Down and Out in Paris and London (3 page)

meals— meals are the worst difficulty of all. Every day at

meal-times you go out, ostensibly to a restaurant, and loaf

an hour in the Luxembourg Gardens, watching the pigeons.

Afterwards you smuggle your food home in your pockets.

Your food is bread and margarine, or bread and wine, and

even the nature of the food is governed by lies. You have to

buy rye bread instead of household bread, because the rye

loaves, though dearer, are round and can be smuggled in

your pockets. This wastes you a franc a day. Sometimes, to

keep up appearances, you have to spend sixty centimes on

a drink, and go correspondingly short of food. Your linen

gets filthy, and you run out of soap and razor-blades. Your

hair wants cutting, and you try to cut it yourself, with such

fearful results that you have to go to the barber after all, and

spend the equivalent of a day’s food. All day you arc telling

lies, and expensive lies.

You discover the extreme precariousness of your six

francs a day. Mean disasters happen and rob you of food.

You have spent your last eighty centimes on half a litre of

milk, and are boiling it over the spirit lamp. While it boils a

bug runs down your forearm; you give the bug a flick with

your nail, and it falls, plop! straight into the milk. There is

nothing for it but to throw the milk away and go foodless.

You go to the baker’s to buy a pound of bread, and you

wait while the girl cuts a pound for another customer. She

is clumsy, and cuts more than a pound. ‘PARDON, MON-

SIEUR,’ she says, ‘I suppose you don’t mind paying two

sous extra?’ Bread is a franc a pound, and you have exactly

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Down and Out in Paris and London

a franc. When you think that you too might be asked to pay

two sous extra, and would have to confess that you could

not, you bolt in panic. It is hours before you dare venture

into a baker’s shop again.

You go to the greengrocer’s to spend a franc on a kilo-

gram of potatoes. But one of the pieces that make up the

franc is a Belgian piece, and the shopman refuses it. You

slink out of the shop, and can never go there again.

You have strayed into a respectable quarter, and you see a

prosperous friend coming. To avoid him you dodge into the

nearest cafe. Once in the cafe you must buy something, so

you spend your last fifty centimes on a glass of black coffee

with a dead fly in it. Once could multiply these disasters by

the hundred. They are part of the process of being hard up.

You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and

margarine in your belly, you go out and look into the shop

windows. Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge,

wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great

yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages, mountains of

potatoes, vast Gruyere cheeses like grindstones. A snivel-

ling self-pity comes over you at the sight of so much food.

You plan to grab a loaf and run, swallowing it before they

catch you; and you refrain, from pure funk.

You discover the boredom which is inseparable from

poverty; the times when you have nothing to do and, be-

ing underfed, can interest yourself in nothing. For half a

day at a time you lie on your bed, feeling like the JEUNE

SQUELETTE in Baudelaire’s poem. Only food could rouse

you. You discover that a man who has gone even a week on

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bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly

with a few accessory organs.

This—one could describe it further, but it is all in the

same style —is life on six francs a day. Thousands of people

in Paris live it— struggling artists and students, prostitutes

when their luck is out, out-of-work people of all kinds. It is

the suburbs, as it were, of poverty.

I continued in this style for about three weeks. The forty-

seven francs were soon gone, and I had to do what I could

on thirty-six francs a week from the English lessons. Being

inexperienced, I handled the money badly, and sometimes

I was a day without food. When this happened I used to

sell a few of my clothes, smuggling them out of the hotel in

small packets and taking them to a secondhand shop in the

rue de la Montagne St Genevieve. The shopman was a red-

haired Jew, an extraordinary disagreeable man, who used

to fall into furious rages at the sight of a client. From his

manner one would have supposed that we had done him

some injury by coming to him. ‘MERDE!’ he used to shout,

‘YOU here again? What do you think this is? A soup kitch-

en?’ And he paid incredibly low prices. For a hat which I had

bought for twenty-five shillings and scarcely worn he gave

five francs; for a good pair of shoes, five francs; for shirts,

a franc each. He always preferred to exchange rather than

buy, and he had a trick of thrusting some useless article into

one’s hand and then pretending that one had accepted it.

Once I saw him take a good overcoat from an old woman,

put two white billiard-balls into her hand, and then push

her rapidly out of the shop before she could protest. It would

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Down and Out in Paris and London

have been a pleasure to flatten the Jew’s nose, if only one

could have afforded it.

These three weeks were squalid and uncomfortable, and

evidently there was worse coming, for my rent would be due

before long. Nevertheless, things were not a quarter as bad

as I had expected. For, when you are approaching poverty,

you make one discovery which outweighs some of the oth-

ers. You discover boredom and mean complications and the

beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great re-

deeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the

future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less

money you have, the less you worry. When you have a hun-

dred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven

panics. When you have only three francs you are quite in-

different; for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and

you cannot think further than that. You are bored, but you

are not afraid. You think vaguely, ‘I shall be starving in a

day or two—shocking, isn’t it?’ And then the mind wanders

to other topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some

extent, provide its own anodyne.

