Down and Out in London and Paris

by Orwell, George

  the morning. Jules also left at midnight, usually after a

  dispute with Boris, who had to look after the bar till two.

  Between twelve and half-past I did what I could to finish

  the washing up. There was no time to attempt doing the

  work properly, and I used simply to rub the grease off

  the plates with tablenapkins. As for the dirt on the floor,

  I let it lie, or swept the worst of it out of sight under the

  stoves.

  At half-past twelve I would put on my coat and hurry

  out. The patron, bland as ever, would stop me as I went

  down the alley-way past the bar. « Mais, mon cher

  monsieur, how tired you look! Please do me the favour of

  accepting this glass of brandy."

  He would hand me the glass of brandy as courteously

  as though I had been a Russian duke instead of a

  plongeur. He treated all of us like this. It was our com-

  pensation for working seventeen hours a day.

  As a rule the last Metro was almost empty-a great

  advantage, for one could sit down and sleep for a

  quarter of an hour. Generally I was in bed by halfpast

  one. Sometimes I missed the train and had to sleep on

  the floor of the restaurant, but it hardly mattered, for I

  could have slept on cobblestones at that time.

  XXI

  THIS life went on for about a fortnight, with a slight

  increase of work as more customers came to the restaur-

  ant. I could have saved an hour a day by taking a

  room near the restaurant, but it seemed impossible to

  find time to change lodgings-or, for that matter, to get

  my hair cut, look at a newspaper, or even undress

  completely. After ten days I managed to find a free

  quarter of an hour, and wrote to my friend B. in London

  asking him if he could get me a job of some sort-

  anything, so long as it allowed more than five hours

  sleep. I was simply not equal to going on with a

  seventeen-hour day, though there are plenty of people

  who think nothing of it. When one is overworked, it is a

  good cure for self-pity to think of the thousands of

  people in Paris restaurants who work such hours, and

  will go on doing it, not for a few weeks, but for years.

  There was a girl in a bistro near my hotel who worked

  from seven in the morning till midnight for a whole year,

  only sitting down to her meals. I remember once asking

  her to come to a dance, and she laughed and said that

  she had not been further than the street corner for

  several months. She was consumptive, and died about

  the time I left Paris.

  After only a week we were all neurasthenic with

  fatigue, except Jules, who skulked persistently. The

  quarrels, intermittent at first, had now become con-

  tinuous. For hours one would keep up a drizzle of

  useless nagging, rising into storms of abuse every few

  minutes. "Get me down that saucepan, idiot!' the cook

  would cry (she was not tall enough to reach the shelves

  where the saucepans were kept). "Get it down yourself,

  you old whore," I would answer. Such remarks seemed to

  be generated spontaneously from the air of the kitchen.

  We quarrelled over things of inconceivable pettiness.

  The dustbin, for instance, was an unending source of

  quarrels-whether it should be put where I wanted it,

  which was in the cook's way, or where she wanted it,

  which was between me and the sink. Once she nagged

  and nagged until at last, in pure spite, I lifted the

  dustbin up and put it out in the middle of the floor,

  where she was bound to trip over it.

  "Now, you cow," I said, "move it yourself."

  Poor old woman, it was too heavy for her to lift, and

  she sat down, put her head on the table and burst out

  crying. And I jeered at her. This is the kind of effect that

  fatigue has upon one's manners.

  After a few days the cook had ceased talking about

  Tolstoi and her artistic nature, and she and I were not

  on speaking terms, except for the purposes of work, and

  Boris and Jules were not on speaking terms, and neither

  of them was on speaking terms with the cook. Even

  Boris and I were barely on speaking terms. We had

  agreed beforehand that the engueulades of working hours

  did not count between times; but we had called each

  other things too bad to be forgotten-and besides, there

  were no between times. Jules grew lazier and lazier, and

  he stole food constantly-from a sense of duty, he said.

  He called the rest of us jaune-blackleg-when we would

  not join with him in stealing. He had a curious,

  malignant spirit. He told me, as a matter of pride, that

  he had sometimes wrung a dirty dishcloth into a

  customer's soup before taking it in, just to be revenged

  upon a member of the bourgeoisie.

