Down and Out in Paris and London (13 page)

wine, I sucked it all down in one draught, and it seemed to

go straight into my veins and flow round my body like new

blood. Ah, that made a difference!

‘I wolfed the whole two pounds of bread without stop-

ping to take breath. Maria stood with her hands on her hips,

watching me eat. ‘Well, you feel better, eh?’ she said when I

had finished.

‘’Better!’ I said. ‘I feel perfect! I’m not the same man as I

was five minutes ago. There’s only one thing in the world I

need now—a cigarette.’

‘Maria put her hand in her apron pocket. ‘You can’t have

it,’ she said. ‘I’ve no money. This is all I had left out of your

three francs fifty —seven sous. It’s no good; the cheapest

cigarettes are twelve sous a packet.’

‘’Then I can have them!’ I said. ‘Jesus Christ, what a piece

of luck! I’ve got five sous—it’s just enough.’

‘Maria took the twelve sous and was starting out to the

tobacconist’s. And then something I had forgotten all this

time came into my head. There was that cursed Sainte El-

oise! I had promised her a candle if she sent me money;

and really, who could say that the prayer hadn’t come true?

‘Three or four francs,’ I had said; and the next moment along

came three francs fifty. There was no getting away from it. I

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com

101

should have to spend my twelve sous on a candle.

‘I called Maria back. ‘It’s no use,’ I said; ‘there is Sainte

Eloise —I have promised her a candle. The twelve sous will

have to go on that. Silly, isn’t it? I can’t have my cigarettes

after all.’

‘’Sainte Eloise?’ said Maria. ‘What about Sainte Eloise?’

‘’I prayed to her for money and promised her a candle,’

I said. ‘She answered the prayer—at any rate, the money

turned up. I shall have to buy that candle. It’s a nuisance,

but it seems to me I must keep my promise.’

‘’But what put Sainte Eloise into your head?’ said Maria.

‘’It was her picture,’ I said, and I explained the whole

thing. ‘There she is, you see,’ I said, and I pointed to the pic-

ture on the wall.

‘Maria looked at the picture, and then to my surprise

she burst into shouts of laughter. She laughed more and

more, stamping about the room and holding her fat sides

as though they would burst. I thought she had gone mad. It

was two minutes before she could speak.

‘’Idiot!’ she cried at last. ‘T’ES FOU! T’ES FOU! Do you

mean to tell me you really knelt down and prayed to that

picture? Who told you it was Sainte Eloise?’

‘’But I made sure it was Sainte Eloise!’ I said.

‘’Imbecile! It isn’t Sainte Eloise at all. Who do you think

it is?’

‘’Who?’ I said.

‘’It is Suzanne May, the woman this hotel is called after.’

‘I had been praying to Suzanne May, the famous prosti-

tute of the Empire …

10

Down and Out in Paris and London

‘But, after all, I wasn’t sorry. Maria and I had a good

laugh, and then we talked it over, and we made out that I

didn’t owe Sainte Eloise anything. Clearly it wasn’t she who

had answered the prayer, and there was no need to buy her

a candle. So I had my packet of cigarettes after all.’

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com

10

XVI

Time went on and the Auberge de Jehan Cottard showed

no signs of opening. Boris and I went down there one

day during our afternoon interval and found that none of

the alterations had been done, except the indecent pictures,

and there were three duns instead of two. The PATRON

greeted us with his usual blandness, and the next instant

turned to me (his prospective dishwasher) and borrowed

five francs. After that I felt certain that the restaurant would

never get beyond talk. The PATRON, however, again named

the opening for ‘exactly a fortnight from today’, and intro-

duced us to the woman who was to do the cooking, a Baltic

Russian five feet tall and a yard across the hips. She told us

that she had been a singer before she came down to cooking,

and that she was very artistic and adored English literature,

especially LA CASE DE L’ONCLE TOM.

In a fortnight I had got so used to the routine of a PLON-

GEUR’S life that I could hardly imagine anything different.

It was a life without much variation. At a quarter to six one

woke with a sudden start, tumbled into grease-stiffened

clothes, and hurried out with dirty face and protesting mus-

cles. It was dawn, and the windows were dark except for the

workmen’s cafes. The sky was like a vast flat wall of cobalt,

with roofs and spires of black paper pasted upon it. Drowsy

men were sweeping the pavements with ten-foot besoms,

10

Down and Out in Paris and London

and ragged families picking over the dustbins. Work-

men, and girls with a piece of chocolate in one hand and a

CROISSANT in the other, were pouring into the Metro sta-

tions. Trams, filled with more workmen, boomed gloomily

past. One hastened down to the station, fought for a place—

one does literally have to fight on the Paris Metro at six in

the morning—and stood jammed in the swaying mass of

passengers, nose to nose with some hideous French face,

breathing sour wine and garlic. And then one descended

into the labyrinth of the hotel basement, and forgot daylight

till two o’clock, when the sun was hot and the town black

with people and cars.

After my first week at the hotel I always spent the af-

ternoon interval in sleeping, or, when I had money, in a

BISTRO. Except for a few ambitious waiters who went to

English classes, the whole staff wasted their leisure in this

way; one seemed too lazy after the morning’s work to do

anything better. Sometimes half a dozen PLONGEURS

would make up a party and go to an abominable brothel

in the Rue de Sieyes, where the charge was only five francs

twenty-five centimes—tenpence half-penny. It was nick-

named ‘LE PRIX FIXE’, and they used to describe their

experiences there as a great joke. It was a favourite rendez-

vous of hotel workers. The PLONGEURS’ wages did not

allow them to marry, and no doubt work in the basement

does not encourage fastidious feelings.

