Down and Out in Paris and London

by George Orwell

It was a very narrow street—a ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse.

Hôtel des Trois Moineaux.

Hotel of the Three Sparrows

The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people—people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad

grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent.

Strawberries and Raspberries

How do I marry a soldier, I who loves the whole regiment

I wish one could find a pub in London a quarter as cheery.

Refined, vicious

But life is beautiful

Demanding

it were not for that accursed law that robs us of our liberty, I would have murdered her at that moment.

What a Debauched man!

Because in reality

apache

A violent, Street ruffian, originally in Paris

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.

jeune squelette

Young skeleton

Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

Not likely to cause offense

But we are not losing our heads and wasting time; we were just stimulating one another for the effort of packing four hours’ work into two hours.

The cook does not look upon himself as a servant, but as a skilled workman; he is generally called “un ouvrier”

A worker

Resourceful

Community

You have to be tough

I’m tough

Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.

Blech It makes me never want to eat out

s’en f——pas mal!”

Perhaps it hardly matters whether such people are swindled or not.

Belly dance

Long live Germany

Amazing

For, after all, where is the real need of big hotels and smart restaurants? They are supposed to provide luxury, but in reality they provide only a cheap, shoddy imitation of it. Nearly everyone hates hotels. Some restaurants are better than others, but it is impossible to get as good a meal in a restaurant as one can get, for the same expense, in a private house.

don’t expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, but we will fight like devils against any improvement of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day.

Foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are.

Maybe the idea for 1984 started here

The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.

The mob is in fact loose now, and—in the shape of rich men—is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as “smart” hotels.

These are only my own Ideas about the basic facts of a plongeur’s life, made without reference to immediate economic questions, and no doubt largely platitudes. I present them as a sample of the thoughts that are put into one’s head by working in a hotel.

très

serieuse

Very serious

England is a very good country when you are not poor; and, of course, with a tame imbecile to look after, I was not going to be poor.

a gracelessness, a patina of antique filth, quite different from mere shabbiness.

was the land of the tea urn and the Labour Exchange, as Paris is the land of the bistro and the sweatshop.

Seen in the mass, lounging there, they were a disgusting

sight; nothing villainous or dangerous, but a graceless, mangy crew, nearly all ragged and palpably underfed.

And all foreigners to him were “dem bloody dagoes”—for, according to his theory, foreigners were

It was malnutrition and not any native vice that had destroyed his manhood.

We slept two in a cell, “one up, one down”—that is, one on a wooden shelf and one on the floor, with straw palliasses and plenty of blankets, dirty but not verminous.

There is such a hopelessness about some of the people there—decent, broken-down types who have pawned their collars but are still trying for office jobs. Coming to a Salvation Army shelter, where it is at least clean, is their last clutch at respectability.

The charge was elevenpence, but it was a dark, evil-smelling place, and a notorious haunt of the “nancy boys.”

You’ll never get a drop off real toffs. It’s shabby sort of blokes you get most off, and foreigners. I’ve had even sixpences off Japs, and blackies, and that. They’re not so bloody mean as what an Englishman is.

If you’ve got any education, it don’t matter to you if you’re on the road for the rest of your life.”

You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, ‘I’m a free man in here’ “—he tapped his forehead—“and you’re all right.”