Down and Out in Paris and London (18 page)

work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would

be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who

should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they

know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of

him. I say this of the PLONGEUR because it is his case I

have been considering; it would apply equally to number-

less other types of worker. These are only my own ideas

about the basic facts of a PLONGEUR’S life, made without

reference to immediate economic questions, and no doubt

largely platitudes. I present them as a sample of the thoughts

that are put into one’s head by working in an hotel.

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Down and Out in Paris and London

XXIII

As soon as I left the Auberge de Jehan Cottard I went to

bed and slept the clock round, all but one hour. Then

I washed my teeth for the first time in a fortnight, bathed

and had my hair cut, and got my clothes out of pawn. I had

two glorious days of loafing. I even went in my best suit to

the Auberge, leant against the bar and spent five francs on a

bottle of English beer. It is a curious sensation, being a cus-

tomer where you have been a slave’s slave. Boris was sorry

that I had left the restaurant just at the moment when we

were LANCES and there was a chance of making money. I

have heard from him since, and he tells me that he is mak-

ing a hundred francs a day and has set up a girl who is TRES

SERIEUSE and never smells of garlic.

I spent a day wandering about our quarter, saying good-

bye to everyone. It was on this day that Charlie told me

about the death of old Roucolle the miser, who had once

lived in the quarter. Very likely Charlie was lying as usual,

but it was a good story.

Roucolle died, aged seventy-four, a year or two before I

went to Paris, but the people in the quarter still talked of

him while I was there. He never equalled Daniel Dancer or

anyone of that kind, but he was an interesting character. He

went to Les Halles every morning to pick up damaged veg-

etables, and ate cat’s meat, and wore newspaper instead of

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underclothes, and used the wainscoting of his room for fire-

wood, and made himself a pair of trousers out of a sack—all

this with half a million francs invested. I should like very

much to have known him.

Like many misers, Roucolle came to a bad end through

putting his money into a wildcat scheme. One day a Jew

appeared in the quarter, an alert, business-like young chap

who had a first-rate plan for smuggling cocaine into Eng-

land. It is easy enough, of course, to buy cocaine in Paris,

and the smuggling would be quite simple in itself, only there

is always some spy who betrays the plan to the customs or

the police. It is said that this is often done by the very people

who sell the cocaine, because the smuggling trade is in the

hands of a large combine, who do not want competition.

The Jew, however, swore that there was no danger. He knew

a way of getting cocaine direct from Vienna, not through

the usual channels, and there would be no blackmail to

pay. He had got into touch with Roucolle through a young

Pole, a student at the Sorbonne, who was going to put four

thousand francs into the scheme if Roucolle would put six

thousand. For this they could buy ten pounds of cocaine,

which would be worth a small fortune in England.

The Pole and the Jew had a tremendous struggle to get

the money from between old Roucolle’s claws. Six thousand

francs was not much—he had more than that sewn into

the mattress in his room—but it was agony for him to part

with a sou. The Pole and the Jew were at him for weeks on

end, explaining, bullying, coaxing, arguing, going down on

their knees and imploring him to produce the money. The

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Down and Out in Paris and London

old man was half frantic between greed and fear. His bowels

yearned at the thought of getting, perhaps, fifty thousand

francs’ profit, and yet he could not bring himself to risk

the money. He used to sit in a comer with his head in his

hands, groaning and sometimes yelling out in agony, and

often he would kneel down (he was very pious) and pray for

strength, but still he couldn’t do it. But at last, more from

exhaustion than anything else, he gave in quite suddenly;

he slit open the mattress where his money was concealed

and handed over six thousand francs to the Jew.

The Jew delivered the cocaine the same day, and prompt-

ly vanished. And meanwhile, as was not surprising after the

fuss Roucolle had made, the affair had been noised all over

the quarter. The very next morning the hotel was raided and

searched by the police.

Roucolle and the Pole were in agonies. The police were

downstairs, working their way up and searching every

room in turn, and there was the great packet of cocaine on

the table, with no place to hide it and no chance of escap-

ing down the stairs. The Pole was for throwing the stuff out

of the window, but Roucolle would not hear of it. Charlie

told me that he had been present at the scene. He said that

when they tried to take the packet from Roucolle he clasped

it to his breast and struggled like a madman, although he

was seventy-four years old. He was wild with fright, but he

would go to prison rather than throw his money away.

At last, when the police were searching only one floor be-

low, somebody had an idea. A man on Roucolle’s floor had a

dozen tins of face-powder which he was selling on commis-

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sion; it was suggested that the cocaine could be put into the

tins and passed off as face-powder. The powder was hastily

thrown out of the window and the cocaine substituted, and

the tins were put openly on Roucolle’s table, as though there

there were nothing to conceal. A few minutes later the po-

lice came to search Roucolle’s room. They tapped the walls

and looked up the chimney and turned out the drawers and

examined the floorboards, and then, just as they were about

to give it up, having found nothing, the inspector noticed

the tins on the table.

‘TIENS,’ he said, ‘have a look at those tins. I hadn’t no-

ticed them. What’s in them, eh?’

