counters, and the first time I went to the kitchen I took
my tray unknowingly to the wrong one. The head cook
walked up to me, twisted his moustaches, and looked
me up and down. Then he beckoned to the breakfast
cook and pointed at me.
"Do you see that? That is the type of plongeur they
send us nowadays. Where do you come from, idiot?
From Charenton, I suppose?" (There is a large lunatic
asylum at Charenton.)
"From England," I said.
"I might have known it. Well, mon cher monsieur
l'Anglais, may I inform you that you are the son of a
whore? And now the camp to the other counter, where
you belong."
I got this kind of reception every time I went to the
kitchen, for I always made some mistake; I was ex-
pected to know the work, and was cursed accordingly.
From curiosity I counted the number of times I was
called maquereau during the day, and it was thirty-nine.
At half-past four the Italian told me that I could stop
working, but that it was not worth going out, as we
began again at five. I went to the lavatory for a smoke;
smoking was strictly forbidden, and Boris had warned
me that the lavatory was the only safe place. After that
I worked again till a quarter-past nine, when the waiter
put his head into the doorway and told me to leave the
rest of the crockery. To my astonishment, after calling
me pig, mackerel, etc., all day, he had suddenly grown
quite friendly. I realised that the curses I had met with
were only a kind of probation.
"That'll do, mon p'tit," said the waiter. « Tu n'es pas
débrouillard, but you work all right. Come up and have
your dinner. The hotel allows us two litres of wine
each, and I've stolen another bottle. We'll have a fine
booze."
We had an excellent dinner from the leavings of the
higher employees. The waiter, grown mellow, told me
stories about his love-affairs, and about two men whom
he had stabbed in Italy, and about how he had dodged
his military service. He was a good fellow when one
got to know him; he reminded me of Benvenuto
Cellini, somehow. I was tired and drenched with sweat,
but I felt a new man after a day's solid food. The work
did not seem difficult, and I felt that this job would suit
me. It was not certain, however, that it would continue,
for I had been engaged as an "extra" for the day only,
at twenty-five francs. The sour-faced doorkeeper
counted out the money, less fifty centimes which he
said was for insurance (a lie, I discovered afterwards).
Then he stepped out into the passage, made me take off
my coat, and carefully prodded me all over, searching
for stolen food. After this the chef du personnel appeared
and spoke to me. Like the waiter, he had grown more
genial on seeing that I was willing to work.
"We will give you a permanent job if you like," he
said. "The head waiter says he would enjoy calling an
Englishman names. Will you sign on for a month?"
Here was a job at last, and I was ready to jump at it.
Then I remembered the Russian restaurant, due to open
in a fortnight. It seemed hardly fair to promise working a
month, and then leave in the middle. I said that I had
other work in prospect-could I be engaged for a
fortnight? But at that the chef du personnel shrugged his
shoulders and said that the hotel only engaged men by
the month. Evidently I had lost my chance of a job.
Boris, by arrangement, was waiting for me in the
Arcade of the Rue de Rivoli. When I told him what had
happened, he was furious. For the first time since I had
known him he forgot his manners and called me a fool.
"Idiot! Species of idiot! What's the good of my
finding you a job when you go and chuck it up the next
moment? How could you be such a fool as to mention
the other restaurant? You'd only to promise you would
work for a month."
"It seemed more honest to say I might have to leave,"
I objected.
"Honest! Honest! Who ever heard of a plongeur being
honest? Mon ami"-suddenly he seized my lapel and
spoke very earnestly-"mon ami, you have worked
here all day. You see what hotel work is like. Do you
think a plongeur can afford a sense of honour?"
"No, perhaps not."
"Well, then, go back quickly and tell the chef du
personnel you are quite ready to work for a month. Say
you will throw the other job over. Then, when our
restaurant opens, we have only to walk out."
"But what about my wages if I break my contract?"
Boris banged his stick on the pavement and cried out
at such stupidity. "Ask to be paid by the day, then you
won't lose a sou. Do you suppose they would prosecute
a plongeur for breaking his contract? 'A plongeur is too low
to be prosecuted."
I hurried back, found the chef du personnel, and told
him that I would work for a month, whereat he signed
me on. This was my first lesson in plongeur morality.
Later I realised how foolish it had been to have any
scruples, for the big hotels are quite merciless towards
their employees. They engage or discharge men as the
work demands, and they all sack ten per cent. or more
of their staff when the season is over. Nor have they
any difficulty in replacing a man who leaves at short
notice, for Paris is thronged by hotel employees out of
work.
