Down and Out in London and Paris

by Orwell, George

  must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be

  damned to you."

  This is particularly the attitude of intelligent,

  cultivated people; one can read the substance of it in a

  hundred essays. Very few cultivated people have less

  than (say) four hundred pounds a year, and naturally

  they side with the rich, because they imagine that any

  liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own

  liberty. Foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the

  alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as

  they are. Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very

  much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them

  are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of

  people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by

  them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that

  makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their

  opinions.

  Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on

  the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental

  difference between rich and poor, as though they were

  two different races, like negroes and white men. But in

  reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich

  and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and

  nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the

  average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change

  places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is

  the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with

  the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that

  intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might

  be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with

  the poor. For what do the majority of educated people

  know about poverty? In my copy of Villon's poems the

  editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the

  line « Ne pain ne voyent qu'aux fenestres" by a footnote; so

  remote is even hunger from the educated man's

  experience. From this ignorance a superstitious fear of

  the mob results quite naturally. The educated man

  pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty

  to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work

  minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory.

  "Anything," he thinks, "any injustice,

  sooner than let that mob loose." He does not see that

  since there is no difference between the mass of rich and

  poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The

  mob is in fact loose now, and-in the shape of rich men-is

  using its power to set up enormous treadmills of

  boredom, such as "smart" hotels.

  To sum up. A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave,

  doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at

  work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he

  would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated

  people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the

  process, because they know nothing about him and

  consequently are afraid of him. I say this of the plongeur

  because it is his case I have been considering; it would

  apply equally to numberless other types of worker. These

  are only my own ideas about the basic facts of a plongeur's

  life, made without reference to immediate economic

  questions, and no doubt largely platitudes. I present

  them as a sample of the thoughts that are put into one's

  head by working in a hotel.

  XXIII

  As soon as I left the Auberge de Jehan Cottard I went to

  bed and slept the clock round, all but one hour. Then I

  washed my teeth for the first time in a fortnight, bathed

  and had my hair cut, and got my clothes out of pawn. I

  had two glorious days of loafing. I even went in my best

  suit to the Auberge, leant against the bar and spent five

  francs on a bottle of English beer. It is a curious

  sensation, being a customer where you have been a slave's

  slave. Boris was sorry that I had left the restaurant just at

  the moment when we were lancés and there was a. chance

  of making money. I have heard

  from him since, and he tells me that he is making a

  hundred francs a day and has set up a girl who is trés

  serieuse and never smells of garlic.

  I spent a day wandering about our quarter, saying

  good-bye to everyone. It was on this day that Charlie

  told me about the death of old Roucolle the miser, who

  had once lived in the quarter. Very likely Charlie was

  lying as usual, but it was a good story.

  Roucolle died, aged seventy-four, a year or two

  before I went to Paris, but the people in the quarter still

  talked of him while I was there. He never equalled

  Daniel Dancer or anyone of that kind, but he was an

  interesting character. He went to Les Halles every

  morning to pick up damaged vegetables, and ate cat's

  meat, and wore newspaper instead of underclothes, and

  used the wainscoting of his room for firewood, and

  made himself a pair of trousers out of a sack-all this

  with half a million francs invested. I should like very

  much to have known him.

  Like many misers, Roucolle came to a bad end

  through putting his money into a wildcat scheme. One

  day a Jew appeared in the quarter, an alert, businesslike

  young chap who had a first-rate plan for smuggling

  cocaine into England. It is easy enough, of course, to buy

  cocaine in Paris, and the smuggling would be quite

  simple in itself, only there is always some spy who

  betrays the plan to the customs or the police. It is said

  that this is often done by the very people who sell the

  cocaine, because the smuggling trade is in the hands of a

  large combine, who do not want competition. The Jew,

  however, swore that there was no danger. He knew a way

  of getting cocaine direct from Vienna, not through the

  usual channels, and there would be no blackmail to pay.

  He had got into touch with Roucolle through a young

  Pole, a student at the Sorbonne, who

  was going to put four thousand francs into the scheme if

  Roucolle would put six thousand. For this they could buy

  ten pounds of cocaine, which would be worth a small

  fortune in England.

