impossible without noise and quarrelling. Indeed the
quarrels are a necessary part of the process, for the pace
would never be kept up if everyone did not accuse
everyone else of idling. It was for this reaon that during
the rush hours the whole staff raged and cursed like
demons. At those times there was scarcely a verb in the
hotel except foutre. A girl in the bakery, aged sixteen,
used oaths that would have defeated a cabman. (Did not
Hamlet say "cursing like a scullion"? No doubt
Shakespeare had watched scullions at work.) But we are
not losing our heads and wasting time; we were just
stimulating one another for the effort of packing four
hours' work into two hours.
What keeps a hotel going is the fact that the em-
ployees take a genuine pride in their work, beastly and
silly though it is. If a man idles, the others soon find him
out, and conspire against him to get him sacked.
Cooks, waiters and plongeurs differ greatly in outlook,
but they are all alike in being proud of their efficiency.
Undoubtedly the most workmanlike class, and the
least servile, are the cooks. They do not earn quite so
much as waiters, but their prestige is higher and their
employment steadier. The cook does not look upon
himself as a servant, but as a skilled workman; he is
generally called « un ouvrier, » which a waiter never is.
He knows his power-knows that he alone makes or mars
a restaurant, and that if he is five minutes late
everything is out of gear, He despises the whole non-
cooking staff, and makes it a point of honour to insult
everyone below the head waiter. And he takes a genuine
artistic pride in his work, which demands very great
skill. It is not the cooking that is so difficult, but the
doing everything to time. Between breakfast and lun-
cheon the head cook at the Hôtel X. would receive
orders for several hundred dishes, all to be served at
different times; he cooked few of them himself, but he
gave instructions about all of them and inspected them
before they were sent up. His memory was wonderful.
The vouchers were pinned on a board, but the head cook
seldom looked at them; everything was stored in his
mind, and exactly to the minute, as each dish fell due,
he would call out, « Faites marcher une côtelette de veau » (or
whatever it was) unfailingly. He was an insufferable
bully, but he was also an artist. It is for their punctu-
ality, and not for any superiority in technique, that men
cooks are preferred to women.
The waiter's outlook is quite different. He too is
proud in a way of his skill, but his skill is chiefly in
being servile. His work gives him the mentality, not of a
workman, but of a snob. He lives perpetually in sight of
rich people, stands at their tables, listens to their conver
sation, sucks up to them with smiles and discreet little
jokes. He has the pleasure of spending money by proxy.
Moreover, there is always the chance that he may
become rich himself, for, though most waiters die poor,
they have long runs of luck occasionally. At some cafés
on the Grand Boulevard there is so much money to be
made that the waiters actually pay the patron for their
employment. The result is that between constantly
seeing money, and hoping to get it, the waiter comes to
identify himself to some extent with his employers. He
will take pains to serve a meal in style, because he feels
that he is participating in the meal himself.
I remember Valenti telling me of some banquet at
Nice at which he had once served, and of how it cost
two hundred thousand francs and was talked of for
months afterwards. "It was splendid, mon p'tit, mais
magnifique! Jesus Christ! The champagne, the silver, the
orchids-I have never seen anything like them, and I have
seen some things. Ah, it was glorious!"
"But, " I said, "you were only there to wait?"
"Oh, of course. But still, it was splendid."
The moral is, never be sorry for a waiter. Sometimes
when you sit in a restaurant, still stuffing yourself half
an hour after closing time, you feel that the tired waiter
at your side must surely be despising you. But he is not.
He is not thinking as he looks at you, "What an overfed
lout"; he is thinking, "One day, when I have saved
enough money, I shall be able to imitate that man." He is
ministering to a kind of pleasure he thoroughly
understands and admires. And that is why waiters are
seldom Socialists, have no effective trade union, and
will work twelve hours a day-they work fifteen hours,
seven days a week, in many cafés. They are snobs, and
they find the servile nature of their work rather con-
genial.
The plongeurs, again, have a different outlook. Theirs
is a job which offers no prospects, is intensely exhaust-
ing, and at the same time has not a trace of skill or
interest; the sort of job that would always be done by
women if women were strong enough. All that is re-
quired of them is to be constantly on the run, and to put
up with long hours and a stuffy atmosphere. They have
no way of escaping from this life, for they cannot save a
penny from their wages, and working from sixty to a
hundred hours a week leaves them no time to train for
anything else. The best they can hope for is to find a
slightly softer job as night-watchman or lavatory
attendant.
