George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

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