  The Pole and the Jew had a tremendous struggle to

  get the money from between old Roucolle's claws. Six

  thousand francs was not much-he had more than that

  sewn into the mattress in his room-but it was agony for

  him to part with a sou. The Pole and the Jew were at him

  for weeks on end, explaining, bullying, coaxing, arguing,

  going down on their knees and imploring him to produce

  the money. The old man was half frantic between greed

  and fear. His bowels yearned at the thought of getting,

  perhaps, fifty thousand francs' profit, and yet he could

  not bring himself to risk the money. He used to sit in a

  corner with his head in his hands, groaning and

  sometimes yelling out in agony, and often he would kneel

  down (he was very pious) and pray for strength, but still

  he couldn't do it. But at last, more from e
xhaustion than

  anything else, he gave in quite suddenly; he slit open the

  mattress where his money was concealed and handed

  over six thousand francs to the Jew.

  The Jew delivered the cocaine the same day, and

  promptly vanished. And meanwhile, as was not sur-

  prising after the fuss Roucolle had made, the affair had

  been noised all over the quarter. The very next morning

  the hotel was raided and searched by the police.

  Roucolle and the Pole were in agonies. The police were

  downstairs, working their way up and searching every

  room in turn, and there was the great packet of cocaine

  on the table, with no place to hide it and no chance of

  escaping down the stairs. The Pole was for throwing the

  stuff out of the window, but Roucolle

  would not hear of it. Charlie told me that he had been

  present at the scene. He said that when they tried to

  take the packet from Roucolle he clasped it to his

  breast and struggled like a madman, although he was

  seventy-four years old. He was wild with fright, but he

  would go to prison rather than throw his money away.

  At last, when the police were searching only one floor

  below, somebody had an idea. A man on Roucolle's floor

  had a dozen tins of face-powder which he was selling on

  commission; it was suggested that the cocaine could be

  put into the tins and passed off as face-powder. The

  powder was hastily thrown out of the window and the

  cocaine substituted, and the tins were put openly on

  Roucolle's table, as though there there were nothing to

  conceal. A few minutes later the police came to search

  Roucolle's room. They tapped the walls and looked up the

  chimney and turned out the drawers and examined the

  floorboards, and then, just as they were about to give it

  up, having found nothing, the inspector noticed the tins

  on the table.

  "Tiens," he said, "have a look at those tins. I hadn't

  noticed them. What's in them, eh?"

  "Face-powder," said the Pole as calmly as he could

  manage. But at the same instant Roucolle let out a loud

  groaning noise, from alarm, and the police became

  suspicious immediately. They opened one of the tins and

  tipped out the contents, and after smelling it, the

  inspector said that he believed it was cocaine. Roucolle

  and the Pole began swearing on the names of the saints

  that it was only face-powder; but it was no use, the more

  they protested the more suspicious the police became.

  The two men were arrested and led off to the police

  station, followed by half the quarter.

  At the station, Roucolle and the Pole were inter

  rogated by the Commissaire while a tin of the cocaine

  was sent away to be analysed. Charlie said that the

  scene Roucolle made was beyond description. He wept,

  prayed, made contradictory statements and denounced

  the Pole all at once, so loud that he could be heard half

  a street away. The policemen almost burst with

  laughing at him.

  After an hour a policeman came back with the tin of

  cocaine and a note from the analyst. He was laughing.

  "This is not cocaine, monsieur," he said.

  "What, not cocaine?" said the Commissaire. "Mais,

  alors-what is it, then?"

  "It is face-powder."

  Roucolle and the Pole were released at once, entirely

  exonerated but very angry. The Jew had doublecrossed

  them. Afterwards, when the excitement was over, it

  turned out that he had played the same trick on two

  other people in the quarter.

  The Pole was glad enough to escape, even though he

  had lost his four thousand francs, but poor old

  Roucolle was utterly broken down. He took to his bed at

  once, and all that day and half the night they could

  hear him thrashing about, mumbling, and sometimes

  yelling out at the top of his voice:

  "Six thousand francs! Nom de Jesus-Christ! Six

  thousand francs!"

  Three days later he had some kind of stroke, and in

  a fortnight he was dead-of a broken heart, Charlie said.

  XXIV

  I TRAVELLED to England third class via Dunkirk and

  Tilbury, which is the cheapest and not the worst way of

  crossing the Channel. You had to pay extra for

  a cabin, so I slept in the saloon, together with most of

  the third-class passengers. I find this entry in my diary

  for that day:

  "Sleeping in the saloon, twenty-seven men, sixteen

  women. Of the women, not a single one has washed her

  face this morning. The men mostly went to the bathroom;

  the women merely produced vanity cases and covered the

  dirt with powder. Q,. A secondary sexual difference?"