  The kitchen grew dirtier and the rats bolder, though

  we trapped a few of them. Looking round that filthy

  room, with raw meat lying among refuse on the floor,

  and cold, clotted saucepans sprawling everywhere, and

  the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used to

  wonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world

  as bad as ours. But the other three all said that they

  had been in dirtier places. Jules took a positive pleasure

  in seeings things dirty. In the afternoon, when 8

  he had not much to do, he used to stand in the kitchen

  doorway jeering at us for working too hard:

  "Fool! Why do you wash that plate? Wipe it on your

  trousers. Who cares about the customers? They don't

  know what's going on. What is restaurant work? You

  are carving a chicken and it falls on the floor. You

  apologise, you bow, you go out; and in five minutes you

  come back by another door-with the same chicken. That

  is restaurant work," etc.

  And, strange to say, in spite of all this filth and in-

  competence, the Auberge de Jehan Cottard was actually

  a success. For the first few days all our customers were

  Russians, friends of the patron, and these were followed

  by Americans and other foreigners-no Frenchmen.

  Then one night there was tremendous excitement,

  because our first Frenchman had arrived. For a moment

  our quarrels were forgotten and we all united in the

  effort to serve a good dinner. Boris tiptoed into the

  kitchen, jerked his thumb over his shoulder and

  whispered conspiratorially:

  "Sh! Attention, un Français! »

  A moment later the patron's wife came and

  whispered:

  "Attention, un Français! See that he gets a double

  portion of all vegetables."

  While the Frenchman ate, the patron's wife stood

  behind the grille of the kitchen door and watched the

  expression of his face. Next night the Frenchman came

  back with two other Frenchmen. This meant that we

  were earning a good name; the surest sign of a bad

  restaurant is to be frequented only by foreigners. Pro-

  bably part of the reason for our success was that the

  patron, with the sole gleam of sense he had shown in />
  fitting out the restaurant, had bought very sharp table-

  knives. Sharp knives, of course, are the secret of a

  successful restaurant. I am glad that this happened, for

  it destroyed one of my illusions, namely, the idea that

  Frenchmen know good food when they see it. Or

  perhaps we were a fairly good restaurant by Paris

  standards; in which case the bad ones must be past

  imagining.

  In a very few days after I had written to B. he replied

  to say that there was a job he could get for me. It was to

  look after a congenital imbecile, which sounded a

  splendid rest cure after the Auberge de Jehan Cottard. I

  pictured myself loafing in the country lanes, knocking

  thistle-heads off with my stick, feeding on roast lamb and

  treacle tart, and sleeping ten hours a night in sheets

  smelling of lavender. B. sent me a fiver to pay my

  passage and get my clothes out of the pawn, and as soon

  as the money arrived I gave one day's notice and left the

  restaurant. My leaving so suddenly embarrassed the

  patron, for as usual he was penniless, and he had to pay

  my wages thirty francs short. However he stood me a

  glass of Courvoisier '48 brandy, and I think he felt that

  this made up the difference. They engaged a Czech, a

  thoroughly competent plongeur, in my place, and the poor

  old cook was sacked a few weeks later. Afterwards I

  heard that, with two first-rate people in the kitchen, the

  plongeur's work had been cut down to fifteen hours a day.

  Below that no one could have cut it, short of

  modernising the kitchen.

  XXII

  FOR what they are worth I want to give my opinions

  about the life of a Paris plongeur. When one comes to

  think of it, it is strange that thousands of people in a

  great modern city should spend their waking hours

  swabbing dishes in hot dens underground. The

  question I am raising is why this life goes on-what

  purpose it serves, and who wants it to continue, and why.

  I am not taking the merely rebellious, fainéant attitude. I

  am trying to consider the social significance of a plongeur's

  life.

  I think one should start by saying that a plongeur is

  one of the slaves of the modern world. Not that there is

  any need to whine over him, for he is better off than

  many manual workers, but still, he is no freer than if he

  were bought and sold. His work is servile and without

  art; he is paid just enough to keep him alive; his only

  holiday is the sack. He is cut off from marriage, or, if he

  marries, his wife must work too. Except by a lucky

  chance, he has no escape from this life, save into prison.

  At this moment there are men with university degrees

  scrubbing dishes in Paris for ten or fifteen hours a day.

  One cannot say that it is mere idleness on their part, for

  an idle man cannot be a plongeur; they have simply been

  trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible. If

  plongeurs thought at all, they would long ago have formed

  a union and gone on strike for better treatment. But

  they do not think, because they have no leisure for it;

  their life has made slaves of them.

  The question is, why does this slavery continue?

