Down and Out in Paris and London (8 page)

dant if trade was good. When would the restaurant open?

I asked. ‘Exactly a fortnight from today,’ the PATRON an-

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swered grandly (he had a manner of waving his hand and

flicking off his cigarette ash at the same time, which looked

very grand), ‘exactly a fortnight from today, in time for

lunch.’ Then, with obvious pride, he showed us over the res-

taurant.

It was a smallish place, consisting of a bar, a dining-

room, and a kitchen no bigger than the average bathroom.

The PATRON was decorating it in a trumpery ‘picturesque’

style (he called it ‘LE NORMAND’; it was a matter of sham

beams stuck on the plaster, and the like) and proposed to

call it the Auberge de Jehan Cottard, to give a medieval ef-

fect. He had a leaflet printed, full of lies about the historical

associations of the quarter, and this leaflet actually claimed,

among other things, that there had once been an inn on the

site of the restaurant which was frequented by Charlemagne.

The PATRON was very pleased with this touch. He was also

having the bar decorated with indecent pictures by an artist

from the Salon. Finally he gave us each an expensive ciga-

rette, and after some more talk he went home.

I felt strongly that we should never get any good from

this restaurant. The PATRON had looked to me like a cheat,

and, what was worse, an incompetent cheat, and I had seen

two unmistakable duns hanging about the back door. But

Boris, seeing himself a MAITRE D’HOTEL once more,

would not be discouraged.

‘We’ve brought it off—only a fortnight to hold out. What

is a fortnight? JE M’EN F——. To think that in only three

weeks I shall have my mistress! Will she be dark or fair, I

wonder? I don’t mind, so long as she is not too thin.’

0

Down and Out in Paris and London

Two bad days followed. We had only sixty centimes left,

and we spent it on half a pound of bread, with a piece of

garlic to rub it with. The point of rubbing garlic on bread

is that the taste lingers and gives one the illusion of hav-

ing fed recently. We sat most of that day in the Jardin des

Plantes. Boris had shots with stones at the tame pigeons,

but always missed them, and after that we wrote dinner

menus on the backs of envelopes. We were too hungry even

to try and think of anything except food. I remember the

dinner Boris finally selected for himself. It was: a dozen oys-

ters, bortch soup (the red, sweet, beetroot soup with cream

on top), crayfishes, a young chicken en CASSEROLE, beef

with stewed plums, new potatoes, a salad, suet pudding and

Roquefort cheese, with a litre of Burgundy and some old

brandy. Boris had international tastes in food. Later on,

when we were prosperous, I occasionally saw him eat meals

almost as large without difficulty.

When our money came to an end I stopped looking for

work, and was another day without food. I did not believe

that the Auberge de Jehan Cottard was really going to open,

and I could see no other prospect, but I was too lazy to do

anything but lie in bed. Then the luck changed abruptly. At

night, at about ten o’clock, I heard an eager shout from the

street. I got up and went to the window. Boris was there,

waving his stick and beaming. Before speaking he dragged

a bent loaf from his pocket and threw it up to me.

‘MON AMI, MON CHER AMI, we’re saved! What do

you think?’

‘Surely you haven’t got a job!’

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1

‘At the Hotel X, near the Place de la Concorde—five hun-

dred francs a month, and food. I have been working there

today. Name of Jesus Christ, how I have eaten!’

After ten or twelve hours’ work, and with his game leg,

his first thought had been to walk three kilometres to my ho-

tel and tell me the good news! What was more, he told me to

meet him in the Tuileries the next day during his afternoon

interval, in case he should be able to steal some food for me.

At the appointed time I met Boris on a public bench. He un-

did his waistcoat and produced a large, crushed, newspaper

packet; in it were some minced veal, a wedge of Gamembert

cheese, bread and an eclair, all jumbled together.

‘VOILA!’ said Boris, ‘that’s all I could smuggle out for

you. The doorkeeper is a cunning swine.’

It is disagreeable to eat out of a newspaper on a public

seat, especially in the Tuileries, which are generally full of

pretty girls, but I was too hungry to care. While I ate, Bo-

ris explained that he was working in the cafeterie of the

hotel—that is, in English, the stillroom. It appeared that

the cafeterie was the very lowest post in the hotel, and a

dreadful come-down for a waiter, but it would do until the

Auberge de Jehan Gottard opened. Meanwhile I was to meet

Boris every day in the Tuileries, and he would smuggle out

as much food as he dared. For three days we continued with

this arrangement, and I lived entirely on the stolen food.

Then all our troubles came to an end, for one of the PLON-

GEURS left the Hotel X, and on Boris’s recommendation I

was given a job there myself.

Down and Out in Paris and London

X

The Hotel X was a vast, grandiose place with a classical

facade, and at one side a little, dark doorway like a rat-

hole, which was the service entrance. I arrived at a quarter

to seven in the morning. A stream of men with greasy trou-

sers were hurrying in and being checked by a doorkeeper

who sat in a tiny office. I waited, and presently the CHEF

DU PERSONNEL, a sort of assistant manager, arrived and

began to question me. He was an Italian, with a round, pale

face, haggard from overwork. He asked whether I was an

experienced dishwasher, and I said that I was; he glanced at

my hands and saw that I was lying, but on hearing that I was

an Englishman he changed his tone and engaged me.

‘We have been looking for someone to practise our Eng-

lish on,’ he said. ‘Our clients are all Americans, and the

only English we know is——‘ He repeated something that

little boys write on the walls in London. ‘You may be useful.

Come downstairs.’

