Down and Out in Paris and London E-Book

George Orwell

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 355

Beschreibung

George Orwell's vivid memoir of his time living among the desperately poor and destitute, Down and Out in Paris and London is a moving tour of the underworld of society. Written when Orwell was a struggling writer in his twenties, it documents his 'first contact with poverty'. Here, he painstakingly documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor – sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses of last resort, working as a dishwasher in Paris's vile 'Hôtel X', surviving on scraps and cigarette butts, living alongside tramps, a star-gazing pavement artist and a starving Russian ex-army captain. Exposing a shocking, previously-hidden world to his readers, Orwell gave a human face to the statistics of poverty for the first time – and in doing so, found his voice as a writer.

Leseprobe

DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON

Other titles by George Orwell

available from Polygon

Nineteen Eighty-FourAnimal Farm

This edition first published in paperback in Great Britain in 2024

by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.

Birlinn Ltd

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10 Newington Road

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987654321

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

Introduction © Hugo Rifkind, 2024

First published in 1933 by Victor Gollancz.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 1 84697 658 2

eBook ISBN 978 1 78885 641 6

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

Typeset in Bembo MT Pro by Initial Typesetting Services, Edinburgh

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

INTRODUCTION

A modern-day Eric Blair would have had a rough ride. Amid society’s least fortunate, few of whom had better options, he was an ex-public schoolboy slumming it. The reviews, and the internet, would have torn him apart.

In pre-war Britain, though, it wasn’t just popular patience for the dilettante posh that was so different from today. Writing was, too. Line-by-line, George Orwell’s tight, beautiful prose still leaps out at you; only on the second page, we have already learned that his street in Paris is ‘a ravine of tall, leprous houses’. Through current eyes, though, one striking thing about Down and Out in Paris and London is that, although it takes the form of a memoir, the author himself is barely in it. Or rather, while we see what he sees and learn what he does, and even sometimes find out what he thinks about it, almost nothing here is confessional, or personal, or individually revealing.

So slight is his presence that it can sometimes be a bit of a shock when he abruptly turns up. In Paris, for example, in the new kitchen he has belatedly set up with his Russian waiter friend Boris at the Auberge de Jehan Cottard, we hear of his bickering with the cook.

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.

Nothing like this has happened before. Who actually is this man, you wonder, who snaps so abruptly into cruelty? How many other times has he behaved like this without letting on?

At other times, one is tempted to infer personality from transgressions that he barely seems to notice. Antisemitism leaps from these pages; other characters of varying backgrounds are sketched in intimate and evocative detail, but a Jew is always just a Jew. ‘After knowing him,’ he writes of one, ‘I saw the force of the proverb “Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don’t trust an Armenian.”’

Then there is the tale told by his friend, Charlie, early in the book, where he boastfully recounts what can only be described as the violent rape of a teenage prostitute held captive in a cellar. ‘Tears streamed down the girl’s face, washing away the powder in long, dirty smears,’ enthuses Charlie. ‘He was a curious specimen, Charlie,’ is Orwell’s diffident verdict. Then again, when he later comes to describe what seems to be a fellow tramp’s attempted and repeated rape of him, in a cell at a London hostel, he admits only that it was ‘a nasty experience’.

These omissions are worth noticing when one thinks of Orwell’s legacy today. Were a similar book to be written now, it is inconceivable that it would be without long passages of introspection and angst. Editors would demand them, readers would expect them, reviewers and subsequent interviewers would be incredulous that they weren’t there. The very point of such a book, indeed, would likely be to explain how it felt for a chap from the Upper Middle to have ended up so profoundly on his uppers.

As it is, nowhere in the book do we even get a particularly honest account of the author’s circumstances. History tells us that he actually had an aunt in Paris with money, but Orwell does not. History also tells us that many of his London tramping experiences actually took place before Paris, and had already formed the basis of a published essay. Here, Orwell would have you believe that unexpected circumstances on leaving Paris simply plunged him into penury. History also tells us that he attended Eton. Here, he simply doesn’t let on, not even when he meets a fellow tramp who also attended Eton, whom he calls ‘the Old Etonian’ and considers something of a fraud.