  People have a way of taking it for granted that all work

  is done for a sound purpose. They see somebody else

  doing a disagreeable job, and think that they have

  solved things by saying that the job is necessary. Coal-

  mining, for example, is hard work, but it is necessary-we

  must have coal. Working in the sewers is unpleasant,

  but somebody must work in the sewers. And similarly

  with a plongeur's work. Some people must feed in

  restaurants, and so other people must swab dishes for

  eighty hours a week. It is the work of civilisation,

  therefore unquestionable. This point is worth

  considering.

  Is a plongeur's work really necessary to civilisation?

  We have a feeling that it must be "honest" work,

  because it is hard and disagreeable, and we have made

  a sort of fetish of manual work. We see a man cutting

  down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a social

  need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not

  occur to us that he may only be cutting down a

  beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue. I

  believe it is the same with a plongeur. He earns his bread

  in the sweat of his brow, but it does not follow that he is

  doing anything useful; he may be only supplying a

  luxury which, very often, is not a luxury.

  As an example of what I mean by luxuries which are

  not luxuries, take an extreme case, such as one hardly

  sees in Europe. Take an Indian rickshaw puller, or a

  gharry pony. In any Far Eastern town there are

  rickshaw pullers by the hundred, black wretches

  weighing eight stone, clad in loin-cloths. Some of them

  are diseased; some of them are fifty years old. For miles

  on end they trot in the sun or rain, head down, dragging

  at the shafts, with the sweat dripping from their grey

  moustaches. When they go too slowly the passenger

  calls them bahinchut. They earn thirty or forty rupees a

  month, and cough their lungs out after a few years. The

  gharry ponies are gaunt, vicious things that have been

  sold cheap as having a few years' work left in them.

  Their master looks on the whip as a substitute for food.

  Their work expresses itself in a sort of equation-whip

  plus food equals energy; generally it is about sixty per

  cent. whip and forty per cent. food. Sometimes their

  necks are encircled by one vast sore, so that they drag

  all day on raw flesh. It is still possible to make them

  work, however; it is just a question of thrashing them so

  hard that the pain behind outweighs the pain in front.

  After a few years even the whip loses its virtue, and the

  pony goes to the knacker. These are instances of un-

  necessary work, for there is no real need for gharries

  and rickshaws; they only exist because Orientals con-

  sider it vulgar to walk. They are luxuries, and, as any-

  one who has ridden in them knows, very poor luxuries.

  They afford a small amount of convenience, which

  cannot possibly balance the suffering of the men and

  animals.

  Similarly with the plongeur. He is a king compared

  with a rickshaw puller or a gharry pony, but his case is

  analogous. He is the slave of a hotel or a restaurant,

  and his slavery is more or less useless. For, after all,

  where is the real need of big hotels and smart

  restaurants? They are supposed to provide luxury, but

  in reality they provide only a cheap, shoddy imitation of

  it. Nearly everyone hates hotels. Some restaurants are

  better than others, but it is impossible to get as good a

  meal in a restaurant as one can get, for the same ex-

  pense, in a private house. No doubt hotels and restau-

  rants must exist, but there is no need that they should

  enslave hundreds of p
eople. What makes the work in

  them is not the essentials; it is the shams that are sup-

  posed to represent luxury. Smartness, as it is called,

  means, in effect, merely that the staff work more and

  the customers pay more; no one benefits except the

  proprietor, who will presently buy himself a striped villa

  at Deauville. Essentially, a "smart" hotel is a place

  where a hundred people toil like devils in order that two

  hundred may pay through the nose for things they do

  not really want. If the nonsense were cut out of hotels

  and restaurants, and the work done with simple

  efficiency, plongeurs might work six or eight hours a day

  instead of ten or fifteen.

  Suppose it is granted that a plongeur's work is more

  or less useless. Then the question follows, Why does any

  one want him to go on working? I am trying to go beyond

  the immediate economic cause, and to consider what

  pleasure it can give anyone to think of men swabbing

  dishes for life. For there is no doubt that people-

  comfortably situated people-do find a pleasure in such

  thoughts. A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working

  when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his

  work is needed or not, he must work, because work in

  itself is good-for slaves, at least. This sentiment still

  survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless

  drudgery.

  I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work

  is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the

  thought runs) are such low animals that they would be

  dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them

  too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be

  intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the

  improvement of working conditions, usually says some-

  thing like this:

  "We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it

  is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with

  the thought of its unpleasantness. But don't expect us

  to do anything about it. We are sorry for you lower

  classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange,

  but we will fight like devils against any improvement of

  your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you

  are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not

  going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an

  extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you