Down and Out in Paris and London (10 page)

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com

bedside. He stripped the clothes back and shook me rough-

ly. ‘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 filled 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. PLON-

GEURS 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.

Down and Out in Paris and London

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 him-

self 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 boule-

vards, and being given fifty days’ imprisonment in London

for working without a permit, 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.

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com

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 splen-

dour—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, torn paper and trampled food. A dozen waiters with

their coats off, showing their sweaty armpits, sat at the ta-

ble 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 crock-

ery, were squalid stores of food that the waiters had stolen.

Down and Out in Paris and London

There were only two sinks, and no washing basin, and it

was nothing unusual for a waiter to wash his face in the wa-

ter in which clean crockery was rinsing. But the customers

saw nothing of this. There were a coco-nut mat and a mir-

ror outside the dining-room door, and the waiters used to

preen themselves up and go in looking the picture of clean-

liness.

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 hur-

ry 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,

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com

but boring and silly beyond words. It is dreadful to think

that some people spend their whole decades at such occu-

pations. 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 ac-

tress—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 ap-

parently even a seventy-eight-hour week can leave one with

some vitality.

0

Down and Out in Paris and London

XIII

On my third day at the hotel the CHEF DU PERSON-

NEL, 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 mous-

tache?’

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. After-

wards 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 ex-

isting in a hotel. Our staff, amounting to about a hundred

and ten, had their prestige graded as accurately as that of

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com

1

soldiers, and a cook or waiter was as much above a PLON-

GEUR as a captain above a private. Highest of all came the

manager, who could sack anybody, even the cooks. We nev-

er 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 sys-

tem 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 po-

sition 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 be-

low 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 any-

Down and Out in Paris and London

thing between three thousand and seven hundred and fifty

^ 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 wait-

ers, 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 cellarman, some

porters and pages, the ice man, the bakers, the night-watch-

man, the doorkeeper. Different jobs were done by different

races. The office employees and the cooks and sewing-wom-

en were French, the waiters Italians and Germans (there is

hardly such a thing as a French waiter in Paris), the PLON-

GEURS 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 pig-

keepers for a trifle, and to divide the proceeds of this among

the PLONGEURS. There was much pilfering, too. The wait-

ers 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 cellarman stole

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com

brandy. By a rule of the hotel the waiters were not allowed

to keep stores of spirits, but had to go to the cellarman for

each drink as it was ordered. As the cellarman 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 doorkeep-

er, 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 door-

keeper played similar tricks on any employee who was fool

enough to be taken in. He called himself a Greek, but in