More thought-provokingly, history finally tells us that everything described in this book takes place in the late 1920s, shortly after Orwell had returned from his stint as a member of the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. Those five years would of course go on to inspire his novel Burmese Days, itself published only a year after Down and Out in Paris and London. With the beating heart of Burmese Days being one of colonial self-disgust, the modern reader yearns for an account of Western poverty that contrasts it with that of the subcontinent, or even of the demons and guilt that had – perhaps? – now sent this former agent of Empire deep into European slums.

As it is, while there are occasional mentions of India here, the writer seems to make an active point of avoiding admitting that he has ever been there. ‘I spoke to one of them in bad Urdu,’ he even writes, of meeting Indian tramps in London, yet leaving the reader utterly in the dark as to why he could. A modern editor, I expect, simply wouldn’t stand for any of this. Or if they did, come the reviews, they’d wish they hadn’t.

Feasibly, the book is also mis-titled. While he is definitely ‘down’ in Paris, struggling as a plongeur, I would say that it is only as a wandering tramp in London that he truly becomes ‘out’. The two halves of the book, in fact, don’t really have much to do with each other. Only rarely are the two situations compared, such as when he muses on the unfairness of Parisian hobos being allowed to sleep on the street or under bridges, while their London equivalents were hassled and moved on. Indeed, for all the dirt, work, bugs and squalor of Paris, he often seems to be having a rather good time there, almost in the manner of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald before him, or William Somerset Maugham before them, but with less culture and worse hangovers.

His account of an average Saturday night on the piss at his brick-floored local bistro ‘at the foot of the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux’ is a thing of lasting beauty. ‘Everyone was very happy,’ he writes of the start, ‘overwhelmingly certain that the world was a good place and we a notable set of people.’ Hours later, however, ‘We perceived that we were not splendid inhabitants of a splendid world, but a crew of underpaid workmen grown squalidly and dismally drunk.’ Heads feel ‘swollen up like a balloon’, the floor seems to rock, people crawl out the back to be sick. George, mate, we’ve all been there. ‘On the whole,’ he concludes, ‘the two hours when one was perfectly and wildly happy seemed worth the subsequent headache.’

Even when the money is gone, there is an irrepressible energy to Orwell’s memories of Paris, quite absent when he comes back home. One moment he will be lying in bed in his pension, dodging his landlady, too poor to eat and too fatigued to move. The next Boris will arrive, and produce from his waistcoat, ‘some minced veal, a wedge of Camembert cheese, bread and an éclair, all jumbled together’. There is always some reason to trek across town on a promise of something better.

Perhaps that’s because this whole world of poverty exists on the fringes of luxury. Much of what Orwell writes about the top-end hotels and restaurants of Paris would make one wary of eating out, even to this day. ‘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.’ You won’t see that on TripAdvisor. Or, as is perhaps still genuinely useful, ‘the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it’. As a plongeur – the lowest of the low in the restaurant trade – Orwell is engaged in direct class warfare and loving it. Every customer is a mug, every patron is a beast and every scam at their expense is a triumph.

In London, it’s all much more flat and bleak. ‘The Irishman was a friendly old man,’ Orwell will write, heavily, ‘but he smelt very unpleasant, which was not surprising when one learned how many diseases he suffered from.’ And, while there was a certain glamour in fighting mysterious insects in a Parisian garret, there’s not much to be found in sharing floorspace in a London ‘spike’ – a hostel, basically – with chronic bronchitis. The institutional nature of the London tramping experience leaves little space for poetry. ‘Naked and shivering, we lined up in the passage. You cannot conceive what ruinous, degenerate curs we looked, standing there in the merciless morning light.’

