Sh! Attention, un Français! »
A moment later the patron's wife came and
whispered:
"
Attention, un Français! See that he gets a double
portion of all vegetables."
While the Frenchman ate, the
patron's wife stood
behind the grille of the kitchen door and watched the
expression of his face. Next night the Frenchman came
back with two other Frenchmen. This meant that we
were earning a good name; the surest sign of a bad
restaurant is to be frequented only by foreigners. Pro-
bably part of the reason for our success was that the
patron, with the sole gleam of sense he had shown in
fitting out the restaurant, had bought very sharp table-
knives. Sharp knives, of course, are the secret of a
successful restaurant. I am glad that this happened, for
it destroyed one of my illusions, namely, the idea that
Frenchmen know good food when they see it. Or
perhaps we were a fairly good restaurant by Paris
standards; in which case the bad ones must be past
imagining.
In a very few days after I had written to B. he replied
to say that there was a job he could get for me. It was to
look after a congenital imbecile, which sounded a
splendid rest cure after the Auberge de Jehan Cottard. I
pictured myself loafing in the country lanes, knocking
thistle-heads off with my stick, feeding on roast lamb and
treacle tart, and sleeping ten hours a night in sheets
smelling of lavender. B. sent me a fiver to pay my
passage and get my clothes out of the pawn, and as soon
as the money arrived I gave one day's notice and left the
restaurant. My leaving so suddenly embarrassed the
patron,
for as usual he was penniless, and he had to pay
my wages thirty francs short. However he stood me a
glass of Courvoisier '48 brandy, and I think he felt that
this made up the difference. They engaged a Czech, a
thoroughly competent
plongeur, in my place, and the poor
old cook was sacked a few weeks later. Afterwards I
heard that, with two first-rate people in the kitchen, the
plongeur's
work had been cut down to fifteen hours a day.
Below that no one could have cut it, short of
modernising the kitchen.
XXII
FOR what they are worth I want to give my opinions
about the life of a Paris
plongeur. When one comes to
think of it, it is strange that thousands of people in a
great modern city should spend their waking hours
swabbing dishes in hot dens underground. The
question I am raising is why this life goes on-what
purpose it serves, and who wants it to continue, and why.
I am not taking the merely rebellious,
fainéant attitude. I
am trying to consider the social significance of a
plongeur's
life.
I think one should start by saying that a
plongeur is
one of the slaves of the modern world. Not that there is
any need to whine over him, for he is better off than
many manual workers, but still, he is no freer than if he
were bought and sold. His work is servile and without
art; he is paid just enough to keep him alive; his only
holiday is the sack. He is cut off from marriage, or, if he
marries, his wife must work too. Except by a lucky
chance, he has no escape from this life, save into prison.
At this moment there are men with university degrees
scrubbing dishes in Paris for ten or fifteen hours a day.
One cannot say that it is mere idleness on their part, for
an idle man cannot be a
plongeur; they have simply been
trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible. If
plongeurs
thought at all, they would long ago have formed
a union and gone on strike for better treatment. But
they do not think, because they have no leisure for it;
their life has made slaves of them.
The question is, why does this slavery continue?
People have a way of taking it for granted that all work
is done for a sound purpose. They see somebody else
doing a disagreeable job, and think that they have
solved things by saying that the job is necessary. Coal-
mining, for example, is hard work, but it is necessary-we
must have coal. Working in the sewers is unpleasant,
but somebody must work in the sewers. And similarly
with a
plongeur's work. Some people must feed in
restaurants, and so other people must swab dishes for
eighty hours a week. It is the work of civilisation,
therefore unquestionable. This point is worth
considering.
Is a
plongeur's work really necessary to civilisation?
We have a feeling that it must be "honest" work,
because it is hard and disagreeable, and we have made
a sort of fetish of manual work. We see a man cutting
down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a social
need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not
occur to us that he may only be cutting down a
beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue. I
believe it is the same with a
plongeur. He earns his bread
in the sweat of his brow, but it does not follow that he is
doing anything useful; he may be only supplying a
luxury which, very often, is not a luxury.
As an example of what I mean by luxuries which are
not luxuries, take an extreme case, such as one hardly
sees in Europe. Take an Indian rickshaw puller, or a