George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

poverty, is on the fringe of it. Six francs is a shilling,

and you can live on a shilling a day in Paris if you know

how. But it is a complicated business.

It is altogether curious, your first contact with

poverty. You have thought so much about poverty - it

is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you

knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so

utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be

quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You

thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and

boring. It is the peculiar

lowness of poverty that you

discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the

complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.

You discover, for instance, the secrecy attaching to

poverty. At a sudden stroke you have been reduced to an

income of six francs a day. But of course you dare not

admit it-you have got to pretend that you are living

quite as usual. From the start it tangles you in a net of

lies, and even with the lies you can hardly manage it.

You stop sending clothes to the laundry, and the

laundress catches you in the street and asks you why;

you mumble something, and she, thinking you are

sending the clothes elsewhere, is your enemy for life.

The tobacconist keeps asking why you have cut down

your smoking. There are letters you want to answer, and

cannot, because stamps are too expensive. And then

there are your meals-meals are the worst difficulty of

all. Every day at meal-times you go out, ostensibly to a

restaurant, and loaf an hour in the Luxembourg

Gardens, watching the pigeons. Afterwards you smuggle

your food home in your pockets. Your food is bread and

margarine, or bread and wine, and even the nature of the

food is governed by lies. You have to buy rye bread

instead of household bread, because the rye loaves,

though dearer, are round and can be smuggled in your

pockets. This wastes you a franc a day. Sometimes, to

keep up appearances, you have to spend sixty centimes

on a drink, and go correspondingly short of food. Your

linen gets filthy, and you run out of soap and razor-

blades. Your hair wants cutting, and you try to

cut it yourself, with such fearful results that you

have to go the barber after all, and spend the equivalent

of a day's food. All day you are telling lies, and

expensive lies.

You discover the extreme precariousness of your six

francs a day. Mean disasters happen and rob you of

food. You have spent your last eighty centimes on half a

litre of milk, and are boiling it over the spirit lamp.

While it boils a bug runs down your forearm; you give

the bug a flick with your nail, and it falls, plop! straight

into the milk. There is nothing for it but to throw the

milk away and go foodless.

You go to the baker's to buy a pound of bread, and

you wait while the girl cuts a pound for another cus-

tomer. She is clumsy, and cuts more than a pound.

"Pardon, monsieur," she says, "I suppose you don't mind

paying two sous extra?" Bread is a franc a pound, and

you have exactly a franc. When you think that you too

might be asked to pay two sous extra, and would have

to confess that you could not, you bolt in panic. It is

hours before you dare venture into a baker's shop again.

You go to the greengrocer's to spend a franc on a

kilogram of potatoes. But one of the pieces that make up

the franc is a Belgium piece, and the shopman refuses

it. You slink out of the shop, and can never go there

again.

You have strayed into a respectable quarter, and you

see a prosperous friend coming. To avoid him you dodge

into the nearest café. Once in the café you must buy

something, so you spend your last fifty centimes on a

glass of black coffee with a dead fly in it. One could

multiply these disasters by the hundred. They are part

of the process of being hard up.

You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread

and margarine in your belly, you go out and look

into the shop windows. Everywhere there is food in-

sulting you in huge, wasteful piles; whole dead pigs,

baskets of hot loaves; great yellow blocks of butter,

strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyère

cheeses like grindstones. A snivelling self-pity comes

over you at the sight of so much food. You plan to grab a

loaf and run, swallowing it before they catch you; and

you refrain, from pure funk.

You discover the boredom which is inseparable from

poverty; the times when you have nothing to do and,

being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing. For half

a day at a time you lie on your bed, feeling like the jeune

squelette in Baudelaire's poem. Only food could rouse

you. You discover that a man who has gone even a week

on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a

belly with a few accessory organs.

This-one could describe it further, but it is all in the

same style-is life on six francs a day. Thousands of

people in Paris live it-struggling artists and students,

prostitutes when their luck is out, out-of-work people of

all kinds. It is the suburbs, as it were, of poverty.

I continued in this style for about three weeks. The

forty-seven francs were soon gone, and I had to do what

I could on thirty-six francs a week from the English

lessons. Being inexperienced, I handled the money

badly, and sometimes I was a day without food. When

this happened I used to sell a few of my clothes, smug-

gling them out of the hotel in small packets and taking

them to a second-hand shop in the Rue de la Montagne

St. Geneviève. The shopman was a red-haired Jew, an

extraordinary disagreeable man, who used to fall into

furious rages at the sight of a client. From his manner

One would have supposed that we had done him some

injury by coming to him. « Merde! » he used to shout,

'you here again? What do you think this is? A soup

kitchen?" And he paid incredibly low prices. For a hat

which I had bought for twenty-five shillings and.

scarcely worn he gave five francs; for a good pair of

shoes, five francs; for shirts, a franc each. He always

preferred to exchange rather than buy, and he had a

trick of thrusting some useless article into one's hand

and then pretending that one had accepted it. Once I

saw him take a good overcoat from an old woman, put

two white billiard-balls into her hand, and then push

her rapidly out of the shop before she could protest. It

would have been a pleasure to flatten the Jew's nose, if

only one could have afforded it.

These three weeks were squalid and uncomfortable,

and evidently there was worse coming, for my rent

would be due before long. Nevertheless, things were not

a quarter as bad as I had expected. For, when you are

approaching poverty, you make one discovery which

outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and

mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but

you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty:

the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain

limits, it is actually true that the less money you have,

the less you worry. When you have a hundred francs in

the world you are liable to the most craven panics. When

you have only three francs you are quite indifferent; for

three francs will feed you till to-morrow, and you cannot

think further than that. You are bored, but you are not