And there is another feeling that is a great consolation

in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has ex-

perienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at

knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have

talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the

dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It

takes off a lot of anxiety,

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IV

One day my English lessons ceased abruptly. The weath-

er was getting hot and one of my pupils, feeling too

lazy to go on with his lessons, dismissed me. The other

disappeared from his lodgings without notice, owing me

twelve francs. I was left with only thirty centimes and no

tobacco. For a day and a half I had nothing to cat or smoke,

and then, too hungry to put it off any longer, I packed my

remaining clothes into my suitcase and took them to the

pawnshop. This put an end to all pretence of being in funds,

for I could not take my clothes out of the hotel without ask-

ing Madame F.’s leave. I remember, however, how surprised

she was at my asking her instead of removing the clothes

on the sly, shooting the moon being a common trick in our

quarter.

It was the first time that I had been in a French pawn-

shop. One went through grandiose stone portals (marked,

of course, ‘LIBERTE, EGATITE, FRATERNITE’ they write

that even over the police stations in France) into a large,

bare room like a school classroom, with a counter and rows

of benches. Forty or fifty people were waiting. One handed

one’s pledge over the counter and sat down. Presently, when

the clerk had assessed its value he would call out, ‘NUME-

RO such and such, will you take fifty francs?’ Sometimes it

was only fifteen francs, or ten, or five—whatever it was, the

Down and Out in Paris and London

whole room knew it. As I Came in the clerk called with an

air of offence, ‘NUMERO 83—here!’ and gave a little whis-

tle and a beckon, as though calling a dog. NUMERO 83

stepped to the counter; he was an old bearded man, with an

overcoat buttoned up at the neck and frayed trouser-ends.

Without a word the clerk shot the bundle across the counter

—evidently it was worth nothing. It fell to the ground and

came open, displaying four pairs of men’s woollen pants.

No one could help laughing. Poor NUMERO 83 gathered

up his pants and shambled out, muttering to himself.

The clothes I was pawning, together with the suitcase,

had cost over twenty pounds, and were in good condition.

I thought they must be worth ten pounds, and a quarter

of this (one expects quarter value at a pawnshop) was two

hundred and fifty or three hundred francs. I waited without

anxiety, expecting two hundred francs at the worst.

At last the clerk called my number: ‘NUMERO 97!’

‘Yes,’ I said, standing up.

‘Seventy francs?’

Seventy francs for ten pounds’ worth of clothes! But it

was no use arguing; I had seen someone else attempt to ar-

gue, and the clerk had instantly refused the pledge. I took

the money and the pawnticket and walked out. I had now

no clothes except what I stood up in—the coat badly out

at the elbow—an overcoat, moderately pawnable, and one

spare shirt. Afterwards, when it was too late, I learned that

it was wiser to go to a pawnshop in the afternoon. The clerks

are French, and, like most French people, are in a bad tem-

per till they have eaten their lunch.

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When I got home, Madame F. was sweeping the BISTRO

floor. She came up the steps to meet me. I could see in her

eye that she was uneasy about my rent.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘what did you get for your clothes? Not

much, eh?’

‘Two hundred francs,’ I said promptly.

‘TIENS!’ she said, surprised; ‘well, THAT’S not bad.

How expensive those English clothes must be!’

The lie saved a lot of trouble, and, strangely enough, it

came true. A few days later I did receive exactly two hun-

dred francs due to me for a newspaper article, and, though

it hurt to do it, I at once paid every penny of it in rent. So,

though I came near to starving in the following weeks, I

was hardly ever without a roof.

It was now absolutely necessary to find work, and I re-

membered a friend of mine, a Russian waiter named Boris,

who might be able to help me. I had first met him in the

public ward of a hospital, where he was being treated for ar-

thritis in the left leg. He had told me to come to him if I were

ever in difficulties.

I must say something about Boris, for he was a curi-

ous character and my close friend for a long time. He was

a big, soldierly man of about thirty-five, and had been good

looking, but since his illness he had grown immensely fat

from lying in bed. Like most Russian refugees, he had had

an adventurous life. His parents, killed in the Revolution,

had been rich people, and he had served through the war

in the Second Siberian Rifles, which, according to him,

was the best regiment in the Russian Army. After the war

Down and Out in Paris and London

he had first worked in a brush factory, then as a porter at

Les Halles, then had become a dishwasher, and had finally

worked his way up to be a waiter. When he fell ill he was at

the Hotel Scribe, and taking a hundred francs a day in tips.

His ambition was to become a MAITRE D’HOTEL, save

fifty thousand francs, and set up a small, select restaurant

on the Right Bank.

Boris always talked of the war as the happiest time of

his life. War and soldiering were his passion; he had read

innumerable books of strategy and military history, and

could tell you all about the theories of Napoleon, Kutuzof,

Clausewitz, Moltke and Foch. Anything to do with soldiers

pleased him. His favourite cafe was the Gloserie des Lilas in

Montparnasse, simply because the statue of Marshal Ney

stands outside it. Later on, Boris and I sometimes went to

the rue du Commerce together. If we went by Metro, Boris

always got out at Cambronne station instead of Commerce,

though Commerce was nearer; he liked the association with

General Cambronne, who was called on to surrender at Wa-

terloo, and answered simply, ‘MERDE!’

The only things left to Boris by the Revolution were his

medals and some photographs of his old regiment; he had

kept these when everything else went to the pawnshop. Al-