And yet the plongeurs, low as they are, also have a
kind of pride. It is the pride of the drudge-the man who
is equal to no matter what quantity of work. At that
level, the mere power to go on working like an ox is
about the only virtue attainable. Débrouillard is what
every plongeur wants to be called. A débrouillard is a man
who, even when he is told to do the impossible, will se
débrouiller-get it done somehow. One of the kitchen
plongeurs at the Hôtel X., a German, was well known as
a débrouillard. One night an English lord came to the
hotel, and the waiters were in despair, for the lord had
asked for peaches, and there were none in stock; it was
late at night, and the shops would be shut. "Leave it to
me," said the German. He went out, and in ten minutes
he was back with four peaches. He had gone into a
neighbouring restaurant and stolen them. That is what is
meant by a débrouillard. The English lord paid for the
peaches at twenty francs each.
Mario, who was in charge of the cafeterie, had the
typical drudge mentality. All he thought of was getting
through the « boulot, » and he defied you to give him
too much of it. Fourteen years underground had
left him with about as much natural laziness as a piston
rod. « Faut étre dur, » he used to say when anyone
complained. You will often hear plongeurs boast, « Je suis
dur"-as though they were soldiers, not male charwomen.
and when the press of work came we were all ready for a
grand concerted effort to get through it. The constant
war between the different departments also made for
efficiency, for everyone clung to his own privileges and
tried to stop the others idling and pilfering.
This is the good side of hotel work. In a hotel a huge
and complicated machine is kept running by an inade-
quate staff, because every man has a well-defined job
and does it scrupulously. But there is a weak point, and
it is this-that the job the staff are doing is not necessarily
what the customer pays for. The customer pays, as he
sees it, for good service; the employee is paid, as he sees
it, for the boulot-meaning, as a rule, an imitation of good
service. The result is that, though hotels are miracles of
punctuality, they are worse than the worst private houses
in the things that matter.
Take cleanliness, for example. The dirt in the Hôtel
X., as soon as one penetrated into the service quarters,
was revolting. Our cafeterie had year-old filth in all the
dark corners, and the bread-bin was infested with cock-
roaches. Once I suggested killing these beasts to Mario.
"Why kill the poor animals?" he said reproachfully. The
others laughed when I wanted to wash my hands before
touching the butter. Yet we were clean where we
recognised cleanliness as part of the boulot. We
scrubbed the tables and polished the brasswork regu-
larly, because we had orders to do that; but we had no
orders to be genuinely clean, and in any case we had no
time for it. We were simply carrying out our duties;
and as our first duty was punctuality, we saved time by
being dirty.
In the kitchen the dirt was worse. It is not a figure of
speech, it is a mere statement of fact to say that a
French cook will spit in the soup-that is, if he is not
going to drink it himself. He is an artist, but his art is
not cleanliness. To a certain extent he is even dirty
because he is an artist, for food, to look smart, needs
dirty treatment. When a steak, for instance, is brought
up for the head cook's inspection, he does not handle it
with a fork. He picks it up in his fingers and slaps it
down, runs his thumb round the dish and licks it to
taste the gravy, runs it round and licks again, then
steps back and contemplates the piece of meat like an
artist judging a picture, then presses it lovingly into
place with his fat, pink fingers, every one of which he
has licked a hundred times that morning. When he is
satisfied, he takes a cloth and wipes his fingerprints
from the dish, and hands it to the waiter. And the
waiter, of course, dips his fingers into the gravy-his
nasty, greasy fingers which he is for ever running
through his brilliantined hair. Whenever one pays more
than, say, ten francs for a dish of meat in Paris, one may
be certain that it has been fingered in this manner. In
very cheap restaurants it is different; there, the same
trouble is not taken over the food, and it is just forked
out of the pan and flung on to a plate, without handling.
Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more
sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.
Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants,
because sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and
smartness. The hotel employee is too busy getting food
ready to remember that it is meant to be eaten. A meal
is simply « une commande » to him, just as a man dying of
cancer is simply "a case" to the doctor. A customer
orders, for example, a piece of toast. Somebody, pressed
with work in a cellar deep underground, has to prepare it.