Whereas the impoverished in France oozed with enterprise, his fellow tramps are exhausted and lethargic. ‘One seemed to breathe,’ he writes, ‘a less feverish air.’ At one point, Orwell suggests to his tramp mate, Paddy, that they could trek into inner London to tap a friend for cash. Paddy, who knows there is a spike nearby, simply can’t be bothered. Internally, secretly, it’s of course possible that Orwell retained a haughty, voyeuristic distance at these moments, considering himself merely among tramps rather than one of them. Only once, though, is he identified as an unexpected presence in their midst. This is in the Lower Binfield spike, when an old soldier orderly notices that he has described himself as a journalist. ‘Then you are a gentleman?’ he says. ‘Well, that’s bloody bad luck, guv’nor.’ Appalling favouritism follows.

With this being Orwell’s first published book, there’s an obvious inclination to hunt within it for signs of the writer he will become. You will see them, certainly, in the writing itself. The prose is always taut, never flowery, and can do an awful lot very quickly. ‘Our cafeterie had year-old filth in all the dark corners, and the bread-bin was infested with cockroaches.’ Corners and a bread-bin and, boom, you have the whole room.

What you will not find in this early Orwell, though, is anything that would today be described as Orwellian. The powerful chords that Orwell’s writing today often strikes, in our technological age of creeping totalitarianism, disinformation and fake news, are simply not present at all. In fact, while there are certainly politics here, they sometimes verge on the immature. The horrendous workload of the plongeur, for example, he decides is not down to desperation or the exploitative nature of capitalism, but in fact down to ‘simply fear of the mob’ due to a terror that a working class with more time on their hands would become revolutionaries. As a big picture observation, I suppose this idea of huge, malign, horribly competent forces in the background does foreshadow the way his politics will evolve. It just sits a bit oddly with his more recent observation that nobody can even run a kitchen properly.

His fascination with poverty is also, today, frankly un-fashionable. We may be past the brazen exploitation of a decade ago, when the television combined titillation and voyeurism in goggle-at-the-poor shows such as Benefits Street, but what has replaced them often seems to have far less salience. One thinks immediately of Fergal Keane’s Forgotten Britain series, or the books of Darren McGarvey (with both these people, as it happens, being winners of the Orwell Prize, which today rewards those who ‘make political writing into an art’.) Yet both, while tremendously powerful, lack the first-person swashbuckle of Orwell, or quite the same sense that they are slapping down hard truths on the breakfast tables of the powerful. I wonder if the bleak reality is that mainstream society, today, actually knows plenty about poverty, but just doesn’t much care.

For Orwell, even basic points of human egalitarianism are still points worth making. In Paris, he hits out at the assumption that ‘there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though . . .’ (eek) ‘. . . they were two different races, like Negroes and white men.’ And then, similarly in London, ‘if one looks closely one sees that there is no essential difference between a beggar’s livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is work?’ He dismisses the idea utterly that tramps want to be tramps, declaring that ‘deliberate, cynical parasitism, such as one reads of in Jack London’s books on American tramping, is not in the English character’.

Despite the squalor and awfulness, this often makes Down and Out in Paris and London into a surprisingly positive, and almost romantic book, full of conviction that nobody need be doomed and a better world is possible. As such, it’s hard not to contrast this Orwell with the later Orwell, the pessimistic post-war Orwellian Orwell, who in Nineteen Eighty-Four basically concludes the reverse. Think of Winston Smith, who starts off believing that ‘If there was hope, it lay in the proles!’ Before concluding that it doesn’t lie anywhere, because there is no hope at all.

Actually, it is in Orwell’s form, basically in his journalism, that you see his greatest legacy today. He is the journalist saturated in his topic; every long-read in a colour supplement that you have ever read is in his debt, as is every subsequent travel writer or immersive Gonzo hack. From his interviews with ‘screever’ pavement artists (‘See? You can have cartoons about any of the parties, but you mustn’t put anything in favour of Socialism, because the police won’t stand it’) to his chapter about London tramp slang (which gives us ‘gaggers’, ‘clodhoppers’, ‘judys’ and ‘tosheroons’ among many more) he simply has a brilliant eye for colour. We learn of the ‘Twopenny Hangover’: an establishment in which the homeless pay twopenny to sleep on a bench leaning against a rope, which a man known as ‘the valet’ cuts at five o’clock in the morning. Also ‘the Coffin’, in which they can pay twice as much to sleep in a wooden box filled with bedbugs. There are a thousand details here on which a lesser, lazier writer could hang a whole book. He’s really done the work.

