Read Down and Out in Paris and London Online
Authors: George Orwell
Tags: #Download classic literature as completely free eBooks from Planet eBook.
He is talking of love, his favourite subject.
‘AH, L’AMOUR, L’AMOUR! AH, QUE LES FEMMES
M’ONT TUE! Alas, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, women have
been my ruin, beyond all hope my ruin. At twenty-two I
am utterly worn out and finished. But what things I have
learned, what abysses of wisdom have I not plumbed! How
great a thing it is to have acquired the true wisdom, to have
become in the highest sense of the word a civilized man, to
have become RAFFINE, VICIEUX,’ etc. etc.
‘MESSIEURS ET DAFFIES, I perceive that you are sad.
AH, MAIS LA VIE EST BELLE—you must not be sad. Be
more gay, I beseech you!
‘Fill high ze bowl vid Samian vine,
Ve vill not sink of semes like zese!
‘AH, QUE LA VIE EST BELLE! LISTEN, MESSIEURS
ET DAMES, out of the fullness of my experience I will dis-
course to you of love. I will explain to you what is the true
meaning of love—what is the true sensibility, the higher,
more refined pleasure which is known to civilized men
10
Down and Out in Paris and London
alone. I will tell you of the happiest day of my life. Alas, but
I am past the time when I could know such happiness as
that. It is gone for ever—the very possibility, even the desire
for it, are gone.
‘Listen, then. It was two years ago; my brother was in
Paris—he is a lawyer—and my parents had told him to find
me and take me out to dinner. We hate each other, my broth-
er and I, but we preferred not to disobey my parents. We
dined, and at dinner he grew very drunk upon three bottles
of Bordeaux. I took him back to his hotel, and on the way I
bought a bottle of brandy, and when we had arrived I made
my brother drink a tumblerful of it—I told him it was some-
thing to make him sober. He drank it, and immediately he
fell down like somebody in a fit, dead drunk. I lifted him up
and propped his back against the bed; then I went through
his pockets. I found eleven hundred francs, and with that I
hurried down the stairs, jumped into a taxi, and escaped.
My brother did not know my address —I was safe.
‘Where does a man go when he has money? To the BOR-
DELS, naturally. But you do not suppose that I was going
to waste my time on some vulgar debauchery fit only for
navvies? Confound it, one is a civilized man! I was fas-
tidious, exigeant, you understand, with a thousand francs
in my pocket. It was midnight before I found what I was
looking for. I had fallen in with a very smart youth of
eighteen, dressed EN SMOKING and with his hair cut A
L’AMERICAINE, and we were talking in a quiet BISTRO
away from the boulevards. We understood one another
well, that youth and I. We talked of this and that, and dis-
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
11
cussed ways of diverting oneself. Presently we took a taxi
together and were driven away.
‘The taxi stopped in a narrow, solitary street with a sin-
gle gas-lamp flaring at the end. There were dark puddles
among the stones. Down one side ran the high, blank wall
of a convent. My guide led me to a tall, ruinous house with
shuttered windows, and knocked several times at the door.
Presently there was a sound of footsteps and a shooting of
bolts, and the door opened a little. A hand came round the
edge of it; it was a large, crooked hand, that held itself palm
upwards under our noses, demanding money.
‘My guide put his foot between the door and the step.
‘How much do you want?’ he said.
‘’A thousand francs,’ said a woman’s voice. ‘Pay up at
once or you don’t come in.’
‘I put a thousand francs into the hand and gave the re-
maining hundred to my guide: he said good night and left
me. I could hear the voice inside counting the notes, and
then a thin old crow of a woman in a black dress put her
nose out and regarded me suspiciously before letting me in.
It was very dark inside: I could see nothing except a flaring
gas-jet that illuminated a patch of plaster wall, throwing ev-
erything else into deeper shadow. There was a smell of rats
and dust. Without speaking, the old woman lighted a can-
dle at the gas-jet, then hobbled in front of me down a stone
passage to the top of a flight of stone steps.
‘’VOILA!’ she said; ‘go down into the cellar there and do
what you like. I shall see nothing, hear nothing, know noth-
ing. You are free, you understand—perfectly free.’
1
Down and Out in Paris and London
‘Ha, MESSIEURS, need I describe to YOU—FORCE-
MENT, you know it yourselves—that shiver, half of terror
and half of joy, that goes through one at these moments?
I crept down, feeling my way; I could hear my breathing
and the scraping of my shoes on the stones, otherwise all
was silence. At the bottom of the stairs my hand met an
electric switch. I turned it, and a great electrolier of twelve
red globes flooded the cellar with a red light. And behold,
I was not in a cellar, but in a bedroom, a great, rich, garish
bedroom, coloured blood red from top to bottom. Figure it
to yourselves, MESSIEURS ET DAMES! Red carpet on the
floor, red paper on the walls, red plush on the chairs, even
the ceiling red; everywhere red, burning into the eyes. It
was a heavy, stifling red, as though the light were shining
through bowls of blood. At the far end stood a huge, square
bed, with quilts red like the rest, and on it a girl was lying,
dressed in a frock of red velvet. At the sight of me she shrank
away and tried to hide her knees under the short dress.
‘I had halted by the door. ‘Come here, my chicken,’ I
called to her.
