Down and Out in Paris and London Read Free Page B

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 arc telling
    lies, and expensive lies.
    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.
    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, MON-
    SIEUR,’ she says, ‘I suppose you don’t mind paying two
    sous extra?’ Bread is a franc a pound, and you have exactly
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    Down and Out in Paris and London
    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.
    You go to the greengrocer’s to spend a franc on a kilo-
    gram 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.
    You have strayed into a respectable quarter, and you see a
    prosperous friend coming. To avoid him you dodge into the
    nearest cafe. Once in the cafe you must buy something, so
    you spend your last fifty centimes on a glass of black coffee
    with a dead fly in it. Once could multiply these disasters by
    the hundred. They are part of the process of being hard up.
    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 Gruyere cheeses like grindstones. A snivel-
    ling 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.
    You discover the boredom which is inseparable from
    poverty; the times when you have nothing to do and, be-
    ing 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
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    bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly
    with a few accessory organs.
    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.
    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 secondhand shop in the
    rue de la Montagne St Genevieve. The shopman was a red-
    haired Jew, an extraordinary 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