Mais, mon cher
monsieur
, how tired you look! Please do me the favour of
accepting this glass of brandy."
He would hand me the glass of brandy as courteously
as though I had been a Russian duke instead of a
plongeur. He treated all of us like this. It was our com-
pensation for working seventeen hours a day.
As a rule the last Metro was almost empty-a great
advantage, for one could sit down and sleep for a
quarter of an hour. Generally I was in bed by halfpast
one. Sometimes I missed the train and had to sleep on
the floor of the restaurant, but it hardly mattered, for I
could have slept on cobblestones at that time.
XXI
THIS life went on for about a fortnight, with a slight
increase of work as more customers came to the restaur-
ant. I could have saved an hour a day by taking a
room near the restaurant, but it seemed impossible to
find time to change lodgings-or, for that matter, to get
my hair cut, look at a newspaper, or even undress
completely. After ten days I managed to find a free
quarter of an hour, and wrote to my friend B. in London
asking him if he could get me a job of some sort-
anything, so long as it allowed more than five hours
sleep. I was simply not equal to going on with a
seventeen-hour day, though there are plenty of people
who think nothing of it. When one is overworked, it is a
good cure for self-pity to think of the thousands of
people in Paris restaurants who work such hours, and
will go on doing it, not for a few weeks, but for years.
There was a girl in a
bistro near my hotel who worked
from seven in the morning till midnight for a whole year,
only sitting down to her meals. I remember once asking
her to come to a dance, and she laughed and said that
she had not been further than the street corner for
several months. She was consumptive, and died about
the time I left Paris.
After only a week we were all neurasthenic with
fatigue, except Jules, who skulked persistently. The
quarrels, intermittent at first, had now become con-
tinuous. For hours one would keep up a drizzle of
useless nagging, rising into storms of abuse every few
minutes. "Get me down that saucepan, idiot!' the cook
would cry (she was not tall enough to reach the shelves
where the saucepans were kept). "Get it down yourself,
you old whore," I would answer. Such remarks seemed to
be generated spontaneously from the air of the kitchen.
We quarrelled over things of inconceivable pettiness.
The dustbin, for instance, was an unending source of
quarrels-whether it should be put where I wanted it,
which was in the cook's way, or where she wanted it,
which was between me and the sink. Once she nagged
and nagged until at last, in pure spite, I lifted the
dustbin up and put it out in the middle of the floor,
where she was bound to trip over it.
"Now, you cow," I said, "move it yourself."
Poor old woman, it was too heavy for her to lift, and
she sat down, put her head on the table and burst out
crying. And I jeered at her. This is the kind of effect that
fatigue has upon one's manners.
After a few days the cook had ceased talking about
Tolstoi and her artistic nature, and she and I were not
on speaking terms, except for the purposes of work, and
Boris and Jules were not on speaking terms, and neither
of them was on speaking terms with the cook. Even
Boris and I were barely on speaking terms. We had
agreed beforehand that the
engueulades of working hours
did not count between times; but we had called each
other things too bad to be forgotten-and besides, there
were no between times. Jules grew lazier and lazier, and
he stole food constantly-from a sense of duty, he said.
He called the rest of us
jaune-blackleg-when we would
not join with him in stealing. He had a curious,
malignant spirit. He told me, as a matter of pride, that
he had sometimes wrung a dirty dishcloth into a
customer's soup before taking it in, just to be revenged
upon a member of the bourgeoisie.
The kitchen grew dirtier and the rats bolder, though
we trapped a few of them. Looking round that filthy
room, with raw meat lying among refuse on the floor,
and cold, clotted saucepans sprawling everywhere, and
the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used to
wonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world
as bad as ours. But the other three all said that they
had been in dirtier places. Jules took a positive pleasure
in seeings things dirty. In the afternoon, when 8
he had not much to do, he used to stand in the kitchen
doorway jeering at us for working too hard:
"Fool! Why do you wash that plate? Wipe it on your
trousers. Who cares about the customers?
They don't
know what's going on. What is restaurant work? You
are carving a chicken and it falls on the floor. You
apologise, you bow, you go out; and in five minutes you
come back by another door-with the same chicken. That
is restaurant work," etc.
And, strange to say, in spite of all this filth and in-
competence, the Auberge de Jehan Cottard was actually
a success. For the first few days all our customers were
Russians, friends of the
patron, and these were followed
by Americans and other foreigners-no Frenchmen.
Then one night there was tremendous excitement,
because our first Frenchman had arrived. For a moment
our quarrels were forgotten and we all united in the
effort to serve a good dinner. Boris tiptoed into the
kitchen, jerked his thumb over his shoulder and
whispered conspiratorially:
"