosy restaurant, with jolly cooks singing love-songs as they broke eggs into
the pan, and five solid meals a day. I even squandered two francs fifty on a packet of
Gaulois Bleu, in anticipation of my wages.
In the morning I walked down to the rue du Marche des Blancs Manteaux; with a shock, I
found it a shimmy back street-as bad as my own. Boris’s hotel was the dirtiest hotel in the
street. From its dark doorway there came out a vile, sour odour, a mixture of slops and
synthetic soup — it was Bouillon Zip, twenty-five centimes a packet. A misgiving came
over me. People who drink Bouillon Zip are starving, or near it. Could Boris possibly be
earning a hundred francs a day? A surly PATRON, sitting in the office, said to me. Yes,
the Russian was at home — in the attic. I went up six nights of narrow, winding stairs, the
Bouillon Zip growing stronger as one got higher. Boris did not answer when I knocked at
his door, so I opened it and went in.
The room was an attic, ten feet square, lighted only by a skylight, its sole furniture a
narrow iron bedstead, a chair, and a wash hand- stand with one game leg. A long S-shaped
chain of bugs marched slowly across the wall above the bed. Boris was lying asleep,
naked, his large belly making a mound under the grimy sheet. His chest was spotted with
insect bites. As I came in he woke up, rubbed his eyes, and groaned deeply.
‘Name of Jesus Christ! ’ he exclaimed, ‘oh, name of Jesus Christ, my back! Curse it, I
believe my back is broken! ’
‘What’s the matter? ’ I exclaimed.
‘My back is broken, that is all. I have spent the night on the floor. Oh, name of Jesus
Christ! If you knew what my back feels like! ’
‘My dear Boris, are you ill? ’
‘Not ill, only starving — yes, starving to death if this goes on much longer. Besides
sleeping on the floor, I have lived on two francs a day for weeks past. It is fearful. You
have come at a bad moment, MON AMI. ’
It did not seem much use to ask whether Boris still had his job at the Hotel Scribe. I
hurried downstairs and bought a loaf of bread. Boris threw himself on the bread and ate
half of it, after which he felt better, sat up in bed, and told me what was the matter with
him. He had failed to get a job after leaving the hospital, because he was still very lame,
and he had spent all his money and pawned everything, and finally starved for several
days. He had slept a week on the quay under the Font d’Austerlitz, among some empty
wine barrels. For the past fortnight he had been living in this room, together with a Jew, a
mechanic. It appeared (there was some complicated explanation. ) that the Jew owed
Boris three hundred francs, and was repaying this by letting him sleep on the floor and
allowing him two francs a day for food. Two francs would buy a bowl of coffee and three
rolls. The Jew went to work at seven in the mornings, and after that Boris would leave his
sleeping-place (it was beneath the skylight, which let in the rain) and get into the bed. He
could not sleep much even there owing to the bugs, but it rested his back after the floor.
It was a great disappointment, when I had come to Boris for help, to find him even worse
off than myself. I explained that I had only about sixty francs left and must get a job
immediately. By this time, however, Boris had eaten the rest of the bread and was feeling
cheerful and talkative. He said carelessly:
‘Good heavens, what are you worrying about? Sixty francs — why, it’s a fortune! Please
hand me that shoe, MON AMI. I’m going to smash some of those bugs if they come
within reach. ’
‘But do you think there’s any chance of getting a job? ’
‘Chance? It’s a certainty. In fact, I have got something already. There is a new Russian
restaurant which is to open in a few days in the rue du Commerce. It is UNE CHOSE
ENTENDUE that I am to be MAITRE D’HOTEL. I can easily get you a job in the
kitchen. Five hundred francs a month and your food — tips, too, if you are lucky. ’
‘But in the meantime? I’ve got to pay my rent before long. ’
‘Oh, we shall find something. I have got a few cards-up my sleeve. There are people who
owe me money, for instance — Paris is full of them. One of them is bound to pay up
before long. Then think of all the women who have been my mistress! A woman never
forgets, you know — I have only to ask and they will help me. Besides, the Jew tells me he
is going to steal some magnetos from the garage where he works, and he will pay us five
francs a day to clean them before he sells them. That alone would keep us. Never worry,
MON AMI. Nothing is easier to get than money. ’
‘Well, let’s go out now and look for a job. ’
‘Presently, MON AMI. We shan’t starve, don’t you fear. This is only the fortune of
war — I’ve been in a worse hole scores of times. It’s only a question of persisting.
