Down and Out in Paris and London Read Free Page A

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.
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    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 re-
    alized 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 be-
    coming 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 ei-
    ther 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 ho-
    tel. During this time he managed to prepare some duplicate
    keys, and on the last night he robbed a dozen rooms, in-
    cluding mine. Luckily, he did not find the money that was
    in my pockets, so I was not left penniless. I was left with just
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    Down and Out in Paris and London
    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 compli-
    cated 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.
    You discover, for instance, the secrecy attaching to pov-
    erty. 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,
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    because stamps are too expensive. And then there are your
    meals— meals are the worst difficulty of all. Every day at
    meal-times 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