Down and Out in Paris and London (11 page)

reality he was an Armenian. 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 univer-

Down and Out in Paris and London

sity, 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 wait-

ers 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 Ital-

ian 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 re-

place 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

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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 ex-

tra, 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 them-

selves against it as well as they can by means of a black list.

Down and Out in Paris and London

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 ho-

tel 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 do-

ing 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 ho-

tel except FOUTRE. A girl in the bakery, aged sixteen, used

oaths that would have defeated a cabman. (Did not Ham-

let 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

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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 con-

spire 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 ser-

vant, 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 hon-

our 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 sev-

eral 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; every-

thing 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) unfail-

Down and Out in Paris and London

ingly. 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 mon-

ey to be made that the waiters actually pay the PATRON

for their employment. The result is that between constant-

ly 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 nev-

er seen anything like them, and I have seen some things.

Ah, it was glorious!’

‘But,’ Isaid, ‘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

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you sit in a restaurant, still stuffing yourself half an hour af-

ter closing time, you feel that the tired waiter at your side

must surely be despising you. But he is not. He is not think-

ing 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 lava-

tory 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 lev-

el, the mere power to go on working like an ox is about

the only virtue attainable. DEBROUILLARD is what ev-

ery PLONGEUR wants to be called. A DEBROUILLARD

0

Down and Out in Paris and London

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 neighbour-

ing 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 typi-

cal 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 ev-

eryone 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 scru-

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1

pulously. 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—mean-

ing, 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 revolt-

ing. 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