Down and Out in Paris and London (15 page)

in his head, namely, that here at last was a chance of being

a waiter and wearing a tail coat once more. For this he was

quite willing to do ten days’ work unpaid, with the chance

of being left jobless in the end. ‘Patience!’ he kept saying.

‘That will arrange itself. Wait till the restaurant opens, and

we’ll get it all back. Patience, MON AMI!’

We needed patience, for days passed and the restaurant

did not even progress towards opening. We cleaned out

the cellars, fixed the shelves, distempered the walls, pol-

ished the woodwork, whitewashed the ceiling, stained the

floor; but the main work, the plumbing and gas-fitting and

electricity, was still not done, because the PATRON could

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not pay the bills. Evidently he was almost penniless, for he

refused the smallest charges, and he had a trick of swiftly

disappearing when asked for money. His blend of shiftiness

and aristocratic manners made him very hard to deal with.

Melancholy duns came looking for him at all hours, and by

instruction we always told them that he was at Fontaine-

bleau, or Saint Cloud, or some other place that was safely

distant. Meanwhile, I was getting hungrier and hungrier.

I had left the hotel with thirty francs, and I had to go back

immediately to a diet of dry bread. Boris had managed in

the beginning to extract an advance of sixty francs from

the PATRON, but he had spent half of it, in redeeming his

waiter’s clothes, and half on the girl of sympathetic tem-

perament. He borrowed three francs a day from Jules, the

second waiter, and spent it on bread. Some days we had not

even money for tobacco.

Sometimes the cook came to see how things were getting

on, and when she saw that the kitchen was still bare of pots

and pans she usually wept. Jules, the second waiter, refused

steadily to help with the work. He was a Magyar, a little

dark, sharp-featured fellow in spectacles, and very talk-

ative; he had been a medical student, but had abandoned

his training for lack of money. He had a taste for talking

while other people were working, and he told me all about

himself and his ideas. It appeared that he was a Commu-

nist, and had various strange theories (he could prove to

you by figures that it was wrong to work), and he was also,

like most Magyars, passionately proud. Proud and lazy men

do not make good waiters. It was Jules’s dearest boast that

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Down and Out in Paris and London

once when a customer in a restaurant had insulted him, he

had poured a plate of hot soup down the customer’s neck,

and then walked straight out without even waiting to be

sacked.

As each day went by Jules grew more and more enraged

at the trick the PATRON had played on us. He had a splut-

tering, oratorical way of talking. He used to walk up and

down shaking his fist, and trying to incite me not to work:

‘Put that brush down, you fool! You and I belong to

proud races; we don’t work for nothing, like these damned

Russian serfs. I tell you, to be cheated like this is torture to

me. There have been times in my life, when someone has

cheated me even of five sous, when I have vomited—yes,

vomited with rage.

‘Besides, MON VIEUX, don’t forget that I’m a Commu-

nist. A BAS LA BOURGEOISIE! Did any man alive ever see

me working when I could avoid it? No. And not only I don’t

wear myself out working, like you other fools, but I steal, just

to show my independence. Once I was in a restaurant where

the PATRON thought he could treat me like a dog. Well, in

revenge I found out a way to steal milk from the milk-cans

and seal them up again so that no one should know. I tell

you I just swilled that milk down night and morning. Every

day I drank four litres of milk, besides half a litre of cream.

The PATRON was at his wits’ end to know where the milk

was going. It wasn’t that I wanted milk, you understand, be-

cause I hate the stuff; it was principle, just principle.

‘Well, after three days I began to get dreadful pains in my

belly, and I went to the doctor. ‘What have you been eating?’

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he said. I said: ‘I drink four litres of milk a day, and half a

litre of cream.’ ‘Four litres!’ he said. ‘Then stop it at once.

You’ll burst if you go on.’ ‘What do I care?’ I said. ‘With

me principle is everything. I shall go on drinking that milk,

even if I do burst.’

‘Well, the next day the PATRON caught me stealing

milk. ‘You’re sacked,’ he said; ‘you leave at the end of the

week.’ ‘PARDON, MONSIEUR,’ I said, ‘I shall leave this

morning.’ ‘No, you won’t,’ he said, ‘I can’t spare you till Sat-

urday.’ ‘Very well, MON PATRON,’ I thought to myself,

‘we’ll see who gets tired of it first.’ And then I set to work

to smash the crockery. I broke nine plates the first day and

thirteen the second; after that the PATRON was glad to see

the last of me.

‘Ah, I’m not one of your Russian MOUJIKS …’

Ten days passed. It was a bad time. I was absolutely at the

end of my money, and my rent was several days overdue. We

loafed about the dismal empty restaurant, too hungry even

to get on with the work that remained. Only Boris now be-

lieved that the restaurant would open. He had set his heart

on being MAITRE D’HOTEL, and he invented a theory

that the PATRON’S money was tied up in shares and he was

waiting a favourable moment for selling. On the tenth day I

had nothing to eat or smoke, and I told the PATRON that I

could not continue working without an advance on my wag-

es. As blandly as usual, the PATRON promised the advance,

and then, according to his custom, vanished. I walked part

of the way home, but I did not feel equal to a scene with Ma-

dame F. over the rent, so I passed the night on a bench on

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Down and Out in Paris and London

the boulevard. It was very uncomfortable—the arm of the

seat cuts into your back—and much colder than I had ex-

pected. There was plenty of time, in the long boring hours

between dawn and work, to think what a fool I had been to

deliver myself into the hands of these Russians.

