---
title: "Down and Out in Paris and London"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 3 of 38
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/3/
cite: "George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, section 3. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/3/"
---

# Down and Out in Paris and London

*George Orwell*

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> 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]

## 3. Chapter III

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/3/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/3/#p-N

[¶0] 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.

[¶1] 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.

[¶2] 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.

[¶3] 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.

[¶4] You discover, for instance, the secrecy attaching to poverty. At a
sudden stroke you have been reduced to an income of six francs a day.
But of course you dare not admit it—you have got to pretend that you
are living quite as usual. From the start it tangles you in a net of
lies, and even with the lies you can hardly manage it. You stop sending
clothes to the laundry, and the laundress catches you in the street and
asks you why; you mumble something, and she, thinking you are sending
the clothes elsewhere, is your enemy for life. The tobacconist keeps
asking why you have cut down your smoking. There are letters you want to
answer, and cannot, because stamps are too expensive. And then there are
your meals—meals are the worst difficulty of all. Every day at
mealtimes you go out, ostensibly to a restaurant, and loaf an hour in
the Luxembourg Gardens, watching the pigeons. Afterwards you smuggle
your food home in your pockets. Your food is bread and margarine, or
bread and wine, and even the nature of the food is governed by lies. You
have to buy rye bread instead of household bread, because the rye
loaves, though dearer, are round and can be smuggled in your pockets.
This wastes you a franc a day. Sometimes, to keep up appearances, you
have to spend sixty centimes on a drink, and go correspondingly short of
food. Your linen gets filthy, and you run out of soap and razor-blades.
Your hair wants cutting, and you try to cut it yourself, with such
fearful results that you have to go to the barber after all, and spend
the equivalent of a day's food. All day you are telling lies, and
expensive lies.

[¶5] You discover the extreme precariousness of your six francs a day. Mean
disasters happen and rob you of food. You have spent your last eighty
centimes on half a litre of milk, and are boiling it over the spirit
lamp. While it boils a bug runs down your forearm; you give the bug a
flick with your nail, and it falls plop! straight into the milk. There
is nothing for it but to throw the milk away and go foodless.

[¶6] You go to the baker's to buy a pound of bread, and you wait while the
girl cuts a pound for another customer. She is clumsy, and cuts more
than a pound. '_Pardon, monsieur_,' she says, 'I suppose you don't mind
paying two sous extra?' Bread is a franc a pound, and you have exactly a
franc. When you think that you too might be asked to pay two sous extra,
and would have to confess that you could not, you bolt in panic. It is
hours before you dare venture into a baker's shop again.

[¶7] You go to the greengrocer's to spend a franc on a kilogram of potatoes.
But one of the pieces that make up the franc is a Belgian piece, and the
shopman refuses it. You slink out of the shop, and can never go there
again.

[¶8] You have strayed into a respectable quarter, and you see a prosperous
friend coming. To avoid him you dodge into the nearest café. Once in the
café you must buy something, so you spend your last fifty centimes on a
glass of black coffee with a dead fly in it. One could multiply these
disasters by the hundred. They are part of the process of being hard up.

[¶9] You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margarine in
your belly, you go out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere there
is food insulting you in huge, wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets
of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages,
mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyère cheeses like grindstones. A
snivelling self-pity comes over you at the sight of so much food. You
plan to grab a loaf and run, swallowing it before they catch you; and
you refrain, from pure funk.

[¶10] You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times
when you have nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself
in nothing. For half a day at a time you lie on your bed, feeling like
the _jeune squelette_ in Baudelaire's poem. Only food could rouse you.
You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine
is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.

[¶11] This—one could describe it further, but it is all in the same style—is
life on six francs a day. Thousands of people in Paris live
it—struggling artists and students, prostitutes when their luck is out,
out-of-work people of all kinds. It is the suburbs, as it were, of
poverty.

[¶12] I continued in this style for about three weeks. The forty-seven francs
were soon gone, and I had to do what I could on thirty-six francs a week
from the English lessons. Being inexperienced, I handled the money
badly, and sometimes I was a day without food. When this happened I used
to sell a few of my clothes, smuggling them out of the hotel in small
packets and taking them to a second-hand shop in the Rue de la Montagne
St Geneviève. The shopman was a red-haired Jew, an extraordinarily
disagreeable man, who used to fall into furious rages at the sight of a
client. From his manner one would have supposed that we had done him
some injury by coming to him. '_Merde!_' he used to shout, '_you_ here
again? What do you think this is? A soup kitchen?' And he paid
incredibly low prices. For a hat which I had bought for twenty-five
shillings and scarcely worn he gave five francs, for a good pair of
shoes five francs, for shirts a franc each. He always preferred to
exchange rather than buy, and he had a trick of thrusting some useless
article into one's hand and then pretending that one had accepted it.
Once I saw him take a good overcoat from an old woman, put two white
billiard-balls into her hand, and then push her rapidly out of the shop
before she could protest. It would have been a pleasure to flatten the
Jew's nose, if only one could have afforded it.

[¶13] These three weeks were squalid and uncomfortable, and evidently there
was worse coming, for my rent would be due before long. Nevertheless,
things were not a quarter as bad as I had expected. For, when you are
approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the
others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings
of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty:
the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is
actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry. When you
have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven
panics. When you have only three francs you are quite indifferent; for
three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further
than that. You are bored, but you are not afraid. You think vaguely, 'I
shall be starving in a day or two—shocking, isn't it?' And then the
mind wanders to other topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some
extent, provide its own anodyne.

[¶14] And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I
believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a
feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last
genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the
dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you
can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.