By the same author
BURMESE DAYS COMING UP FOR
AIR HOMAGE TO CATALONIA
THE LION AND THE UNICORN
ANIMAL FARM
CRITICAL ESSAYS
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
DOWN AND OUT IN
PARIS AND LONDON
BY
GEORGE ORWELL
" O scathful harm, condition of poverte ! "
CHAUCER
LONDON
SECKER & WARBURG
1949
Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd. 7 John Street, Bloomsbury, London, W.C.
First published (Gollancz), January
1933 New edition, reset, 1949
MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN by MORRISON
AND GIBB LTD., LONDON AND EDINBURGH
I
THE Rue du Coq d'Or, Paris, seven in the morning.
A succession of furious, choking yells from the street.
Madame Monce, who kept the little hotel opposite mine,
had come out on to the pavement to address a lodger on
the third floor. Her bare feet were stuck into sabots and
her grey hair was streaming down.
Madame Monce: « Salope! Salope! How many times
have I told you not to squash bugs on the wallpaper? Do
you think you've bought the hotel, eh? Why can't you
throw them out of the window like everyone else? Putain!
Salope! »
The woman on the third floor: « Vache! »
Thereupon a whole variegated chorus of yells, as
windows were flung open on every side and half the
street joined in the quarrel. They shut up abruptly ten
minutes later, when a squadron of cavalry rode past and
people stopped shouting to look at them.
I sketch this scene, just to convey something of the
spirit of the Rue du Coq d'Or. Not that quarrels were the
only thing that happened there-but still, we seldom got
through the morning without at least one outburst of
this description. Quarrels, and the desolate cries of
street hawkers, and the shouts of children chasing
orange-peel over the cobbles, and at night loud singing
and the sour reek of the refuse-carts, made up the
atmosphere of the street.
It was a very narrow street-a ravine of tall, leprous
houses, lurching towards one another in queer atti-
tudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of
collapse. All the houses were hotels and packed to the
tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and Italians. At 5
the foot of the hotels were tiny bistros, where you could be
drunk for the equivalent of a shilling. On Saturday nights
about a third of the male population of the quarter was
drunk. There was fighting over women, and the Arab
navvies who lived in the cheapest hotels used to conduct
mysterious feuds, and fight them out with chairs and
occasionally revolvers. At night the policemen would
only come through the street two together. It was a fairly
rackety place. And yet amid the noise and dirt lived the
usual respectable French shopkeepers, bakers and
laundresses and the like, keeping themselves to
themselves and quietly piling up small fortunes. It'was
quite a representative Paris slum.
My hotel was called the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux. It
was a dark, rickety warren of five storeys, cut up by
wooden partitions into forty rooms. The rooms were
small and inveterately dirty, for there was no maid,
and Madame F., the patronne, had no time to do any
sweeping. The walls were as thin as matchwood, and
to hide the cracks they had been covered with layer
after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and
housed innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines
of bugs marched all day like columns of soldiers,
and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that
one had to get up every few hours and kill them in
hecatombs. Sometimes when the bugs got too bad
one used to burn sulphur and drive them into the
next room; whereupon the lodger next door would
retort by having his room sulphured, and drive the
bugs back. It was a dirty place, but homelike, for
Madame F. and her husband were good sorts. The
rent of the rooms varied between thirty and fifty
francs a week.
The lodgers were a floating population, largely
foreigners, who used to turn up without luggage, stay
a week and then disappear again. They were of every
trade-cobblers, bricklayers, stonemasons, navvies,
students, prostitutes, rag-pickers. Some of them were
fantastically poor. In one of the attics there was a
Bulgarian student who made fancy shoes for the Ameri-
can market. From six to twelve he sat on his bed, making
a dozen pairs of shoes and earning thirty-five francs; the
rest of the day he attended lectures at the Sorbonne. He
was studying for the Church, and books of theology lay
face-down on his leather-strewn floor. In another room
lived a Russian woman and her son, who called himself
an artist. The mother worked sixteen hours a day,
darning socks at twenty-five centimes a sock, while the
son, decently dressed, loafed in the Montparnasse cafés.
One room was let to two different lodgers, one a day
worker and the other a night worker. In another room a
widower shared the same bed with his two grown-up
daughters, both consumptive.
There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris
slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people -people
who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and
given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them
from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees
people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived
lives that were curious beyond words.
There were the Rougiers, for instance, an old, ragged,
dwarfish couple who plied an extraordinary trade. They
used to sell post cards on the Boulevard St. Michel. The
curious thing was that the post cards were sold in sealed
packets as pornographic ones, but were actually photo-
graphs of chateaux on the Loire; the buyers did not discover
this till too late, and of course never complained. The
Rougiers earned about a hundred francs a week, and by
strict economy managed to be always half
starved and half drunk. The filth of their room was
such that one could smell it on the floor below. Accord-
ing to Madame F., neither of the Rougiers had taken off
their clothes for four years.
Or there was Henri, who worked in the sewers. He
was a tall, melancholy man with curly hair, rather
romantic-looking in his long, sewer-man's boots.
Henri's peculiarity was that he did not speak, except for
the purposes of work, literally for days together. Only a
year before he had been a chauffeur i
n good employ and
saving money. One day he fell in love, and when the girl
refused him he lost his temper and kicked her. On being
kicked the girl fell desperately in love with Henri, and
for a fortnight they lived together and spent a thousand
francs of Henri's money. Then the girl was unfaithful;
Henri planted a knife in her upper arm and was sent to
prison for six months. As soon as she had been stabbed
the girl fell more in love with Henri than ever, and the
two made up their quarrel and agreed that when Henri
came out of jail he should buy a taxi and they would
marry and settle down. But a fortnight later the girl was
unfaithful again, and when Henri came out she was with
child. Henri did not stab her again. He drew out all his
savings and went on a drinking-bout that ended in
another month's imprisonment; after that he went to
work in the sewers. Nothing would induce Henri to talk.
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 civilise
d 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,
and then a thin old crow of a woman in a black dress
put her nose out and regarded me suspiciously before
letting me in. It was very dark inside: I could see
nothing except a flaring gas jet that illuminated a patch
of plaster wall, throwing everything else into
deeper shadow. There was a smell of rats and dust.
Without speaking, the old woman lighted a candle at the
gas jet, then hobbled in front of me down a stone
passage to the top of a flight of stone steps.
" 'Voilà!' she said; 'go down into the cellar there and
do what you like. I shall see nothing, hear nothing, know
nothing. You are free, you understand-perfectly free.'
"Ha, messieurs, need I describe to you forcément, you
know it yourselves-that shiver, half of terror and half of
joy, that goes through one at these moments? I crept
down, feeling my way; I could hear my breathing and the
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