‘She gave a whimper of fright. With a bound I was be-
side the bed; she tried to elude me, but I seized her by the
throat—like this, do you see? —tight! She struggled, she be-
gan to cry out for mercy, but I held her fast, forcing back her
head and staring down into her face. She was twenty years
old, perhaps; her face was the broad, dull face of a stupid
child, but it was coated with paint and powder, and her blue,
stupid eyes, shining in the red light, wore that shocked, dis-
torted look that one sees nowhere save in the eyes of these
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
1
women. She was some peasant girl, doubtless, whom her
parents had sold into slavery.
‘Without another word I pulled her off the bed and
threw her on to the floor. And then I fell upon her like a
tiger! Ah, the joy, the incomparable rapture of that time!
There, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, is what I would expound
to you; VOILA L’AMOUR! There is the true love, there is
the only thing in the world worth striving for; there is the
thing beside which all your arts and ideals, all your philoso-
phies and creeds, all your fine words and high attitudes, are
as pale and profitless as ashes. When one has experienced
love—the true love—what is there in the world that seems
more than a mere ghost of joy?
‘More and more savagely I renewed the attack. Again
and again the girl tried to escape; she cried out for mercy
anew, but I laughed at her.
‘’Mercy!’ I said, ‘do you suppose I have come here to
show mercy? Do you suppose I have paid a thousand francs
for that?’ I swear to you, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, that if it
were not for that accursed law that robs us of our liberty, I
would have murdered her at that moment.
‘Ah, how she screamed, with what bitter cries of agony.
But there was no one to hear them; down there under the
streets of Paris we were as secure as at the heart of a pyra-
mid. Tears streamed down the girl’s face, washing away the
powder in long, dirty smears. Ah, that irrecoverable time!
You, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, you who have not cultivated
the finer sensibilities of love, for you such pleasure is almost
beyond conception. And I too, now that my youth is gone—
1
Down and Out in Paris and London
ah, youth!—shall never again see life so beautiful as that. It
is finished.
‘Ah yes, it is gone—gone for ever. Ah, the poverty, the
shortness, the disappointment of human joy! For in reali-
ty—CAR EN REALITE, what is the duration of the supreme
moment of love. It is nothing, an instant, a second perhaps.
A second of ecstasy, and after that—dust, ashes, nothing-
ness.
‘And so, just for one instant, I captured the supreme
happiness, the highest and most refined emotion to which
human beings can attain. And in the same moment it was
finished, and I was left—to what? All my savagery, my pas-
sion, were scattered like the petals of a rose. I was left cold
and languid, full of vain regrets; in my revulsion I even felt
a kind of pity for the weeping girl on the floor. Is it not nau-
seous, that we should be the prey of such mean emotions?
I did not look at the girl again; my sole thought was to get
away. I hastened up the steps of the vault and out into the
street. It was dark and bitterly cold, the streets were empty,
the stones echoed under my heels with a hollow, lonely ring.
All my money was gone, I had not even the price of a taxi
fare. I walked back alone to my cold, solitary room.
‘But there, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, that is what I prom-
ised to expound to you. That is Love. That was the happiest
day of my life.’
He was a curious specimen, Charlie. I describe him, just
to show what diverse characters could be found flourishing
in the Coq d’Or quarter.
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
1
III
I lived in the Coq d’Or quarter for about a year and a half.
One day, in summer, I found that I had just four hundred
and fifty francs left, and beyond this nothing but thirty-six
francs a week, which I earned by giving English lessons.
Hitherto I had not thought about the future, but I now re-
alized that I must do something at once. I decided to start
looking for a job, and—very luckily, as it turned out—I took
the precaution of paying two hundred francs for a month’s
rent in advance. With the other two hundred and fifty
francs, besides the English lessons, I could live a month,
and in a month I should probably find work. I aimed at be-
coming a guide to one of the tourist companies, or perhaps
an interpreter. However, a piece of bad luck prevented this.
One day there turned up at the hotel a young Italian who
called himself a compositor. He was rather an ambiguous
person, for he wore side whiskers, which are the mark ei-
ther of an apache or an intellectual, and nobody was quite
certain in which class to put him. Madame F. did not like
the look of him, and made him pay a week’s rent in advance.
The Italian paid the rent and stayed six nights at the ho-
tel. During this time he managed to prepare some duplicate
keys, and on the last night he robbed a dozen rooms, in-
cluding mine. Luckily, he did not find the money that was
in my pockets, so I was not left penniless. I was left with just
1
Down and Out in Paris and London
forty-seven francs—that is, seven and tenpence.
This put an end to my plans of looking for work. I had
now got to live at the rate of about six francs a day, and
from the start it was too difficult to leave much thought for
anything else. It was now that my experiences of poverty
began—for six francs a day, if not actual poverty, is on the
fringe of it. Six francs is a shilling, and you can live on a
shilling a day in Paris if you know how. But it is a compli-
cated business.
It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty.
You have thought so much about poverty—it is the thing
you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would
happen to you sooner or later; and it, is all so utterly and
prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple;
it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be
terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar
LOWNESS of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that
it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.
You discover, for instance, the secrecy attaching to pov-
erty. At a sudden stroke you have been reduced to an income
of six francs a day. But of course you dare not admit it—you
have got to pretend that you are living quite as usual. From
the start it tangles you in a net of lies, and even with the
lies you can hardly manage it. You stop sending clothes to
the laundry, and the laundress catches you in the street and
asks you why; you mumble something, and she, thinking
you are sending the clothes elsewhere, is your enemy for life.
The tobacconist keeps asking why you have cut down your
smoking. There are letters you want to answer, and cannot,
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
1
because stamps are too expensive. And then there are your