He also has a peerless sense of people, not just as individuals but also as types. ‘I imagine there are quite a lot of tramps who thank God they are not tramps,’ he writes. ‘They are like the trippers who say such cutting things about trippers.’ In Paris, he tells us to ‘never be sorry for a waiter,’ because ‘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.”’ Or there are the urban London missionaries, who want tramps to ‘sing hymns for buns’. In one spike, Orwell describes a religious trio who arrive, tremblingly, to save souls. ‘There they stood patiently singing and exhorting,’ he writes, ‘and no more notice was taken of them than if they had been earwigs.’ Eventually they clear off. ‘It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level,’ he concludes.

This may be a rich observation coming from the likes of me, but there are far too many political writers today who rely only on lofty polemic; having no greater ambition than identifying somebody who is wrong about something, and making sure everybody knows. Often, this is contrasted with investigative reporting, the wheedling out of secrets from those who would keep them hidden. Orwell, though, represents a different tradition, somewhere between the two.

His is the journalism of the fly on the wall. For all the newspaper columns I have ever written, I am well aware that journalism is of far greater value when it adds to the sum of human knowledge, rather than merely leeching from it. From this book onwards, Orwell is a rebuke to the armchair pundit. Even for myself, he reminds me of how much more worthwhile I feel when I get away from my desk and set out with a notebook, whether it’s to lurk on corners outside Scottish polling stations, or to interview Spanish sex workers, or to hear the stories of Syrian refugees in a Jordanian camp, or just to speak to anyone, anywhere, who wouldn’t otherwise make the news. This is what he did, and it is what we should all do, far more. You get down in the dirt, sometimes literally, and you show the world a part of itself that it has chosen not to see.

Hugo Rifkind

– 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 attitudes, 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 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 arid 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, ragpickers. Some of them were fantastically poor. In one of the attics there was a Bulgarian student who made fancy shoes for the American 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 postcards on the Boulevard St Michel. The curious thing was that the postcards were sold in sealed packets as pornographic ones, but were actually photographs 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. According 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 in 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 –

Life 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 civilized 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 Samian 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 civilized 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 tumblerful 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 civilized 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 scraping of my shoes on the stones, otherwise all was silence. At the bottom of the stairs my hand met an electric switch. I turned it, and a great electrolier of twelve red globes flooded the cellar with a red light. And behold, I was not in a cellar, but in a bedroom, a great, rich, garish bedroom, coloured blood red from top to bottom. Figure it to yourselves, messieurs et dames! Red carpet on the floor, red paper on the walls, red plush on the chairs, even the ceiling red; everywhere red, burning into the eyes. It was a heavy, stifling red, as though the light were shining through bowls of blood. At the far end stood a huge, square bed, with quilts red like the rest, and on it a girl was lying, dressed in a frock of red velvet. At the sight of me she shrank away and tried to hide her knees under the short dress.

‘I had halted by the door. “Come here, my chicken,” I called to her.

‘She gave a whimper of fright. With a bound I was beside the bed; she tried to elude me, but I seized her by the throat – like this, do you see? – tight! She struggled, she began to cry out for mercy, but I held her fast, forcing back her head and staring down into her face. She was twenty years old, perhaps; her face was the broad, dull face of a stupid child, but it was coated with paint and powder, and her blue, stupid eyes, shining in the red light, wore that shocked, distorted look that one sees nowhere save in the eyes of these women. She was some peasant girl, doubtless, whom her parents had sold into slavery.

