the morning. Jules also left at midnight, usually after a
dispute with Boris, who had to look after the bar till two.
Between twelve and half-past I did what I could to finish
the washing up. There was no time to attempt doing the
work properly, and I used simply to rub the grease off
the plates with tablenapkins. As for the dirt on the floor,
I let it lie, or swept the worst of it out of sight under the
stoves.
At half-past twelve I would put on my coat and hurry
out. The patron, bland as ever, would stop me as I went
down the alley-way past the bar. « Mais, mon cher
monsieur, how tired you look! Please do me the favour of
accepting this glass of brandy."
He would hand me the glass of brandy as courteously
as though I had been a Russian duke instead of a
plongeur. He treated all of us like this. It was our com-
pensation for working seventeen hours a day.
As a rule the last Metro was almost empty-a great
advantage, for one could sit down and sleep for a
quarter of an hour. Generally I was in bed by halfpast
one. Sometimes I missed the train and had to sleep on
the floor of the restaurant, but it hardly mattered, for I
could have slept on cobblestones at that time.
XXI
THIS life went on for about a fortnight, with a slight
increase of work as more customers came to the restaur-
ant. I could have saved an hour a day by taking a
room near the restaurant, but it seemed impossible to
find time to change lodgings-or, for that matter, to get
my hair cut, look at a newspaper, or even undress
completely. After ten days I managed to find a free
quarter of an hour, and wrote to my friend B. in London
asking him if he could get me a job of some sort-
anything, so long as it allowed more than five hours
sleep. I was simply not equal to going on with a
seventeen-hour day, though there are plenty of people
who think nothing of it. When one is overworked, it is a
good cure for self-pity to think of the thousands of
people in Paris restaurants who work such hours, and
will go on doing it, not for a few weeks, but for years.
There was a girl in a bistro near my hotel who worked
from seven in the morning till midnight for a whole year,
only sitting down to her meals. I remember once asking
her to come to a dance, and she laughed and said that
she had not been further than the street corner for
several months. She was consumptive, and died about
the time I left Paris.
After only a week we were all neurasthenic with
fatigue, except Jules, who skulked persistently. The
quarrels, intermittent at first, had now become con-
tinuous. For hours one would keep up a drizzle of
useless nagging, rising into storms of abuse every few
minutes. "Get me down that saucepan, idiot!' the cook
would cry (she was not tall enough to reach the shelves
where the saucepans were kept). "Get it down yourself,
you old whore," I would answer. Such remarks seemed to
be generated spontaneously from the air of the kitchen.
We quarrelled over things of inconceivable pettiness.
The dustbin, for instance, was an unending source of
quarrels-whether it should be put where I wanted it,
which was in the cook's way, or where she wanted it,
which was between me and the sink. Once she nagged
and nagged until at last, in pure spite, I lifted the
dustbin up and put it out in the middle of the floor,
where she was bound to trip over it.
"Now, you cow," I said, "move it yourself."
Poor old woman, it was too heavy for her to lift, and
she sat down, put her head on the table and burst out
crying. And I jeered at her. This is the kind of effect that
fatigue has upon one's manners.
After a few days the cook had ceased talking about
Tolstoi and her artistic nature, and she and I were not
on speaking terms, except for the purposes of work, and
Boris and Jules were not on speaking terms, and neither
of them was on speaking terms with the cook. Even
Boris and I were barely on speaking terms. We had
agreed beforehand that the engueulades of working hours
did not count between times; but we had called each
other things too bad to be forgotten-and besides, there
were no between times. Jules grew lazier and lazier, and
he stole food constantly-from a sense of duty, he said.
He called the rest of us jaune-blackleg-when we would
not join with him in stealing. He had a curious,
malignant spirit. He told me, as a matter of pride, that
he had sometimes wrung a dirty dishcloth into a
customer's soup before taking it in, just to be revenged
upon a member of the bourgeoisie.
