my job was to wash up, keep the kitchen clean, prepare
vegetables, make tea, coffee and sandwiches, do the
simpler cooking, and run errands. The terms were, as
usual, five hundred francs a month and food, but I had
no free day and no fixed working hours. At the Hôtel X. I
had seen catering at its best, with unlimited money and
good organisation. Now, at the Auberge, I learned how
things are done in a thoroughly bad restaurant. It is
worth describing, for there are hundreds of similar
restaurants in Paris, and every visitor feeds in one of
them occasionally.
I should add, by the way, that the Auberge was not
the ordinary cheap eating-house frequented by students
and workmen. We did not provide an adequate meal at
less than twenty-five francs, and we were picturesque
and artistic, which sent up our social standing. There
were the indecent pictures in the bar, and the Norman
decorations-sham beams on the walls, electric lights
done up as candlesticks, "peasant" pottery, even a
mounting-block at the door-and the
patron and the head
waiter were Russian officers, and many of the
customers titled Russian refugees. In short, we were
decidedly chic.
Nevertheless, the conditions behind the kitchen door
were suitable for a pigsty. For this is what our service
arrangements were like.
The kitchen measured fifteen feet long by eight
broad, and half this space was taken up by the stoves
and tables. All the pots had to be kept on shelves out of
reach, and there was only room for one dustbin. This
dustbin used to be crammed full by midday, and the
floor was normally an inch deep in a compost of
trampled food.
For firing we had nothing but three gas-stoves,
without ovens, and all joints had to be sent out to the
bakery.
There was no larder. Our substitute for one was a
half-roofed shed in the yard, with a tree growing in the
middle of it. The meat, vegetables and so forth lay there
on the bare earth, raided by rats and cats.
There was no hot water laid on. Water for washing up
had to be heated in pans, and, as there was no room for
these on the stoves when meals were cooking, most of
the plates had to be washed in cold water. This, with
soft soap and the hard Paris water, meant scraping the
grease off with bits of newspaper.
We were so short of saucepans that I had to wash
each one as soon as it was done with, instead of leaving
them till the evening. This alone wasted probably an
hour a day.
Owing to some scamping of expense in the installa-
tion, the electric light usually fused at eight in the
evening. The patron would only allow us three candles
in the kitchen, and the cook said three were unlucky, so
we had only two.
Our coffee-grinder was borrowed from a
bistro near
by, and our dustbin and brooms from the concierge.
After the first week a quantity of linen did not come back
from the wash, as the bill was not paid. We were in
trouble with the inspector of labour, who had discovered
that the staff included no Frenchmen; he had several
private interviews with the
patron, who, I believe, was
obliged to bribe him. The electric company was still
dunning us, and when the duns found that we would
buy them off with
apéritifs, they came every morning. We
were in debt at the grocery, and credit would have been
stopped, only the grocer's wife (a moustachio'd woman of
sixty) had taken a fancy to Jules, who was sent every
morning to cajole her. Similarly I had to waste an hour
every day haggling over vegetables in the Rue du
Commerce, to save a few centimes.
These are the results of starting a restaurant on in-
sufficient capital. And in these conditions the cook and I
were expected to serve thirty or forty meals a day, and
would later on be serving a hundred. From the first day
it was too much for us. The cook's working hours were
from eight in the morning till midnight, and mine from
seven in the morning till half-past twelve the next
morning-seventeen and a half hours, almost without a
break. We never had time to sit down till five in the
afternoon, and even then there was no seat except the
top of the dustbin. Boris, who lived near by and had not
to catch the last Metro home, worked from eight in the
morning till two the next morning-eighteen hours a day,
seven days a week. Such hours, though not usual, are
nothing extraordinary in Paris.
Life settled at once into a routine that made the Hôtel
X. seem like a holiday. Every morning at six I drove
myself out of bed, did not shave, sometimes washed,
hurried up to the Place d'Italie and fought for
a place on the Metro. By seven I was in the desolation of
the cold, filthy kitchen, with the potato skins and bones
and fishtails littered on the floor, and a pile of plates,
stuck together in their grease, waiting from overnight. I
could not start on the plates yet, because the water was
cold, and I had to fetch milk and make coffee, for the
others arrived at eight and expected to find coffee ready.
Also, there were always several copper saucepans to
clean. Those copper saucepans are the bane of a
plongeur's
life. They have to be scoured with sand and
bunches of chain, ten minutes to each one, and then
polished on the outside with Brasso. Fortunately, the art
of making them has been lost and they are gradually
vanishing from French kitchens, though one can still
buy them second-hand.
When I had begun on the plates the cook would take
me away from the plates to begin skinning onions, and
when I had begun on the onions the
patron would arrive