After staying briefly with an Esperantist family, he found a room in a cheap hotel at 6 rue du Pot de Fer leading to rue Mouffetarde in the fifth arrondissement, just a short walk from the Panthéon, the Sorbonne, Boulevard St Michael and Luxembourg Gardens, and close to the métro at Place Monge. It was a hotel and street he would make famous as the Hotel des Trois Moineaux in the rue du Coq d’Or in Down and Out in Paris and London – the most evocative portrait of the twilight world of the Paris clochard by an English writer of that period.