The kitchen grew dirtier and the rats bolder, though
we trapped a few of them. Looking round that filthy
room, with raw meat lying among refuse on the floor,
and cold, clotted saucepans sprawling everywhere, and
the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used to
wonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world
as bad as ours. But the other three all said that they
had been in dirtier places. Jules took a positive pleasure
in seeings things dirty. In the afternoon, when 8
he had not much to do, he used to stand in the kitchen
doorway jeering at us for working too hard:
"Fool! Why do you wash that plate? Wipe it on your
trousers. Who cares about the customers? They don't
know what's going on. What is restaurant work? You
are carving a chicken and it falls on the floor. You
apologise, you bow, you go out; and in five minutes you
come back by another door-with the same chicken. That
is restaurant work," etc.
And, strange to say, in spite of all this filth and in-
competence, the Auberge de Jehan Cottard was actually
a success. For the first few days all our customers were
Russians, friends of the patron, and these were followed
by Americans and other foreigners-no Frenchmen.
Then one night there was tremendous excitement,
because our first Frenchman had arrived. For a moment
our quarrels were forgotten and we all united in the
effort to serve a good dinner. Boris tiptoed into the
kitchen, jerked his thumb over his shoulder and
whispered conspiratorially:
"Sh! Attention, un Français! »
A moment later the patron's wife came and
whispered:
"Attention, un Français! See that he gets a double
portion of all vegetables."
While the Frenchman ate, the patron's wife stood
behind the grille of the kitchen door and watched the
expression of his face. Next night the Frenchman came
back with two other Frenchmen. This meant that we
were earning a good name; the surest sign of a bad
restaurant is to be frequented only by foreigners. Pro-
bably part of the reason for our success was that the
patron, with the sole gleam of sense he had shown in
fitting out the restaurant, had bought very sharp table-
knives. Sharp knives, of course, are the secret of a
successful restaurant. I am glad that this happened, for
it destroyed one of my illusions, namely, the idea that
Frenchmen know good food when they see it. Or
perhaps we were a fairly good restaurant by Paris
standards; in which case the bad ones must be past
imagining.
In a very few days after I had written to B. he replied
to say that there was a job he could get for me. It was to
look after a congenital imbecile, which sounded a
splendid rest cure after the Auberge de Jehan Cottard. I
pictured myself loafing in the country lanes, knocking
thistle-heads off with my stick, feeding on roast lamb and
treacle tart, and sleeping ten hours a night in sheets
smelling of lavender. B. sent me a fiver to pay my
passage and get my clothes out of the pawn, and as soon
as the money arrived I gave one day's notice and left the
restaurant. My leaving so suddenly embarrassed the
patron, for as usual he was penniless, and he had to pay
my wages thirty francs short. However he stood me a
glass of Courvoisier '48 brandy, and I think he felt that
this made up the difference. They engaged a Czech, a
thoroughly competent plongeur, in my place, and the poor
old cook was sacked a few weeks later. Afterwards I
heard that, with two first-rate people in the kitchen, the
plongeur's work had been cut down to fifteen hours a day.
Below that no one could have cut it, short of
modernising the kitchen.
XXII
FOR what they are worth I want to give my opinions
about the life of a Paris plongeur. When one comes to
think of it, it is strange that thousands of people in a
great modern city should spend their waking hours
swabbing dishes in hot dens underground. The
question I am raising is why this life goes on-what
purpose it serves, and who wants it to continue, and why.
I am not taking the merely rebellious, fainéant attitude. I
am trying to consider the social significance of a plongeur's
life.
I think one should start by saying that a plongeur is
one of the slaves of the modern world. Not that there is
any need to whine over him, for he is better off than
many manual workers, but still, he is no freer than if he
were bought and sold. His work is servile and without
art; he is paid just enough to keep him alive; his only
holiday is the sack. He is cut off from marriage, or, if he
marries, his wife must work too. Except by a lucky
chance, he has no escape from this life, save into prison.
At this moment there are men with university degrees
scrubbing dishes in Paris for ten or fifteen hours a day.
One cannot say that it is mere idleness on their part, for
an idle man cannot be a plongeur; they have simply been
trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible. If
plongeurs thought at all, they would long ago have formed
a union and gone on strike for better treatment. But
they do not think, because they have no leisure for it;
their life has made slaves of them.
The question is, why does this slavery continue?