How can he stop and say to himself, "This toast is to be
eaten-I must make it eatable"? All he knows is that it must
look right and must be ready in three minutes. Some large
drops of sweat fall from his forehead on to the toast. Why
should he worry? Presently the toast falls among the filthy
sawdust on the floor. Why trouble to make a new piece? It
is much quicker to wipe the sawdust off. On the way
upstairs the toast falls again, butter side down. Another
wipe is all it needs. And so with everything. The only food
at the Hôtel X. which was ever prepared cleanly was the
staff's, and the patron's. The maxim, repeated by everyone,
was: "Look out for the patron, and as for the clients, s'en f--
pas mal! » Everywhere in the service quarters dirt festered-a
secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel
like the intestines through a man's body.
Apart from the dirt, the patron swindled the customers
wholeheartedly. For the most part the materials of the food
were very bad, though the cooks knew how to serve it up in
style. The meat was at best ordinary, and as to the
vegetables, no good housekeeper would have looked at
them in the market. The cream, by a standing order, was
diluted with milk. The tea and coffee were of inferior sorts,
and the jam was synthetic stuff out of vast, unlabelled tins.
All the cheaper wines, according to Boris, were corked vin
ordinaire. There was a rule that employees must pay for
anything they spoiled, and in consequence damaged things
were seldom thrown away. Once the waiter on the third
floor dropped a roast chicken down the shaft of our service
lift, where it fell into a litter of broken bread, torn paper
and so forth at the bottom. We simply wiped it with a cloth and
sent it up again. Upstairs there were dirty tales of once-used
sheets not being washed, but simply damped, ironed and put back
on the beds. The patron was as mean to us as to the
customers. Throughout the vast hotel there was not,
for instance, such a thing as a brush and pan; one had
to manage with a broom and a piece of cardboard. And
the staff lavatory was worthy of Central Asia, and there
was no place to wash one's hands, except the sinks
used for washing crockery.
In spite of all this the Hôtel X. was one of the dozen
most expensive hotels in Paris, and the customers paid
startling prices. The ordinary charge for a night's
lodging, not including breakfast, was two hundred
francs. All wine and tobacco were sold at exactly double
shop prices, though of course the patron bought at the
wholesale price. If a customer had a title, or was
reputed to be a millionaire, all his charges went up
automatically. One morning on the fourth floor an
American who was on diet wanted only salt and hot
water for his breakfast. Valenti was furious. "Jesus
Christ!" he said, "what about my ten per cent.? Ten per
cent. of salt and water!" And he charged twentyfive
francs for the breakfast. The customer paid without a
murmur.
According to Boris, the same kind of thing went on
in all Paris hotels, or at least in a
ll the big, expensive
ones. But I imagine that the customers at the Hotel X.
were especially easy to swindle, for they were mostly
Americans, with a sprinkling of English-no Frenchand
seemed to know nothing whatever about good food.
They would stuff themselves with disgusting American
"cereals," and eat marmalade at tea, and drink ver-
mouth after dinner, and order a poulet à la reine at a
hundred francs and then souse it in Worcester sauce.
One customer, from Pittsburg, dined every night in his
bedroom on grape-nuts, scrambled eggs and cocoa.
Perhaps it hardly matters whether such people are
swindled or not.
XV
HEARD queer tales in the hotel. There were tales of
dope fiends, of old debauchees who frequented hotels in
search of pretty page boys, of thefts and blackmail.
Mario told me of a hotel in which he had been, where a
chambermaid stole a priceless diamond ring from an
American lady. For days the staff were searched as they
left work, and two detectives searched the hotel from
top to bottom, but the ring was never found. The
chambermaid had a lover in the bakery, and he had
baked the ring into a roll, where it lay unsuspected
until the search was over.
Once Valenti, at a slack time, told me a story about
himself.
"You know, mon p'tit, this hotel life is all very well,
but it's the devil when you're out of work. I expect you
know what it is to go without eating, eh? Forcément,
otherwise you wouldn't be scrubbing dishes. Well, I'm
not a poor devil of a plongeur; I'm a waiter, and I went
five days without eating, once. Five days without even a
crust of bread Jesus Christ!
"I tell you, those five days were the devil. The only
good thing was, I had my rent paid in advance. I was
living in a dirty, cheap little hotel in the Rue Sainte
Éloise up in the Latin quarter. It was called the Hotel
Suzanne May, after some famous prostitute of the time
of the Empire. I was starving, and there was nothing I
could do; I couldn't even go to the cafés where the hotel
proprietors come to engage waiters, because I
hadn't the price of a drink. All I could do was to lie in
bed getting weaker and weaker, and watching the bugs
running about the ceiling. I don't want to go through
that again, I can tell you.
"In the afternoon of the fifth day I went half mad; at
Down and Out in London and Paris Page 9