Then, in the morning, the luck changed. Evidently the

PATRON had come to an understanding with his creditors,

for he arrived with money in his pockets, set the alterations

going, and gave me my advance. Boris and I bought maca-

roni and a piece of horse’s liver, and had our first hot meal

in ten days.

The workmen were brought in and the alterations made,

hastily and with incredible shoddiness. The tables, for

instance, were to be covered with baize, but when the PA-

TRON found that baize was expensive he bought instead

disused army blankets, smelling incorrigibly of sweat. The

table cloths (they were check, to go with the ‘Norman’ deco-

rations) would cover them, of course. On the last night we

were at work till two in the morning, getting things ready.

The crockery did not arrive till eight, and, being new, had all

to be washed. The cutlery did not arrive till the next morn-

ing, nor the linen either, so that we had to dry the crockery

with a shirt of the PATRON’s and an old pillowslip belong-

ing to the concierge. Boris and I did all the work. Jules was

skulking, and the PATRON and his wife sat in the bar with

a dun and some Russian friends, drinking success to the

restaurant. The cook was in the kitchen with her head on

the table, crying, because she was expected to cook for fifty

people, and there were not pots and pans enough for ten.

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About midnight there was a fearful interview with some

duns, who came intending to seize eight copper saucepans

which the PATRON had obtained on credit. They were

bought off with half a bottle of brandy.

Jules and I missed the last Metro home and had to sleep

on the floor of the restaurant. The first thing we saw in the

morning were two large rats sitting on the kitchen table,

eating from a ham that stood there. It seemed a bad omen,

and I was surer than ever that the Auberge de Jehan Cottard

would turn out a failure.

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Down and Out in Paris and London

XX

The PATRON had engaged me as kitchen PLONGEUR;

that is, my job was to wash up, keep the kitchen clean,

prepare vegetables, make tea, coffee and sandwiches, do the

simpler cooking, and run errands. The terms were, as usual,

five hundred francs a month and food, but I had no free

day and no fixed working hours. At the Hotel X I had seen

catering at its best, with unlimited money and good organi-

zation. Now, at the Auberge, I learned how things are done

in a thoroughly bad restaurant. It is worth describing, for

there are hundreds of similar restaurants in Paris, and ev-

ery visitor feeds in one of them occasionally.

I should add, by the way, that the Auberge was not the

ordinary cheap eating-house frequented by students and

workmen. We did not provide an adequate meal at less than

twenty-five francs, and we were picturesque and artistic,

which sent up our social standing. There were the indecent

pictures in the bar, and the Norman decorations—sham

beams on the walls, electric lights done up as candlesticks,

‘peasant’ pottery, even a mounting-block at the door—and

the PATRON and the head waiter were Russian officers, and

many of the customers tided Russian refugees. In short, we

were decidedly chic.

Nevertheless, the conditions behind the kitchen door

were suitable for a pigsty. For this is what our service ar-

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1

rangements were like.

The kitchen measured fifteen feet long by eight broad,

and half this space was taken up by the stoves and tables.

All the pots had to be kept on shelves out of reach, and

there was only room for one dustbin. This dustbin used to

be crammed full by midday, and the floor was normally an

inch deep in a compost of trampled food.

For firing we had nothing but three gas-stoves, without

ovens, and all joints had to be sent out to the bakery.

There was no larder. Our substitute for one was a half-

roofed shed in the yard, with a tree growing in the middle

of it. The meat, vegetables and so forth lay there on the bare

earth, raided by rats and cats.

There was no hot water laid on. Water for washing up

had to be heated in pans, and, as there was no room for

these on the stoves when meals were cooking, most of the

plates had to be washed in cold water. This, with soft soap

and the hard Paris water, meant scraping the grease off with

bits of newspaper.

We were so short of saucepans that I had to wash each

one as soon as it was done with, instead of leaving them till

the evening. This alone wasted probably an hour a day.

Owing to some scamping of expense in the installation,

the electric light usually fused at eight in the evening. The

PATRON would only allow us three candles in the kitchen,

and the cook said three were unlucky, so we had only two.

Our coffee-grinder was borrowed from a BISTRO near

by, and our dustbin and brooms from the concierge. After

the first week a quantity of linen did not come back from

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Down and Out in Paris and London

the wash, as the bill was not paid. We were in trouble with

the inspector of labour, who had discovered that the staff

included no Frenchmen; he had several private interviews

with the PATRON, who, I believe, was obliged to bribe him.

The electric company was still dunning us, and when the

duns found that we would buy them off with APERITIFS,

they came every morning. We were in debt at the grocery,

and credit would have been stopped, only the grocer’s wife

(a moustachio’d woman of sixty) had taken a fancy to Jules,

who was sent every morning to cajole her. Similarly I had to

waste an hour every day haggling over vegetables in the rue

du Commerce, to save a few centimes.

These are the results of starting a restaurant on insuffi-

cient capital. And in these conditions the cook and I were

expected to serve thirty or forty meals a day, and would later

on be serving a hundred. From the first day it was too much

for us. The cook’s working hours were from eight in the

morning till midnight, and mine from seven in the morn-

ing till half past twelve the next morning—seventeen and a

half hours, almost without a break. We never had time to

sit down till five in the afternoon, and even then there was

no seat except the top of the dustbin. Boris, who lived near

by and had not to catch the last Metro home, worked from

eight in the morning till two the next morning—eighteen