Remember Foch’s maxim: “ATTAQUEZ! ATTAQUEZ! ATTAQUEZ! ”’
It was midday before Boris decided to get up. All the clothes he now had left were one
suit, with one shirt, collar and tie, a pair of shoes almost worn out, and a pair of socks all
holes. He had also an overcoat which was to be pawned in the last extremity. He had a
suitcase, a wretched twenty-franc cardboard thing, but very important, because the
PATRON of the hotel believed that it was full of clothes — without that, he would
probably have turned Boris out of doors. What it actually contained were the medals and
photographs, various odds and ends, and huge bundles of love-letters. In spite of all this
Boris managed to keep a fairly smart appearance. He shaved without soap and with a
razor-blade two months old, tied his tie so that the holes did not show, and carefully
stuffed the soles of his shoes with newspaper. Finally, when he was dressed, he produced
an i nk -bottle and inked the skin of his ankles where it showed through his socks. You
would never have thought, when it was finished, that he had recently been sleeping under
the Seine bridges.
We went to a small cafe off the rue de Rivoli, a well-known rendezvous of hotel
managers and employees. At the back was a dark, cave-like room where all kinds of hotel
workers were sitting — smart young waiters, others not so smart and clearly hungry, fat
pink cooks, greasy dish-washers, battered old scrubbing-women. Everyone had an
untouched glass of black coffee in front of him. The place was, in effect, an employment
bureau, and the money spent on drinks was the PATRON’S commission. Sometimes a
stout, important-looking man, obviously a restaurateur, would come in and speak to the
bannan, and the bannan would call to one of the people at the back of the cafe. But he
never called to Boris or me, and we left after two hours, as the etiquette was that you
could only stay two hours for one drink. We learned afterwards, when it was too late, that
the dodge was to bribe the barman; if you could afford twenty francs he would generally
get you a job.
We went to the Hotel Scribe and waited an hour on the pavement, hoping that the
manager would come out, but he never did. Then we dragged ourselves down to the rue
du Commerce, only to find that the new restaurant, which was being redecorated, was
shut up and the PATRON away. It was now night. We had walked fourteen kilometres
over pavement, and we were so tired that we had to waste one franc fifty on going home
by Metro. Walking was agony to Boris with his game leg, and his optimism wore thinner
and thinner as the day went on. When he got out of the Metro at the Place d’ltalie he was
in despair. He began to say that it was no use looking for work — there was nothing for it
but to try crime.
‘Sooner rob than starve, MON AMI. I have often planned it. A fat, rich American — some
dark corner down Montparnasse way — a cobblestone in a stocking — bang! And then go
through his pockets and bolt. It is feasible, do you not think? I would not flinch — I have
been a soldier, remember. ’
He decided against the plan in the end, because we were both foreigners and easily
recognized.
When we had got back to my room we spent another one franc fifty on bread and
chocolate. Boris devoured his share, and at once cheered up like magic; food seemed to
act on his system as rapidly as a cocktail. He took out a pencil and began making a list of
the people who would probably give us jobs. There were dozens of them, he said.
‘Tomorrow we shall find something, MON AMI, I know it in my bones. The luck always
changes. Besides, we both have brains — a man with brains can’t starve.
‘What things a man can do with brains! Brains will make money out of anything. I had a
friend once, a Pole, a real man of genius; and what do you think he used to do? He would
buy a gold ring and pawn it for fifteen francs. Then — you know how carelessly the clerks
fill up the tickets — where the clerk had written “EN OR” he would add “ET
DIAMANTS” and he would change “fifteen francs” to “fifteen thousand”. Neat, eh?
Then, you see, he could borrow a thousand francs on the security of the ticket. That is
what I mean by brains. .
