---
title: "Down and Out in Paris and London"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 11 of 38
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/11/
cite: "George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, section 11. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/11/"
---

# Down and Out in Paris and London

*George Orwell*

> * A Distributed Proofreaders Canada eBook *

> This eBook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the eBook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the eBook. If either of these conditions applies, please
contact an FP administrator before proceeding.

> This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under
copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your
country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT
IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

> Title: Down and Out in Paris and London
Date of first publication: 1933
Author: George Orwell (1903-1950)
Date first posted: Mar. 14, 2018
Date last updated: Mar. 14, 2018
Faded Page eBook #20180314

> This eBook was produced by: Delphine Lettau, Howard Ross
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

> GEORGE ORWELL

> _Down and Out_
    _in Paris and London_

> O scathful harm, condicion of poverte!
       CHAUCER

> PENGUIN BOOKS

> First published by Victor Gollancz 1933

> Copyright 1933 by Eric Blair

> [The end of _Down and Out in Paris and London_ by George Orwell]

## 11. Chapter XI

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/11/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/11/#p-N

[¶0] 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 _cafeterie_,
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 the life was the fearful heat and stuffiness
of those labyrinthine cellars. Apart from this the hotel, which was
large and well organized, was considered a comfortable one.

[¶1] Our _cafeterie_ was a murky cellar measuring twenty feet by seven by
eight high, and so crowded with coffee-urns, bread-cutters 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 110 degrees Fahrenheit—it neared 130 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.

[¶2] 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 de feu_'. 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.

[¶3] 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 remember 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_.

[¶4] 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—anything, 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.

[¶5] 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.

[¶6] 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.

[¶7] 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 were 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 the hotel, that I saw order
in all this chaos.

[¶8] At half-past eight the work stopped very suddenly. We were not free till
nine, but we used to throw ourselves 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 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.

[¶9] 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.

[¶10] 'Get up!' he said. '_Tu t'es bien saoulé la gueule, pas vrai?_ Well,
never mind that, the hotel's a man short. You've got to work today.'

[¶11] 'Why should I work?' I protested. 'This is my day off.'

[¶12] 'Day off, nothing! The work's got to be done. Get up!'

[¶13] 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 it. The power of swallowing quarts
of wine, and then sweating it out before it can do much damage, is one
of the compensations of their life.