Down and Out in Paris and London (12 page)

BOULOT. We scrubbed the tables and polished the brass-

work 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 cleanli-

ness. 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 in-

spection, he does not handle it with a fork. He picks it up in

Down and Out in Paris and London

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 speak-

ing, 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 COM-

MANDE’ 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 un-

derground, 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

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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 every-

thing. The only food at the Hotel X which was ever prepared

cleanly was the staff’s, and the PATRON’S. The maxim, re-

peated by everyone, was: ‘Look out for the PATRON, and

as for the clients, S’EN F—PAS MAL!’ 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 custom-

ers 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 veg-

etables, 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 OR-

DINAIRE. 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, torn 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

Down and Out in Paris and London

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 sinks used for wash-

ing 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 in-

cluding 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 cus-

tomer 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 es-

pecially 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 mar-

malade at tea, and drink vermouth 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

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every night in his bedroom on grape-nuts, scrambled eggs

and cocoa. Perhaps it hardly matters whether such o people

are swindled or not.

Down and Out in Paris and London

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 nev-

er 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 him-

self.‘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? FORCEMENT, oth-

erwise you wouldn’t be scrubbing dishes. Well, I’m not a

poor devil of a PLONGEUR; I’m a waiter, and I went five

days without eating, once. Five days without even a crust of

bread—Jesus Christ!

‘I tell you, those five days were the devil. The only good

thing was, I had my rent paid in advance. I was living in a

dirty, cheap little hotel in the Rue Sainte Eloise up in the

Latin quarter. It was called the Hotel Suzanne May, after

some famous prostitute of the time of the Empire. I was

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starving, and there was nothing I could do; I couldn’t even

go to the cafes where the hotel proprietors come to engage

waiters, because I hadn’t the price of a drink. All I could

do was to lie in bed getting weaker and weaker, and watch-

ing the bugs running about the ceiling. I don’t want to go

through that again, I can tell you.

‘In the afternoon of the fifth day I went half mad; at least,

that’s how it seems to me now. There was an old faded print

of a woman’s head hanging on the wall of my room, and I

took to wondering who it could be; and after about an hour

I realized that it must be Sainte Eloise, who was the PA-

TRON saint of the quarter. I had never taken any notice of

the thing before, but now, as I lay staring at it, a most ex-

traordinary idea came into my head.

‘’ECOUTE, MON CHER,’ I said to myself, ‘you’ll be

starving to death if this goes on much longer. You’ve got

to do something. Why not try a prayer to Sainte Eloise? Go

down on your knees and ask her to send you some money.

After all, it can’t do any harm. Try it!’

‘Mad, eh? Still, a man will do anything when he’s hun-

gry. Besides, as I said, it couldn’t do any harm. I got out of

bed and began praying. I said:

‘’Dear Sainte Eloise, if you exist, please send me some

money. I don’t ask for much—just enough to buy some bread

and a bottle of wine and get my strength back. Three or four

francs would do. You don’t know how grateful I’ll be, Sainte

Eloise, if you help me this once. And be sure, if you send me

anything, the first thing I’ll do will be to go and bum a can-

dle for you, at your church down the street. Amen.’

Down and Out in Paris and London

‘I put in that about the candle, because I had heard that

saints like having candles burnt in their honour. I meant to

keep my promise, of course. But I am an atheist and I didn’t

really believe that anything would come of it.

‘Well, I got into bed again, and five minutes later there

came a bang at the door. It was a girl called Maria, a big fat

peasant girl who lived at our hotel. She was a very stupid

girl, but a good sort, and I didn’t much care for her to see

me in the state I was in.

‘She cried out at the sight of me. ‘NOM DE DIEU!’ she

said, ‘what’s the matter with you? What are you doing in

bed at this time of day? QUELLE MINE QUE TU AS! You

look more like a corpse than a man.’

‘Probably I did look a sight. I had been five days without

food, most of the time in bed, and it was three days since I

had had a wash or a shave. The room was a regular pigsty,

too.‘’What’s the matter?’ said Maria again.

‘’The matter!’ I said; ‘Jesus Christ! I’m starving. I haven’t

eaten for five days. That’s what’s the matter.’

‘Maria was horrified. ‘Not eaten for five days?’ she said.

‘But why? Haven’t you any money, then?’

‘’Money!’ I said. ‘Do you suppose I should be starving

if I had money? I’ve got just five sous in the world, and I’ve

pawned everything. Look round the room and see if there’s

anything more I can sell or pawn. If you can find anything

that will fetch fifty centimes, you’re cleverer than I am.’

‘Maria began looking round the room. She poked here

and there among a lot of rubbish that was lying about, and

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then suddenly she got quite excited. Her great thick mouth

fell open with astonishment.

‘’You idiot!’ she cried out. ‘Imbecile! What’s THIS,

then?’

‘I saw that she had picked up an empty oil BIDON that

had been lying in the comer. I had bought it weeks before,

for an oil lamp I had before I sold my things.

‘That?’ I said. ‘That’s an oil BIDON. What about it?’

‘’Imbecile! Didn’t you pay three francs fifty deposit on

it?’‘Now, of course I had paid the three francs fifty. They

always make you pay a deposit on the BIDON, and you get

it back when the BIDON is returned. But I’d forgotten all

about it.

‘’Yes—‘ I began.

‘’Idiot!’ shouted Maria again. She got so excited that she

began to dance about until I thought her sabots would go

through the floor, ‘Idiot! T’ES FOU! T’ES FOU! What have

you got to do but take it back to the shop and get your de-

posit back? Starving, with three francs fifty staring you in

the face! Imbecile!’

‘I can hardly believe now that in all those five days I had

never once thought of taking the BIDON back to the shop.

As good as three francs fifty in hard cash, and it had never

occurred to me! I sat up in bed. ‘Quick!’ I shouted to Maria,

‘you take it for me. Take it to the grocer’s at the corner—run

like the devil. And bring back food!’

‘Maria didn’t need to be told. She grabbed the BIDON

and went clattering down the stairs like a herd of elephants

100

Down and Out in Paris and London

and in three minutes she was back with two pounds of bread

under one arm and a half-litre bottle of wine under the oth-

er. I didn’t stop to thank her; I just seized the bread and sank

my teeth in it. Have you noticed how bread tastes when you

have been hungry for a long time? Cold, wet, doughy—like

putty almost. But, Jesus Christ, how good it was! As for the