Down and Out in Paris and London (17 page)

and whispered conspiratorially:

‘SH! ATTENTION, UN FRANCAIS!’

A moment later the PATRON’s wife came and whis-

pered:

‘ATTENTION, UN FRANCAIS! See that he gets a dou-

ble portion of all vegetables.’

While the Frenchman ate, the PATRON’S wife stood

behind the grille of the kitchen door and watched the ex-

pression of his face. Next night the Frenchman came back

with two other Frenchmen. This meant that we were earn-

ing a good name; the surest sign of a bad restaurant is to be

frequented only by foreigners. Probably part of the reason

for our success was that the PATRON, with the sole gleam of

sense he had shown in fitting out the restaurant, had bought

very sharp table-knives. Sharp knives, of course, are THE

secret of a successful restaurant. I am glad that this hap-

pened, for it destroyed one of my illusions, namely, the idea

that Frenchmen know good food when they see it. Or per-

haps we WERE a fairly good restaurant by Paris standards;

in which case the bad ones must be past imagining.

In a very few days after I had written to B he replied to say

that there was a job he could get for me. It was to look after

a congenital imbecile, which sounded a splendid rest cure

after the Auberge de Jehan Cottard. I pictured myself loaf-

ing in the country lanes, knocking thistle-heads off with my

stick, feeding on roast lamb and treacle tart, and sleeping

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Down and Out in Paris and London

ten hours a night in sheets smelling of lavender. B sent me a

fiver to pay my passage and get my clothes out of the pawn,

and as soon as the money arrived I gave one day’s notice and

left the restaurant. My leaving so suddenly embarrassed the

PATRON, for as usual he was penniless, and he had to pay

my wages thirty francs short. However he stood me a glass

of Courvoisier ‘48 brandy, and I think he felt that this made

up the difference. They engaged a Czech, a thoroughly com-

petent PLONGEUR, in my place, and the poor old cook

was sacked a few weeks later. Afterwards I heard that, with

two first-rate people in the kitchen, the PLONGEUR’S work

had been cut down to fifteen hours a day. Below that no one

could have cut it, short of modernizing the kitchen.

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XXII

For what they are worth I want to give my opinions about

the life of a Paris PLONGEUR. When one comes to

think of it, it is strange that thousands of people in a great

modem city should spend their waking hours swabbing

dishes in hot dens underground. The question I am raising

is why this life goes on—what purpose it serves, and who

wants it to continue, and why I am not taking the merely

rebellious, FAINEANT attitude. I am trying to consider the

social significance of a PLONGEUR’S life.

I think one should start by saying that a PLONGEUR is

one of the slaves of the modem world. Not that there is any

need to whine over him, for he is better off than many man-

ual workers, but still, he is no freer than if he were bought

and sold. His work is servile and without art; he is paid just

enough to keep him alive; his only holiday is the sack. He is

cut off from marriage, or, if he marries, his wife must work

too. Except by a lucky chance, he has no escape from this

life, save into prison. At this moment there are men with

university degrees scrubbing dishes in Paris for ten or fif-

teen hours a day. One cannot say that it is mere idleness on

their part, for an idle man cannot be a PLONGEUR; they

have simply been trapped by a routine which makes thought

impossible. If PLONGEURS thought at all, they would long

ago have formed a union and gone on strike for better treat-

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Down and Out in Paris and London

ment. But they do not think, because they have no leisure

for it; their life has made slaves of them.

The question is, why does this slavery continue? People

have a way of taking it for granted that all work is done for

a sound purpose. They see somebody else doing a disagree-

able job, and think that they have solved things by saying

that the job is necessary. Coal-mining, for example, is hard

work, but it is necessary—we must have coal. Working in the

sewers is unpleasant, but somebody must work in the sew-

ers. And similarly with a PLONGEUR’S work. Some people

must feed in restaurants, and so other people must swab

dishes for eighty hours a week. It is the work of civilization,

therefore unquestionable. This point is worth considering.

Is a PLONGEUR’S work really necessary to civilization?

We have a feeling that it must be ‘honest’ work, because it

is hard and disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish

of manual work. We see a man cutting down a tree, and we

make sure that he is filling a social need, just because he

uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he may only be

cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous

statue. I believe it is the same with a PLONGEUR. He earns

his bread in the sweat of his brow, but it does not follow that

he is doing anything useful; he may be only supplying a lux-

ury which, very often, is not a luxury.

As an example of what I mean by luxuries which are not

luxuries, take an extreme case, such as one hardly sees in

Europe. Take an Indian rickshaw puller, or a gharry pony.

