George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

If you asked him why he worked in the sewers he never

answered, but simply crossed his wrists to signify

handcuffs, and jerked his head southward, towards the

prison. Bad luck seemed to have turned him half-witted

in a single day.

Or there was R., an Englishman, who lived six

months of the year in Putney with his parents and six

months in France. During his time in France he drank

four litres of wine a day, and six litres on Saturdays;

he had once travelled as far as the Azores, because the

wine there is cheaper than anywhere in Europe. He was a

gentle, domesticated creature, never rowdy or

quarrelsome, and never sober. He would lie in bed till

midday, and from then till midnight he was in his corner

of the bistro, quietly and methodically soaking. While he

soaked he talked, in a refined, womanish voice, about

antique furniture. Except myself, R. was the only

Englishman in the quarter.

There were plenty of other people who lived lives just

as eccentric as these: Monsieur Jules, the Roumanian,

who had a glass eye and would not admit it, Furex the

Limousin stonemason, Roucolle the miser -he died before

my time, though-old Laurent the rag-merchant, who used

to copy his signature from a slip of paper he carried in his

pocket. It would be fun to write some of their

biographies, if one had time. I am trying to describe the

people in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but

because they are all part of the story. Poverty is what I

am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty

in this slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives,

was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the

background of my own experiences. It is for that reason

that I try to give some idea of what life was like there.

II

L I F E in the quarter. Our

bistro , for instance, at the

foot of the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux. A tiny brick-

floored room, half underground, with wine-sodden

tables, and a photograph of a funeral inscribed « Crédit

est mort »; and red-sashed workmen carving sausage

with big jack-knives; and Madame F., a splendid

Auvergnat peasant woman with the face of a strong-

minded cow, drinking Malaga all day " for her

stomach"; and games of dice for apéritifs; and songs

about «

Les Fraises et Les Framboises , » and about

Madelon, who said, "

Comment épouser un soldat, moi qui

aime tout le régiment?

»; and extraordinarily public love-

making. Half the hotel used to meet in the bistro in the

evenings. I wish one could find a pub in London a

quarter as cheery.

One heard queer conversations in the

bistro . As a

sample I give you Charlie, one of the local curiosities,

talking.

Charlie was a youth of family and education who

had run away from home and lived on occasional

remittances. Picture him very pink and young, with

the fresh cheeks and soft brown hair of a nice little

boy, and lips excessively red and wet, like cherries. His

feet are tiny, his arms abnormally short, his hands

dimpled like a baby's. He has a way of dancing and

capering while he talks, as though he were too happy

and too full of life to keep still for an instant. It is

three in the afternoon, and there is no one in the bistro

except Madame F. and one or two men who are out of

work; but it is all the same to Charlie whom he talks

to, so long as he can talk about himself. He declaims

like an orator on a barricade, rolling the words on his

tongue and gesticulating with his short arms. His

small, rather piggy eyes glitter with enthusiasm. He is,

somehow, profoundly disgusting to see.

He is talking of love, his favourite subject.

«

Ah, l'amour, l'amour! Ah, que les femmes m'ont tué!

Alas, messieurs et dames,

women have been my ruin,

beyond all hope my ruin. At twenty-two I am utterly

worn out and finished. But what things I have learned,

what abysses of wisdom have I not plumbed! How

great a thing it is to have acquired the true wisdom, to

have become in the highest sense of the word a

civilised man, to have become

raffiné, vicieux , » etc. etc.

"

Messieurs et dames , I perceive that you are sad. Ah,

mais la vie est belle-you must not be sad. Be more gay, I

beseech you!

"

Fill high ze bowl vid Saurian vine, Ve

vill not sink of semes like zese!

« Ah, que la vie est belle

! Listen,

messieurs et dames , out

of the fullness of my experience I will discourse to you

of love. I will explain to you what is the true meaning

of love-what is the true sensibility, the higher, more

refined pleasure which is known to civilised men alone.

I will tell you of the happiest day of my life. Alas, but I

am past the time when I could know such happiness as

that. It is gone for ever-the very possibility, even the

desire for it, are gone.

"Listen, then. It was two years ago; my brother was

in Paris-he is a lawyer-and my parents had told him to

find me and take me out to dinner. We hate each other,

my brother and I, but we preferred not to disobey my

parents. We dined, and at dinner he grew very drunk

upon three bottles of Bordeaux. I took him back to his

hotel, and on the way I bought a bottle of brandy, and

when we had arrived I made my brother drink a

tumberful of it-I told him it was something to make

him sober. He drank it, and immediately he fell down

like somebody in a fit, dead drunk. I lifted him up and

propped his back against the bed; then I went through

his pockets. I found eleven hundred francs, and with

that I hurried down the stairs, jumped into a taxi, and

escaped. My brother did not know my address -I was

safe.

"Where does a man go when he has money? To the

bordels

, naturally. But you do not suppose that I was

going to waste my time on some vulgar debauchery fit

only for navvies? Confound it, one is a civilised man! I

was fastidious, exigeant, you understand, with a

thousand francs in my pocket. It was midnight before I

found what I was looking for. I had fallen in with a very

smart youth of eighteen, dressed en smoking and with his

hair cut

à l'américaine , and we were talking in a quiet

bistro

away from the boulevards. We understood one

another well, that youth and I. We talked of this and

that, and discussed ways of diverting oneself. Presently

we took a taxi together and were driven away.

"The taxi stopped in a narrow, solitary street with a

single gas-lamp flaring at the end. There were dark

puddles among the stones. Down one side ran the high,

blank wall of a convent. My guide led me to a tall,

ruinous house with shuttered windows, and knocked

several times at the door. Presently there was a sound of

footsteps and a shooting of bolts, and the door opened a

little. A hand came round the edge of it; it was a large,

crooked hand, that held itself palm upwards under our

noses, demanding money.

"My guide put his foot between the door and the step.

'How much do you want?' he said.

" 'A thousand francs,' said a woman's voice. 'Pay up

at once or you don't come in.'

"I put a thousand francs into the hand and gave the

remaining hundred to my guide: he said good night and

left me. I could hear the voice inside counting the notes,