XI
AS it turned out, I did not break my contract, for it
was six weeks before the Auberge de Jehan Cottard
even showed signs of opening. In the meantime I
worked at the Hôtel X., four days a week in the cafe-
terie, one day helping the waiter on the fourth floor,
and one day replacing the woman who washed up for
the dining-room. My day off, luckily, was Sunday, but
sometimes another man was ill and I had to work that
day as well. The hours were from seven in the
morning till two in the afternoon, and from five in the
evening till nine-eleven hours; but it was a fourteen-
hour day when I washed up for the dining-room. By the
ordinary standards of a Paris plongeur, these are
exceptionally short hours. The only hardship of life was
the fearful heat and stuffiness of these labyrinthine
cellars. Apart from this the hotel, which was large and
well organised, was considered a comfortable one.
Our cafeterie was a murky cellar measuring twenty
feet by seven by eight high, and so crowded with coffee-
urns, breadcutters and the like that one could hardly
move without banging against something. It was lighted
by one dim electric bulb, and four or five gas-fires that
sent out a fierce red breath. There was a thermometer
there, and the temperature never fell below 11o
degrees Fahrenheit-it neared 13o at some times of the
day. At one end were five service lifts, and at the other
an ice cupboard
where we stored milk and butter.
When you went into the ice cupboard you dropped a
hundred degrees of temperature at a single step; it
used to remind me of the hymn about Greenland's icy
mountains and India's coral strand. Two men worked
in the cafeterie besides Boris and myself. One was
Mario, a huge, excitable Italian-he was like a city
policeman with operatic gestures-and the other, a
hairy, uncouth animal whom we called the Magyar; I
think he was a Transylvanian, or something even more
remote. Except the Magyar we were all big men, and at
the rush hours we collided incessantly.
The work in the cafeterie was spasmodic. We were
never idle, but the real work only came in bursts of two
hours at a time-we called each burst « un coup defeu."
The first coup de feu came at eight, when the guests
upstairs began to wake up and demand breakfast. At
eight a sudden banging and yelling would break out all through
the basement; bells rang on all sides, blue-aproned men
rushed through the passages, our service lifts came
down with a simultaneous crash, and the waiters on all
five floors began shouting Italian oaths down the
shafts. I don't remember all our duties, but they
included making tea, coffee and chocolate, fetching
meals from the kitchen, wines from the cellar and fruit
and so forth from the dining-room, slicing bread,
making toast, rolling pats of butter, measuring jam,
opening milk-cans, counting lumps of sugar, boiling
eggs, cooking porridge, pounding ice, grinding coffee-
all this for from a hundred to two hundred customers.
The kitchen was thirty yards away, and the dining-
room sixty or seventy yards. Everything. we sent up in
the service lifts had to be covered by a voucher, and the
vouchers had to be carefully filed, and there was
trouble if even a lump of sugar was lost. Besides this,
we had to supply the staff with bread and coffee, and
fetch the meals for the waiters upstairs. All in all, it
was a complicated job.
I calculated that one had to walk and run about
fifteen miles during the day, and yet the strain of the
work was more mental than physical. Nothing could be
easier, on the face of it, than this stupid scullion work,
but it is astonishingly hard when one is in a hurry. One
has to leap to and fro between a multitude of jobs -it is
like sorting a pack of cards against the clock. You are,
for example, making toast, when bang! down comes a
service lift with an order for tea, rolls and three
different kinds of jam, and simultaneously bang! down
comes another demanding scrambled eggs, coffee and
grapefruit; you run to the kitchen for the eggs and to
the dining-room for the fruit, going like lightning so as
to be back before your toast burns, and having to re-
member about the tea and coffee, besides half a dozen
other orders that are still pending; and at the same time
some waiter is following you and making trouble about
a lost bottle of soda-water, and you are arguing with
him. It needs more brains than one might think. Mario
said, no doubt truly, that it took a year to make a
reliable cafetier.
The time between eight and half-past ten was a sort
of delirium. Sometimes we were going as though we
had only five minutes to live; sometimes there were
sudden lulls when the orders stopped and everything
seemed quiet for a moment. Then we swept up the litter
from the floor, threw down fresh sawdust, and
swallowed gallipots of wine or coffee or water-any-
thing, so long as it was wet. Very often we used to
break off chunks of ice and suck them while we
worked. The heat among the gas-fires was nauseating;
we swallowed quarts of drink during the day, and after
a few hours even our aprons were drenched with sweat.