‘Without another word I pulled her off the bed and threw her on to the floor. And then I fell upon her like a tiger! Ah, the joy, the incomparable rapture of that time! There, messieurs et dames, is what I would expound to you; Voilà l’amour! There is the true love, there is the only thing in the world worth striving for; there is the thing beside which all your arts and ideals, all your philosophies and creeds, all your fine words and high attitudes, are as pale and profitless as ashes. When one has experienced love – the true love – what is there in the world that seems more than a mere ghost of joy?

‘More and more savagely I renewed the attack. Again and again the girl tried to escape; she cried out for mercy anew, but I laughed at her.

‘“Mercy!” I said, “do you suppose I have come here to show mercy? Do you suppose I have paid a thousand francs for that?” I swear to you, messieurs et dames, that if it were not for that accursed law that robs us of our liberty, I would have murdered her at that moment.

‘Ah, how she screamed, with what bitter cries of agony. But there was no one to hear them; down there under the streets of Paris we were as secure as at the heart of a pyramid. Tears streamed down the girl’s face, washing away the powder in long, dirty smears. Ah, that irrecoverable time! You, messieurs et dames, you who have not cultivated the finer sensibilities of love, for you such pleasure is almost beyond conception. And I too, now that my youth is gone – ah, youth! – shall never again see life so beautiful as that. It is finished.

‘Ah yes, it is gone – gone for ever. Ah, the poverty, the shortness, the disappointment of human joy! For in reality – car en realité, what is the duration of the supreme moment of love. It is nothing, an instant, a second perhaps. A second of ecstasy, and after that – dust, ashes, nothingness.

‘And so, just for one instant, I captured the supreme happiness, the highest and most refined emotion to which human beings can attain. And in the same moment it was finished, and I was left – to what? All my savagery, my passion, were scattered like the petals of a rose. I was left cold and languid, full of vain regrets; in my revulsion I even felt a kind of pity for the weeping girl on the floor. Is it not nauseous, that we should be the prey of such mean emotions? I did not look at the girl again; my sole thought was to get away. I hastened up the steps of the vault and out into the street. It was dark and bitterly cold, the streets were empty, the stones echoed under my heels with a hollow, lonely ring. All my money was gone, I had not even the price of a taxi fare. I walked back alone to my cold, solitary room.

‘But there, messieurs et dames, that is what I promised to expound to you. That is Love. That was the happiest day of my life.’

He was a curious specimen, Charlie. I describe him, just to show what diverse characters could be found flourishing in the Coq d’Or quarter.

– III –

I lived in the Coq d’Or quarter for about a year and a half. One day, in summer, I found that I had just four hundred and fifty francs left, and beyond this nothing but thirty-six francs a week, which I earned by giving English lessons. Hitherto I had not thought about the future, but I now realized that I must do something at once. I decided to start looking for a job, and – very luckily, as it turned out – I took the precaution of paying two hundred francs for a month’s rent in advance. With the other two hundred and fifty francs, besides the English lessons, I could live a month, and in a month I should probably find work. I aimed at becoming a guide to one of the tourist companies, or perhaps an interpreter. However, a piece of bad luck prevented this.

One day there turned up at the hotel a young Italian who called himself a compositor. He was rather an ambiguous person, for he wore side whiskers, which are the mark either of an apache or an intellectual, and nobody was quite certain in which class to put him. Madame F. did not like the look of him, and made him pay a week’s rent in advance. The Italian paid the rent and stayed six nights at the hotel. During this time he managed to prepare some duplicate keys, and on the last night he robbed a dozen rooms, including mine. Luckily, he did not find the money that was in my pockets, so I was not left penniless. I was left with just forty-seven francs – that is, seven and tenpence.

This put an end to my plans of looking for work. I had now got to live at the rate of about six francs a day, and from the start it was too difficult to leave much thought for anything else. It was now that my experiences of poverty began – for six francs a day, if not actual poverty, is on the fringe of it. Six francs is a shilling, and you can live on a shilling a day in Paris if you know how. But it is a complicated business.

It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty – it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.