‘Face-powder,’ said the Pole as calmly as he could man-

age. But at the same instant Roucolle let out a loud groaning

noise, from alarm, and the police became suspicious im-

mediately. They opened one of the tins and tipped out the

contents, and after smelling it, the inspector said that he be-

lieved it was cocaine. Roucolle and the Pole began swearing

on the names of the saints that it was only face-powder; but

it was no use, the more they protested the more suspicious

the police became. The two men were arrested and led off to

the police station, followed by half the quarter.

At the station, Roucolle and the Pole were interrogated

by the Commissaire while a tin of the cocaine was sent away

to be analysed. Charlie said that the scene Roucolle made

was beyond description. He wept, prayed, made contradic-

tory statements and denounced the Pole all at once, so loud

that he could be heard half a street away. The policemen al-

most burst with laughing at him.

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Down and Out in Paris and London

After an hour a policeman came back with the tin of co-

caine and a note from the analyst. He was laughing.

‘This is not cocaine, MONSIEUR,’ he said.

‘What, not cocaine?’ said the Commissaire. ‘MAIS, AL-

ORS—what is it, then?’

‘It is face-powder.’

Roucolle and the Pole were released at once, entirely ex-

onerated but very angry. The Jew had double-crossed them.

Afterwards, when the excitement was over, it turned out

that he had played the same trick on two other people in

the quarter.

The Pole was glad enough to escape, even though he had

lost his four thousand francs, but poor old Roucolle was

utterly broken down. He took to his bed at once, and all

that day and half the night they could hear him thrashing

about, mumbling, and sometimes yelling out at the top of

his voice:

‘Six thousand francs! NOM DE JESUS-CHRIST! Six

thousand francs!’

Three days later he had some kind of stroke, and in a

fortnight he was dead—of a broken heart, Charlie said.

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XXIV

I travelled to England third class via Dunkirk and Tilbury,

which is the cheapest and not the worst way of crossing

the Channel. You had to pay extra for a cabin, so I slept in

the saloon, together with most of the third-class passengers.

I find this entry in my diary for that day:

‘Sleeping in the saloon, twenty-seven men, sixteen wom-

en. Of the women, not a single one has washed her face this

morning. The men mostly went to the bathroom; the wom-

en merely produced vanity cases and covered the dirt with

powder. Q. A secondary sexual difference?’

On the journey I fell in with a couple of Roumanians, mere

children, who were going to England on their honeymoon

trip. They asked innumerable questions about England, and

I told them some startling lies. I was so pleased to be getting

home, after being hard up for months in a foreign city, that

England seemed to me a sort of Paradise. There are, indeed,

many things in England that make you glad to get home;

bathrooms, armchairs, mint sauce, new potatoes properly

cooked, brown bread, marmalade, beer made with veritable

hops—they are all splendid, if you can pay for them. Eng-

land is a very good country when you are not poor; and, of

course, with a tame imbecile to look after, I was not going to

be poor. The thought of not being poor made me very patri-

otic. The more questions the Roumanians asked, the more I

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Down and Out in Paris and London

praised England; the climate, the scenery, the art, the litera-

ture, the laws—everything in England was perfect.

Was the architecture in England good? the Rouma-

nians asked. ‘Splendid!’ I said. ‘And you should just see the

London statues! Paris is vulgar—half grandiosity and half

slums. But London—’

Then the boat drew alongside Tilbury pier. The first

building we saw on the waterside was one of those huge

hotels, all stucco and pinnacles, which stare from the Eng-

lish coast like idiots staring over an asylum wall. I saw the

Roumanians, too polite to say anything, cocking their eyes

at the hotel. ‘Built by French architects,’ I assured them;

and even later, when the train was crawling into London

through the eastern slums, I still kept it up about the beau-

ties of English architecture. Nothing seemed too good to

say about England, now that I was coming home and was

not hard up any more.

I went to B.’s office, and his first words knocked every-

thing to ruins. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said; ‘your employers have

gone abroad, patient and all. However, they’ll be back in a

month. I suppose you can hang on till then?’

I was outside in the street before it even occurred to me

to borrow some more money. There was a month to wait,

and I had exactly nineteen and sixpence in hand. The news

had taken my breath away. For a long time I could not make

up my mind what to do. I loafed the day in the streets, and at

night, not having the slightest notion of how to get a cheap

bed in London, I went to a ‘family’ hotel, where the charge

was seven and sixpence. After paying the bill I had ten and

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twopence in hand.

By the morning I had made my plans. Sooner or later I

should have to go to B. for more money, but it seemed hard-

ly decent to do so yet, and in the meantime I must exist in

some hole-and-corner way. Past experience set me against

pawning my best suit. I would leave all my things at the sta-

tion cloakroom, except my second-best suit, which I could

exchange for some cheap clothes and perhaps a pound. If

I was going to live a month on thirty shillings I must have

bad clothes—indeed, the worse the better. Whether thir-

ty shillings could be made to last a month I had no idea,

not knowing London as I knew Paris. Perhaps I could beg,

or sell bootlaces, and I remembered articles I had read in

the Sunday papers about beggars who have two thousand

pounds sewn into their trousers. It was, at any rate, notori-

ously impossible to starve in London, so there was nothing

to be anxious about.

To sell my clothes I went down into Lambeth, where

the people are poor and there are a lot of rag shops. At the

first shop I tried the proprietor was polite but unhelpful; at

the second he was rude; at the third he was stone deaf, or