George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

railway trucks, but at the last moment they rejected us

in favour of Frenchmen. Once we answered an

advertisement calling for hands at a circus. You had to

shift benches and clean up litter, and, during the

performance, stand on two tubs and let a lion jump

through your legs. When we got to the place, an hour

before the time named, we found a queue of fifty men

already waiting. There is some attraction in lions,

evidently.

Once an agency to which I had applied months

earlier sent me a

petit bleu , telling me of an Italian

gentleman who wanted English lessons. The

petit bleu

said "Come at once" and promised twenty francs an

hour. Boris and I were in despair. Here was a splendid

chance, and I could not take it, for it was impossible to

go to the agency with my coat out at the elbow. Then it

occurred to us that I could wear Boris's coat-it did did

not match my trousers, but the trousers were grey and

might pass for flannel at a short distance. The coat was

so much too big for me that I had to wear it unbuttoned

and keep one hand in my pocket. I hurried out, and

wasted seventy-five centimes on a bus fare to get to the

agency. When I got there I found that the Italian had

changed his mind and left Paris.

Once Boris suggested that I should go to Les Halles

and try for a job as a porter. I arrived at half-past four

the morning, when the work was getting into its swing.

Seeing a short, fat man in a bowler hat directing some

porters, I went up to him and asked for work.

Before answering he seized my right hand and felt the palm.

"You are strong, eh?" he said.

"Very strong," I said untruly.

"

Bien . Let me see you lift that crate."

It was a huge wicker basket full of potatoes. I took

hold of it, and found that, so far from lifting it, I could

not even move it. The man in the bowler hat watched

me, then shrugged his shoulders and turned away. I

made off When I had gone some distance I looked

back and saw

four men lifting the basket on to a cart.

It weighed three hundredweight, possibly. The man

had seen that I was no use, and taken this way of

getting rid of me.

Sometimes in his hopeful moments Boris spent

fifty centimes on a stamp and wrote to one of his ex-

mistresses, asking for money. Only one of them ever

replied. It was a woman who, besides having been

his mistress, owed him two hundred francs. When

Boris saw the letter waiting and recognised the

handwriting, he was wild with hope. We seized the

letter and rushed up to Boris's room to read it, like a

child with stolen sweets. Boris read the letter, then

handed it silently to me. It ran:

MY LITTLE CHERISHED WOOLF,-- With what delight did I

open thy charming letter, reminding me of the days of our

perfect love, and of the so dear kisses which I have received

from thy lips. Such memories linger for ever in the heart, like

the perfume of a flower that is dead.

"As to thy request for two hundred francs, alas! it is

impossible. Thou dost not know, my dear one, how I am

desolated to hear of thy embarrassments. But what wouldst

thou? In this life which is so sad, trouble comes to everyone. I

too have had my share. My little sister has been ill (ah, the

poor little one, how she suffered!) and we are obliged to pay I

know not what to the doctor. All our money is gone and we

are passing, I assure thee, very difficult days.

"Courage, my little wolf, always the courage! Remember that

the bad days are not for ever, and the trouble which seems so

terrible will disappear at last.

"Rest assured, my dear one, that I will remember thee always.

And receive the most sincere embraces of her who has never

ceased to love thee, thy

"YVONNE."

This letter disappointed Boris so much that he went

straight to bed and would not look for work again that

day.

My sixty francs lasted about a fortnight. I had

given up the pretence of going out to restaurants, and

we used to eat in my room, one of us sitting on the

bed and the other on the chair. Boris would contribute

his two francs and I three or four francs, and we

would buy bread, potatoes, milk and cheese, and make

soup over my spirit lamp. We had a saucepan and a

coffee-bowl and one spoon; every day there was a

polite squabble as to who should eat out of the

saucepan and who out of the coffee-bowl (the

saucepan held more), and every day, to my secret

anger, Boris gave in first and had the saucepan.

Sometimes we had more bread in the evening,

sometimes not. Our linen was getting filthy, and it

was three weeks since I had had a bath; Boris, so he

said, had not had a bath for months. It was tobacco

that made everything tolerable. We had plenty of

tobacco, for some time before Boris had met a soldier

(the soldiers are given their tobacco free) and bought

twenty or thirty packets at fifty centimes each.

All this was far worse for Boris than for me. The

walking and sleeping on the floor kept his leg and

back in constant pain, and with his vast Russian

appetite he suffered torments of hunger, though he

never seemed to grow thinner. On the whole he was

surprisingly gay, and he had vast capacities for hope.

He used to say seriously that he had a patron saint who

watched over him, and when things were very bad he would

search the gutter for money, saying that the saint often

dropped a two-franc piece there. One day we were waiting

in the Rue Royale; there was a Russian retaurant near by,

and we were going to ask for a job there. Suddenly, Boris

made up his mind to go into the Madeleine and burn a

fifty-centime candle to his patron saint. Then, coming

out, he said that he would be on the safe side, and

solemnly put a match to a fifty-centime stamp, as a

sacrifice to the immortal gods. Perhaps the gods and the

saints did not get on together; at any rate, we missed the

job.

On some mornings Boris collapsed in the most utter

despair. He would lie in bed almost weeping, cursing the

Jew with whom he lived. Of late the Jew had become

restive about paying the daily two francs, and, what was

worse, had begun putting on intolerable airs of

patronage. Boris said that I, as an Englishman, could not

conceive what torture it was to a Russian of family to be

at the mercy of a Jew.

"A Jew,

mon ami , a veritable Jew! And he hasn't even

the decency to be ashamed of it. To think that I, a

captain in the Russian Army-have I ever told you, mon

ami, that I was a captain in the Second Siberian Rifles?

Yes, a captain, and my father was a colonel. And here I

am, eating the bread of a Jew. A Jew ...

"I will tell you what Jews are like. Once, in the early

months of the war, we were on the march, and we had

halted at a village for the night. A horrible old Jew, with

a red beard like Judas Iscariot, came sneaking up to my

billet. I asked him what he wanted. 'Your honour,' he

said, 'I have brought a girl for you, a beautiful young

girl only seventeen. It will only be fifty francs.' 'Thank

you,' I said, 'you can take her away again. I don't want

to catch any diseases.' 'Diseases!'

cried the Jew, mais,

monsieur le capitaine , there's no fear

of that. It's my own daughter!' That is the Jewish

national character for you.