People have a way of taking it for granted that all work
is done for a sound purpose. They see somebody else
doing a disagreeable job, and think that they have
solved things by saying that the job is necessary. Coal-
mining, for example, is hard work, but it is necessary-we
must have coal. Working in the sewers is unpleasant,
but somebody must work in the sewers. And similarly
with a plongeur's work. Some people must feed in
restaurants, and so other people must swab dishes for
eighty hours a week. It is the work of civilisation,
therefore unquestionable. This point is worth
considering.
Is a plongeur's work really necessary to civilisation?
We have a feeling that it must be "honest" work,
because it is hard and disagreeable, and we have made
a sort of fetish of manual work. We see a man cutting
down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a social
need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not
occur to us that he may only be cutting down a
beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue. I
believe it is the same with a plongeur. He earns his bread
in the sweat of his brow, but it does not follow that he is
doing anything useful; he may be only supplying a
luxury which, very often, is not a luxury.
As an example of what I mean by luxuries which are
not luxuries, take an extreme case, such as one hardly
sees in Europe. Take an Indian rickshaw puller, or a
gharry pony. In any Far Eastern town there are
rickshaw pullers by the hundred, black wretches
weighing eight stone, clad in loin-cloths. Some of them
are diseased; some of them are fifty years old. For miles
on end they trot in the sun or rain, head down, dragging
at the shafts, with the sweat dripping from their grey
moustaches. When they go too slowly the passenger
calls them bahinchut. They earn thirty or forty rupees a
month, and cough their lungs out after a few years. The
gharry ponies are gaunt, vicious things that have been
sold cheap as having a few years' work left in them.
Their master looks on the whip as a substitute for food.
Their work expresses itself in a sort of equation-whip
plus food equals energy; generally it is about sixty per
cent. whip and forty per cent. food. Sometimes their
necks are encircled by one vast sore, so that they drag
all day on raw flesh. It is still possible to make them
work, however; it is just a question of thrashing them so
hard that the pain behind outweighs the pain in front.
After a few years even the whip loses its virtue, and the
pony goes to the knacker. These are instances of un-
necessary work, for there is no real need for gharries
and rickshaws; they only exist because Orientals con-
sider it vulgar to walk. They are luxuries, and, as any-
one who has ridden in them knows, very poor luxuries.
They afford a small amount of convenience, which
cannot possibly balance the suffering of the men and
animals.
Similarly with the plongeur. He is a king compared
with a rickshaw puller or a gharry pony, but his case is
analogous. He is the slave of a hotel or a restaurant,
and his slavery is more or less useless. For, after all,
where is the real need of big hotels and smart
restaurants? They are supposed to provide luxury, but
in reality they provide only a cheap, shoddy imitation of
it. Nearly everyone hates hotels. Some restaurants are
better than others, but it is impossible to get as good a
meal in a restaurant as one can get, for the same ex-
pense, in a private house. No doubt hotels and restau-
rants must exist, but there is no need that they should
enslave hundreds of p
eople. What makes the work in
them is not the essentials; it is the shams that are sup-
posed to represent luxury. Smartness, as it is called,
means, in effect, merely that the staff work more and
the customers pay more; no one benefits except the
proprietor, who will presently buy himself a striped villa
at Deauville. Essentially, a "smart" hotel is a place
where a hundred people toil like devils in order that two
hundred may pay through the nose for things they do
not really want. If the nonsense were cut out of hotels
and restaurants, and the work done with simple
efficiency, plongeurs might work six or eight hours a day
instead of ten or fifteen.
Suppose it is granted that a plongeur's work is more
or less useless. Then the question follows, Why does any
one want him to go on working? I am trying to go beyond
the immediate economic cause, and to consider what
pleasure it can give anyone to think of men swabbing
dishes for life. For there is no doubt that people-
comfortably situated people-do find a pleasure in such
thoughts. A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working
when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his
work is needed or not, he must work, because work in
itself is good-for slaves, at least. This sentiment still
survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless
drudgery.
I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work
is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the
thought runs) are such low animals that they would be
dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them
too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be
intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the
improvement of working conditions, usually says some-
thing like this:
"We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it
is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with
the thought of its unpleasantness. But don't expect us
to do anything about it. We are sorry for you lower
classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange,
but we will fight like devils against any improvement of
your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you
are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not
going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an
extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you
Down and Out in London and Paris Page 13