In any Far Eastern town there are rickshaw pullers by the

hundred, black wretches weighing eight stone, clad in loin-

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cloths. Some of them are diseased; some of them are fifty

years old. For miles on end they trot in the sun or rain, head

down, dragging at the shafts, with the sweat dripping from

their grey moustaches. When they go too slowly the pas-

senger calls them BAHINCHUT. They earn thirty or forty

rupees a month, and cough their lungs out after a few years.

The gharry ponies are gaunt, vicious things that have been

sold cheap as having a few years’ work left in them. Their

master looks on the whip as a substitute for food. Their

work expresses itself in a sort of equation—whip plus food

equals energy; generally it is about sixty per cent whip and

forty per cent food. Sometimes their necks are encircled by

one vast sore, so that they drag all day on raw flesh. It is still

possible to make them work, however; it is just a question of

thrashing them so hard that the pain behind outweighs the

pain in front. After a few years even the whip loses its vir-

tue, and the pony goes to the knacker. These are instances

of unnecessary work, for there is no real need for gharries

and rickshaws; they only exist because Orientals consider it

vulgar to walk. They are luxuries, and, as anyone who has

ridden in them knows, very poor luxuries. They afford a

small amount of convenience, which cannot possibly bal-

ance the suffering of the men and animals.

Similarly with the PLONGEUR. He is a king compared

with a rickshaw puller or a gharry pony, but his case is

analogous. He is the slave of a hotel or a restaurant, and

his slavery is more or less useless. For, after all, where is

the REAL need of big hotels and smart restaurants? They

are supposed to provide luxury, but in reality they provide

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Down and Out in Paris and London

only a cheap, shoddy imitation of it. Nearly everyone hates

hotels. Some restaurants are better than others, but it is im-

possible to get as good a meal in a restaurant as one can get,

for the same expense, in a private house. No doubt hotels

and restaurants must exist, but there is no need that they

should enslave hundreds of people. What makes the work

in them is not the essentials; it is the shams that are sup-

posed to represent luxury. Smartness, as it is called, means,

in effect, merely that the staff work more and the customers

pay more; no one benefits except the proprietor, who will

presently buy himself a striped villa at Deauville. Essential-

ly, a ‘smart’ hotel is a place where a hundred people toil like

devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose

for things they do not really want. If the nonsense were cut

out of hotels and restaurants, and the work done with sim-

ple efficiency, PLONGEURS might work six or eight hours a

day instead often or fifteen.

Suppose it is granted that a PLONGEUR’S work is more

or less useless. Then the question follows, Why does any-

one want him to go on working? I am trying to go beyond

the immediate economic cause, and to consider what plea-

sure it can give anyone to think of men swabbing dishes for

life. For there is no doubt that people—comfortably situated

people—do find a pleasure in such thoughts. A slave, Mar-

cus Gato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It

does not matter whether his work is needed or not, he must

work, because work in itself is good—for slaves, at least.

This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains

of useless drudgery.

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I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is,

at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought

runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if

they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.

A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is

questioned about the improvement of working conditions,

usually says something like this:

‘We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is

so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the

thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do

anything about it. We are sorry for you lower classes, just

as we are sorry for a, cat with the mange, but we will fight

like devils against any improvement of your condition. We

feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of

affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of set-

ting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers,

since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy,

sweat and be damned to you.’

This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated

people; one can read the substance of it in a hundred es-

says. Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four

hundred pounds a year, and naturally they side with the

rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the

poor is a threat to their own liberty. Foreseeing some dismal

Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers

to keep things as they are. Possibly he does not like his fel-

low-rich very much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest

of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of

people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them.

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Down and Out in Paris and London

It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes

nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the

idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference

between rich and poor, as though they were two different

races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is

no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are

differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the.

average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed

in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is

the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on

equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the

trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people

who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do

mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated

people know about poverty? In my copy of Villon’s poems

the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the

line ‘NE PAIN NE VOYENT QU’AUX FENESTRES’ by a

footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man’s

experience.

From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob re-

sults quite naturally. The educated man pictures a horde

of submen, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house,

burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or

sweeping out a lavatory. ‘Anything,’ he thinks, ‘any injus-

tice, sooner than let that mob loose.’ He does not see that

since there is no difference between the mass of rich and

poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob

is in fact loose now, and—in the shape of rich men—is using

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its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such

as ‘smart’ hotels.

To sum up. A PLONGEUR is a slave, and a wasted slave,

doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at