For another four hours one was in the cellars, and then

one emerged, sweating, into the cool street. It was lamp-

light—that strange purplish gleam of the Paris lamps—and

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com

10

beyond the river the Eiffel Tower flashed from top to bottom

with zigzag skysigns, like enormous snakes of fire. Streams

of cars glided silently to and fro, and women, exquisite-

looking in the dim light, strolled up and down the arcade.

Sometimes a woman would glance at Boris or me, and then,

noticing our greasy clothes, look hastily away again. One

fought another battle in the Metro and was home by ten.

Generally from ten to midnight I went to a little BISTRO

in our street, an underground place frequented by Arab

navvies. It was a bad place for fights, and I sometimes saw

bottles thrown, once with fearful effect, but as a rule the

Arabs fought among themselves and let Christians alone.

Raki, the Arab drink, was very cheap, and the BISTRO was

open at all hours, for the Arabs—lucky men—had the pow-

er of working all day and drinking all night.

It was the typical life of a PLONGEUR, and it did not

seem a bad life at the time. I had no sensation of poverty, for

even after paying my rent and setting aside enough for to-

bacco and journeys and my food on Sundays, I still had four

francs a day for drinks, and four francs was wealth. There

was—it is hard to express it—a sort of heavy contentment,

the contentment a well-fed beast might feel, in a life which

had become so simple. For nothing could be simpler than

the life of a PLONGEUR. He lives in a rhythm between

work and sleep, without time to think, hardly conscious

of the exterior world; his Paris has shrunk to the hotel, the

Metro, a few BISTROS and his bed. If he goes afield, it is

only a few streets away, on a trip with some servant-girl who

sits on his knee swallowing oysters and beer. On his free day

10

Down and Out in Paris and London

he lies in bed till noon, puts on a clean shirt, throws dice for

drinks, and after lunch goes back to bed again. Nothing is

quite real to him but the BOULOT, drinks and sleep; and of

these sleep is the most important.

One night, in the small hours, there was a murder just

beneath my window. I was woken by a fearful uproar, and,

going to the window, saw a man lying flat on the stones be-

low; I could see the murderers, three of them, flitting away

at the end of the street. Some of us went down and found

that the man was quite dead, his skull cracked with a piece

of lead piping. I remember the colour of his blood, curious-

ly purple, like wine; it was still on the cobbles when I came

home that evening, and they said the school-children had

come from miles round to see it. But the thing that strikes

me in looking back is that I was in bed and asleep within

three minutes of the murder. So were most of the people in

the street; we just made sure that the man was done for, and

went straight back to bed. We were working people, and

where was the sense of wasting sleep over a murder?

Work in the hotel taught me the true value of sleep, just

as being hungry had taught me the true value of food. Sleep

had ceased to be a mere physical necessity; it was something

voluptuous, a debauch more than a relief. I had no more

trouble with the bugs. Mario had told me of a sure remedy

for them, namely pepper, strewed thick over the bedclothes.

It made me sneeze, but the bugs all hated it, and emigrated

to other rooms.

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com

10

XVII

With thirty francs a week to spend on drinks I could

take part in the social life of the quarter. We had

some jolly evenings, on Saturdays, in the little BISTRO at

the foot of the Hotel des Trois Moineaux.

The brick-floored room, fifteen feet square, was packed

with twenty people, and the air dim with smoke. The noise

was deafening, for everyone was either talking at the top

of his voice or singing. Sometimes it was just a confused

din of voices; sometimes everyone would burst out together

in the same song—the ‘Marseillaise’, or the ‘Internationale’,

or ‘Madelon’, or ‘Les Fraises et les Fram-boises’. Azaya, a

great clumping peasant girl who worked fourteen hours a

day in a glass factory, sang a song about, ‘IL A PERDU SES

PANTALONS, TOUT EN DANSANT LE CHARLESTON.’

Her friend Marinette, a thin, dark Gorsican girl of obsti-

nate virtue, tied her knees together and danced the DANSE

DU VENTRE. The old Rougiers wandered in and out, cadg-

ing drinks and trying to tell a long, involved story about

someone who had once cheated them over a bedstead. R.,

cadaverous and silent, sat in his comer quietly boozing.

Charlie, drunk, half danced, half staggered to and fro with

a glass of sham absinthe balanced in one fat hand, pinching

the women’s breasts and declaiming poetry. People played

darts and diced for drinks. Manuel, a Spaniard, dragged the

10

Down and Out in Paris and London

girls to the bar and shook the dice-box against their bel-

lies, for luck. Madame F. stood at the bar rapidly pouring

CHOPINES of wine through the pewter funnel, with a wet

dishcloth always handy, because every man in the room

tried to make love to her. Two children, bastards of big Lou-

is the bricklayer, sat in a comer sharing a glass of SIROP.

Everyone was very happy, overwhelmingly certain that the

world was a good place and we a notable set of people.

For an hour the noise scarcely slackened. Then about

midnight there was a piercing shout of ‘CITOYENS!’ and

the sound of a chair falling over. A blond, red-faced work-

man had risen to his feet and was banging a bottle on the

table. Everyone stopped singing; the word went round, ‘Sh!

Furex is starting!’ Furex was a strange creature, a Limousin

stonemason who worked steadily all the week and drank

himself into a kind of paroxysm on Saturdays. He had lost

his memory and could not remember anything before the

war, and he would have gone to pieces through drink if Ma-

dame F. had not taken care of him. On Saturday evenings at

about five o’clock she would say to someone, ‘Catch Furex

before he spends his wages,’ and when he had been caught

she would take away his money, leaving him enough for one

good drink. One week he escaped, and, rolling blind drunk

in the Place Monge, was run over by a car and badly hurt.

The queer thing about Furex was that, though he was