He led me down a winding staircase into a narrow pas-

sage, deep underground, and so low that I had to stoop in

places. It was stiflingly hot and very dark, with only dim,

yellow bulbs several yards apart. There seemed to be miles

of dark labyrinthine passages—actually, I suppose, a few

hundred yards in all—that reminded one queerly of the low-

er decks of a liner; there were the same heat and cramped

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space and warm reek of food, and a humming, whirring

noise (it came from the kitchen furnaces) just like the whir

of engines. We passed doorways which let out sometimes

a shouting of oaths, sometimes the red glare of a fire, once

a shuddering draught from an ice chamber. As we went

along, something struck me violently in the back. It was a

hundred-pound block of ice, carried by a blue-aproned por-

ter. After him came a boy with a great slab of veal on his

shoulder, his cheek pressed into the damp, spongy flesh.

They shoved me aside with a cry of ‘SAUVE-TOI, IDIOT!’

and rushed on. On the wall, under one of the lights, some-

one had written in a very neat hand: ‘Sooner will you find

a cloudless sky in winter, than a woman at the Hotel X who

has her maidenhead.’ It seemed a queer sort of place.

One of the passages branched off into a laundry, where

an old, skull-faced woman gave me a blue apron and a pile

of dishcloths. Then the CHEF DU PERSONNEL took me to

a tiny underground den—a cellar below a cellar, as it were—

where there were a sink and some gas-ovens. It was too low

for me to stand quite upright, and the temperature was per-

haps 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The CHEF DU PERSONNEL

explained that my job was to fetch meals for the higher ho-

tel employees, who fed in a small dining-room above, clean

their room and wash their crockery. When he had gone, a

waiter, another Italian, thrust a fierce, fuzzy head into the

doorway and looked down at me.

‘English, eh?’ he said. ‘Well, I’m in charge here. If you

work well’ —he made the motion of up-ending a bottle and

sucked noisily. ‘If you don’t’—he gave the doorpost sever-

Down and Out in Paris and London

al vigorous kicks. ‘To me, twisting your neck would be no

more than spitting on the floor. And if there’s any trouble,

they’ll believe me, not you. So be careful.’

After this I set to work rather hurriedly. Except for about

an hour, I was at work from seven in the morning till a

quarter past nine at night; first at washing crockery, then

at scrubbing the tables and floors of the employees’ dining-

room, then at polishing glasses and knives, then at fetching

meals, then at washing crockery again, then at fetching

more meals and washing more crockery. It was easy work,

and I got on well with it except when I went to the kitchen to

fetch meals. The kitchen was like nothing I had ever seen or

imagined—a stifling, low-ceilinged inferno of a cellar, red-

lit from the fires, and deafening with oaths and the clanging

of pots and pans. It was so hot that all the metal-work ex-

cept the stoves had to be covered with cloth. In the middle

were furnaces, where twelve cooks skipped to and fro, their

faces dripping sweat in spite of their white caps. Round that

were counters where a mob of waiters and PLONGEURS

clamoured with trays. Scullions, naked to the waist, were

stoking the fires and scouring huge copper saucepans with

sand. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry and a rage. The head

cook, a fine, scarlet man with big moustachios, stood in

the middle booming continuously, ‘CA MARCHE DEUX

AUFS BROUILLES! CA MARCHE UN CHATEAUBRI-

AND AUX POMMES SAUTEES!’ except when he broke off

to curse at a PLONGEUR. There were three counters, and

the first time I went to the kitchen I took my tray unknow-

ingly to the wrong one. The head cook walked up to me,

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twisted his moustaches, and looked me up and down. Then

he beckoned to the breakfast cook and pointed at me.

‘Do you see THAT? That is the type of PLONGEUR they

send us nowadays. Where do you come from, idiot? From

Charenton, I suppose?’ (There is a large lunatic asylum at

Charenton.)

‘From England,’ I said.

‘I might have known it. Well, MAN CHER MONSIEUR

L’ANGLAIS, may I inform you that you are the son of a

whore? And now—the camp to the other counter, where

you belong.’

I got this kind of reception every time I went to the kitch-

en, for I always made some mistake; I was expected to know

the work, and was cursed accordingly. From curiosity I

counted the number of times I was called MAQUEREAU

during the day, and it was thirty-nine.

At half past four the Italian told me that I could stop

working, but that it was not worth going out, as we began at

five. I went to the lavatory for a smoke; smoking was strictly

forbidden, and Boris had warned me that the lavatory was

the only safe place. After that I worked again till a quarter

past nine, when the waiter put his head into the doorway

and told me to leave the rest of the crockery. To my aston-

ishment, after calling me pig, mackerel, etc., all day, he had

suddenly grown quite friendly. I realized that the curses I

had met with were only a kind of probation.

‘That’ll do, MAN P’TIT,’ said the waiter. ‘TU N’ES PAS

DEBROUILLARD, but you work all right. Come up and

have your dinner. The hotel allows us two litres of wine each,

Down and Out in Paris and London

and I’ve stolen another bottle. We’ll have a fine booze.’

We had an excellent dinner from the leavings of the

higher employees. The waiter, grown mellow, told me sto-

ries about his love-affairs, and about two men whom he had

stabbed in Italy, and about how he had dodged Us military

service. He was a good fellow when one got to know him;

he reminded me of Benvenuto Cellini, somehow. I was tired

and drenched with sweat, but I felt a new man after a day’s

solid food. The work did not seem difficult, and I felt that

this job would suit me. It was not certain, however, that it

would continue, for I had been engaged as an ‘extra’ for the

day only, at twenty-five francs. The sour-faced doorkeeper

counted out the money, less fifty centimes which he said

was for insurance (a lie, I discovered afterwards). Then he

stepped out into the passage, made me take off my coat, and

carefully prodded me all over, searching for stolen food. Af-

ter this the CHEF DU PERSONNEL appeared and spoke

to me. Like the waiter, he had grown more genial on seeing