Down and Out in Paris and London (16 page)

hours a day, seven days a week. Such hours, though not usu-

al, are nothing extraordinary in Paris.

Life settled at once into a routine that made the Hotel X

seem like a holiday. Every morning at six I drove myself out

of bed, did not shave, sometimes washed, hurried up to the

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Place d’ltalie and fought for a place on the Metro. By seven I

was in the desolation of the cold, filthy kitchen, with the po-

tato skins and bones and fishtails littered on the floor, and

a pile of plates, stuck together in their grease, waiting from

overnight. I could not start on the plates yet, because the

water was cold, and I had to fetch milk and make coffee, for

the others arrived at eight and expected to find coffee ready.

Also, there were always several copper saucepans to clean.

Those copper saucepans are the bane of a PLONGEUR’S life.

They have to be scoured with sand and bunches of chain,

ten minutes to each one, and then polished on the outside

with Brasso. Fortunately, the art of making them has been

lost and they are gradually vanishing from French kitchens,

though one can still buy them second-hand.

When I had begun on the plates the cook would take me

away from the plates to begin skinning onions, and when

I had begun on the onions the PATRON would arrive and

send me out to buy cabbages. When I came back with the

cabbages the PATRON’S wife would tell me to go to some

shop half a mile away and buy a pot of rouge; by the time

I came back there would be more vegetables waiting, and

the plates were still not done. In this way our incompetence

piled one job on another throughout the day, everything in

arrears.

Till ten, things went comparatively easily, though we

were working fast, and no one lost his temper. The cook

would find time to talk about her artistic nature, and say

did I not think Tolstoy was EPATANT, and sing in a fine so-

prano voice as she minced beef on the board. But at ten the

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Down and Out in Paris and London

waiters began clamouring for their lunch, which they had

early, and at eleven the first customers would be arriving.

Suddenly everything became hurry and bad temper. There

was not the same furious rushing and yelling as at the Hotel

X, but an atmosphere of muddle, petty spite and exaspera-

tion. Discomfort was at the bottom of it. It was unbearably

cramped in the kitchen, and dishes had to be put on the

floor, and one had to be thinking constantly about not step-

ping on them. The cook’s vast buttocks banged against me

as she moved to and fro. A ceaseless, nagging chorus of or-

ders streamed from her:

‘Unspeakable idiot! How many times have I told you

not to bleed the beetroots? Quick, let me get to the sink!

Put those knives away; get on with the potatoes. What have

you done with my strainer? Oh, leave those potatoes alone.

Didn’t I tell you to skim the BOUILLON? Take that can of

water off the stove. Never mind the washing up, chop this

celery. No, not like that, you fool, like this. There! Look at

you letting those peas boil over! Now get to work and scale

these herrings. Look, do you call this plate clean? Wipe it

on your apron. Put that salad on the floor. That’s right, put

it where I’m bound to step in it! Look out, that pot’s boiling

over! Get me down that saucepan. No, the other one. Put

this on the grill. Throw those potatoes away. Don’t waste

time, throw them on the floor. Tread them in. Now throw

down some sawdust; this Hoor’s like a skating-rink. Look,

you fool, that steak’s burning! MON DIEU, why did they

send me an idiot for a PLONGEUR? Who are you talking

to? Do you realize that my aunt was a Russian countess?’

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etc. etc. etc.

This went on till three o’clock without much variation,

except that about eleven the cook usually had a CRISE DE

NERFS and a flood of tears. From three to five was a fairly

slack time for the waiters, but the cook was still busy, and I

was working my fastest, for there was a pile of dirty plates

waiting, and it was a race to get them done, or partly done,

before dinner began. The washing up was doubled by the

primitive conditions—a cramped draining-board, tepid

water, sodden cloths, and a sink that got blocked once in an

hour. By five the cook and I were feeling unsteady on our

feet, not having eaten or sat down since seven. We used to

collapse, she on the dustbin and I on the floor, drink a bottle

of beer, and apologize for some of the things we had said in

the morning. Tea was what kept us going. We took care to

have a pot always stewing, and drank pints during the day.

At half-past five the hurry and quarrelling began again,

and now worse than before, because everyone was tired

out. The cook had a CRISE DE NERFS at six and another

at nine; they came on so regularly that one could have told

the time by them. She would flop down on the dustbin, be-

gin weeping hysterically, and cry out that never, no, never

had she thought to come to such a life as this; her nerves

would not stand it; she had studied music at Vienna; she

had a bedridden husband to support, etc. etc. At another

time one would have been sorry for her, but, tired as we all

were, her whimpering voice merely infuriated us. Jules used

to stand in the doorway and mimic her weeping. The PA-

TRON’S wife nagged, and Boris and Jules quarrelled all day,

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Down and Out in Paris and London

because Jules shirked his work, and Boris, as head waiter,

claimed the larger share of the tips. Only the second day af-

ter the restaurant opened, they came to blows in the kitchen

over a two-franc tip, and the cook and I had to separate

them. The only person who never forgot Us manners was

the PATRON. He kept the same hours as the rest of us, but

he had no work to do, for it was his wife who really man-

aged things. His sole job, besides ordering the supplies, was

to stand in the bar smoking cigarettes and looking gentle-

manly, and he did that to perfection.

The cook and I generally found time to eat our dinner be-

tween ten and eleven o’clock. At midnight the cook would

steal a packet of food for her husband, stow it under her

clothes, and make off, whimpering that these hours would

kill her and she would give notice in 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 table-napkins. 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.

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He treated all of us like this. It was our compensation for

working seventeen hours a day.

As a rule the last Metro was almost empty—a great ad-

vantage, for one could sit down and sleep for a quarter of an

hour. Generally I was in bed by half past one. Sometimes

I missed the train and had to sleep on the floor of the res-

taurant, but it hardly mattered, for I could have slept on

cobblestones at that time.

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Down and Out in Paris and London

XXI

This life went on for about a fortnight, with a slight

increase of work as more customers came to the res-

taurant. 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 peo-

ple 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 farther than

the street comer for several months. She was consumptive,

and died about the time I left Paris.

After only a week we were all neurasthenic with fa-

tigue, except Jules, who skulked persistently. The quarrels,

intermittent at first, had now become continuous. For

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hours’ one would keep up a drizzle of useless nagging, ris-

ing 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 quar-

rels—whether it should be put where I wanted it, which was

in the cook’s way, or where she wanted it, which was be-

tween 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 Tolstoy

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 bare-

ly 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

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Down and Out in Paris and London

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 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 trou-

sers. 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 apologize, you bow,

you go out; and in five minutes you come back by anoth-

er door— with the same chicken. That is restaurant work,’

etc.And, strange to say, in spite of all this filth and incompe-

tence, 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 Ameri-

cans and other foreigners—no Frenchmen. Then one night

there was tremendous excitement, because our first French-

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man 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