At times we were hopelessly behind with the work, and
some of the customers would have gone without their
breakfast, but Mario always pulled us through. He had
worked fourteen years in the cafeterie, and he had the
skill that never wastes a second between jobs. The
Magyar was very stupid and I was inexperienced, and
Boris was inclined to shirk, partly because of his lame
leg, partly because he was ashamed of working in the
cafeterie after being a waiter; but Mario was wonderful.
The way he would stretch his great arms right across
the cafeterie to fill a coffee-pot with one hand and boil
an egg with the other, at the same time watching toast
and shouting directions to the Magyar, and between
whiles singing snatches from Rigoletto, was beyond all
praise. The patron knew his value, and he was paid a
thousand francs a month, instead of five hundred like
the rest of us.
The breakfast pandemonium stopped at half-past ten.
Then we scrubbed the cafeterie tables, swept the floor
and polished the brasswork, and, on good mornings,
went one at a time to the lavatory for a smoke. This was
our slack time-only relatively slack, however, for we
had only ten minutes for lunch, and we never got
through it uninterrupted. The customers' luncheon hour,
between twelve and two, was another period of turmoil
like the breakfast hour. Most of our work was fetching
meals from the kitchen, which meant constant
engueulades from the cooks. By this time the cooks had
sweated in front of their furnaces for four or five hours,
and their tempers were all warmed up.
At two we were suddenly free men. We threw off our
aprons and put on our coats, hurried out of doors, and,
when we had money, dived into the nearest bistro. It was
strange, coming up into the street from those firelit
cellars. The air seemed blindingly clear and cold, like
arctic summer; and how sweet the petrol did smell, after
the stenches of sweat and food! Sometimes we met
some of our cooks and waiters in the bistros, and they
were friendly and stood us drinks. Indoors we were their
slaves, but it is an etiquette in hotel life that between
hours everyone is equal, and the engueulades do not
count.
At a quarter to five we went back to the hotel. Till
half-past six there were no orders, and we used this time
to polish silver, clean out the coffee-urns, and do other
odd jobs. Then the grand turmoil of the day started-the
dinner hour. I wish I could be Zola for a little while, just
to describe that dinner hour. The essence of the situation
was that a hundred or two hundred people were
demanding individually different meals of five or six
courses, and that fifty or sixty people had to cook and
serve them and clean up the mess
afterwards; anyone with experience of catering will
know what that means. And at this time when the work
was doubled, the whole staff was tired out, and a
number of them were drunk. I could write pages about
> the scene without giving a true idea of it. The chargings
to and fro in the narrow passages, the collisions, the
yells, the struggling with crates and trays and blocks of
ice, the heat, the darkness, the furious festering quarrels
which there was no time to fight out-they pass
description. Anyone coming into the basement for the
first time would have thought himself in a den of
maniacs. It was only later, when I understood the
working of a hotel, that I saw order in all this chaos.
At half-past eight the work stopped very suddenly.
We were not free till nine, but we used to throw our-
selves full length on the floor, and lie there resting our
legs, too lazy even to go to the ice cupboard for a drink.
Sometimes the chef du personnel would come in with
bottles of beer, for the hotel stood us an extra beer when
we had had a hard day. The food we were given was no
more than eatable, but the patron was not mean about
drink; he allowed us two litres of wine a day each,
knowing that if a plongeur is not given two litres he will
steal three. We had the heeltaps of bottles as well, so
that we often drank too much-a good thing, for one
seemed to work faster when partially drunk.
Four days of the week passed like this; of the other
two working days, one was better and one worse. After
a week of this life I felt in need of a holiday. It was
Saturday night, so the people in our bistro were busy
getting drunk, and with a free day ahead of me I was
ready to join them. We all went to bed, drunk, at two in
the morning, meaning to sleep till noon. At half-past
five I was suddenly awakened. A night-watchman,
sent from the hotel, was standing at my bedside. He
stripped the clothes back and shook me roughly.
"Get up!" he said. « Tu t'es bien saoulé la gueule, eh?
Well, never mind that, the hotel's a man short. You've
got to work to-day."
"Why should I work?" I protested. "This is my day
off."
"Day off, nothing! The work's got to be done. Get
up!»
I got up and went out, feeling as though my back
were broken and my skull filled with hot cinders. I did
not think that I could possibly do a day's work. And yet,
after only an hour in the basement, I found that I was
perfectly well. It seemed that in the heat of those
cellars, as in a turkish bath, one could sweat out almost
any quantity of drink. Plongeurs know this, and count on
Down and Out in London and Paris Page 7