  On the journey I fell in with a couple of Roumanians,

  mere children, who were going to England on their

  honeymoon trip. They asked innumerable questions

  about England, and I told them some startling lies. I was

  so pleased to be getting home, after being hard up for

  months in a foreign city, that England seemed to me a

  sort of Paradise. There are, indeed, many things in

  England that make you glad to get home; bathrooms,

  armchairs, mint sauce, new potatoes properly cooked,

  brown bread, marmalade, beer made with veritable hops-

  they are all splendid, if you can pay for them. England is

  a very good country when you are not poor; and, of

  course, with a tame imbecile to look after, I was not

  going to be poor. The thought of not being poor made me

  very patriotic. The more questions the Roumanians

  asked, the more I praised England; the climate, the

  scenery, the art, the literature, the laws-everything in

  England was perfect.

  Was the architecture in England good? the Rou-

  manians asked. "Splendid!" I said. "And you should just

  see the London statues! Paris is vulgar-half grandiosity

  and half slums. But London-"

  Then the boat drew alongside Tilbury pier. The first

  building we saw on the waterside was one of those huge

  hotels, all stucco and pinnacles, which stare from the

  English coast like idiots staring over an asylum

  wall. I saw the Roumanians, too polite to say anything,

  cocking their eyes at the hotel. "Built by French

  architects," I assured them; and even later, when the

  train was crawling into London through the eastern

  slums, I still kept it up about the beauties of English

  architecture. Nothing seemed too good to say about

  England, now that I was coming home and was not hard

  up any more.

  I went to B.'s office, and his first words knocked

  everything to ruins. "I'm sorry," he said; "your employers

  have gone abroad, patient and all. However, they'll be

  back in a month. I suppose you can hang on till then?"

  I was outside in the street before it even occurred to

  me to borrow some more money. There was a month to

  wait, and I had exactly nineteen and sixpence in hand.

  The news had taken my breath away. For a long time I

  could not make u
p my mind what to do. I loafed the day

  in the streets, and at night, not having the slightest

  notion of how to get a cheap bed in London, I went to a

  "family" hotel, where the charge was seven and sixpence.

  After paying the bill I had ten and twopence in hand.

  By the morning I had made my plans. Sooner or later

  I should have to go to B. for more money, but it seemed

  hardly decent to do so yet, and in the meantime I must

  exist in some hole-and-corner way. Past experience set

  me against pawning my best suit. I would leave all my

  things at the station cloakroom, except my second-best

  suit, which I could exchange for some cheap clothes and

  perhaps a pound. If I was going to live a month on thirty

  shillings I must have bad clothes-indeed, the worse the

  better. Whether thirty shillings could be made to last a

  month I had no idea, not knowing London as I knew

  Paris. Perhaps I could beg, or sell bootlaces, and I

  remembered articles I had read in the Sunday papers about

  beggars who have two thousand pounds sewn into their

  trousers. It was, at any rate, notoriously impossible to

  starve in London, so there was nothing to be anxious about.

  To sell my clothes I went down into Lambeth, where

  the people are poor and there are a lot of rag shops. At

  the first shop I tried the proprietor was polite but

  unhelpful; at the second he was rude; at the third he

  was stone deaf, or pretended to be so. The fourth

  shopman was a large blond young man, very pink all

  over, like a slice of ham. He looked at the clothes I was

  wearing and felt them disparagingly between thumb and

  finger.

  "Poor stuff," he said, "very poor stuff, that is." (It was

  quite a good suit.) "What yer want for 'em?"

  I explained that I wanted some older clothes and as

  much money as he could spare. He thought for a moment,

  then collected some dirty-looking rags and threw them on

  to the counter. "What about the money?" I said, hoping for

  a pound. He pursed his lips, then produced a shilling and

  laid it beside the clothes. I did not argue-I was going to

  argue, but as I opened my mouth he reached out as

  though to take up the shilling again; I saw that I was

  helpless. He let me change in a small room behind the

  shop.

  The clothes were a coat, once dark brown, a pair of

  black dungaree trousers, a scarf and a cloth cap; I had

  kept my own shirt, socks and boots, and I had a comb and