Down and Out in Paris and London (2 page)

He is talking of love, his favourite subject.

‘AH, L’AMOUR, L’AMOUR! AH, QUE LES FEMMES

M’ONT TUE! Alas, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, women have

been my ruin, beyond all hope my ruin. At twenty-two I

am utterly worn out and finished. But what things I have

learned, what abysses of wisdom have I not plumbed! How

great a thing it is to have acquired the true wisdom, to have

become in the highest sense of the word a civilized man, to

have become RAFFINE, VICIEUX,’ etc. etc.

‘MESSIEURS ET DAFFIES, I perceive that you are sad.

AH, MAIS LA VIE EST BELLE—you must not be sad. Be

more gay, I beseech you!

‘Fill high ze bowl vid Samian vine,

Ve vill not sink of semes like zese!

‘AH, QUE LA VIE EST BELLE! LISTEN, MESSIEURS

ET DAMES, out of the fullness of my experience I will dis-

course to you of love. I will explain to you what is the true

meaning of love—what is the true sensibility, the higher,

more refined pleasure which is known to civilized men

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Down and Out in Paris and London

alone. I will tell you of the happiest day of my life. Alas, but

I am past the time when I could know such happiness as

that. It is gone for ever—the very possibility, even the desire

for it, are gone.

‘Listen, then. It was two years ago; my brother was in

Paris—he is a lawyer—and my parents had told him to find

me and take me out to dinner. We hate each other, my broth-

er and I, but we preferred not to disobey my parents. We

dined, and at dinner he grew very drunk upon three bottles

of Bordeaux. I took him back to his hotel, and on the way I

bought a bottle of brandy, and when we had arrived I made

my brother drink a tumblerful of it—I told him it was some-

thing to make him sober. He drank it, and immediately he

fell down like somebody in a fit, dead drunk. I lifted him up

and propped his back against the bed; then I went through

his pockets. I found eleven hundred francs, and with that I

hurried down the stairs, jumped into a taxi, and escaped.

My brother did not know my address —I was safe.

‘Where does a man go when he has money? To the BOR-

DELS, naturally. But you do not suppose that I was going

to waste my time on some vulgar debauchery fit only for

navvies? Confound it, one is a civilized man! I was fas-

tidious, exigeant, you understand, with a thousand francs

in my pocket. It was midnight before I found what I was

looking for. I had fallen in with a very smart youth of

eighteen, dressed EN SMOKING and with his hair cut A

L’AMERICAINE, and we were talking in a quiet BISTRO

away from the boulevards. We understood one another

well, that youth and I. We talked of this and that, and dis-

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cussed ways of diverting oneself. Presently we took a taxi

together and were driven away.

‘The taxi stopped in a narrow, solitary street with a sin-

gle gas-lamp flaring at the end. There were dark puddles

among the stones. Down one side ran the high, blank wall

of a convent. My guide led me to a tall, ruinous house with

shuttered windows, and knocked several times at the door.

Presently there was a sound of footsteps and a shooting of

bolts, and the door opened a little. A hand came round the

edge of it; it was a large, crooked hand, that held itself palm

upwards under our noses, demanding money.

‘My guide put his foot between the door and the step.

‘How much do you want?’ he said.

‘’A thousand francs,’ said a woman’s voice. ‘Pay up at

once or you don’t come in.’

‘I put a thousand francs into the hand and gave the re-

maining hundred to my guide: he said good night and left

me. I could hear the voice inside counting the notes, and

then a thin old crow of a woman in a black dress put her

nose out and regarded me suspiciously before letting me in.

It was very dark inside: I could see nothing except a flaring

gas-jet that illuminated a patch of plaster wall, throwing ev-

erything else into deeper shadow. There was a smell of rats

and dust. Without speaking, the old woman lighted a can-

dle at the gas-jet, then hobbled in front of me down a stone

passage to the top of a flight of stone steps.

‘’VOILA!’ she said; ‘go down into the cellar there and do

what you like. I shall see nothing, hear nothing, know noth-

ing. You are free, you understand—perfectly free.’

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Down and Out in Paris and London

‘Ha, MESSIEURS, need I describe to YOU—FORCE-

MENT, you know it yourselves—that shiver, half of terror

and half of joy, that goes through one at these moments?

I crept down, feeling my way; I could hear my breathing

and the scraping of my shoes on the stones, otherwise all

was silence. At the bottom of the stairs my hand met an

electric switch. I turned it, and a great electrolier of twelve

red globes flooded the cellar with a red light. And behold,

I was not in a cellar, but in a bedroom, a great, rich, garish

bedroom, coloured blood red from top to bottom. Figure it

to yourselves, MESSIEURS ET DAMES! Red carpet on the

floor, red paper on the walls, red plush on the chairs, even

the ceiling red; everywhere red, burning into the eyes. It

was a heavy, stifling red, as though the light were shining

through bowls of blood. At the far end stood a huge, square

bed, with quilts red like the rest, and on it a girl was lying,

dressed in a frock of red velvet. At the sight of me she shrank

away and tried to hide her knees under the short dress.

‘I had halted by the door. ‘Come here, my chicken,’ I

called to her.

‘She gave a whimper of fright. With a bound I was be-

side the bed; she tried to elude me, but I seized her by the

throat—like this, do you see? —tight! She struggled, she be-

gan to cry out for mercy, but I held her fast, forcing back her

head and staring down into her face. She was twenty years

old, perhaps; her face was the broad, dull face of a stupid

child, but it was coated with paint and powder, and her blue,

stupid eyes, shining in the red light, wore that shocked, dis-

torted look that one sees nowhere save in the eyes of these

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women. She was some peasant girl, doubtless, whom her

parents had sold into slavery.

‘Without another word I pulled her off the bed and

threw her on to the floor. And then I fell upon her like a

tiger! Ah, the joy, the incomparable rapture of that time!

There, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, is what I would expound

to you; VOILA L’AMOUR! There is the true love, there is

the only thing in the world worth striving for; there is the

thing beside which all your arts and ideals, all your philoso-

phies and creeds, all your fine words and high attitudes, are

as pale and profitless as ashes. When one has experienced

love—the true love—what is there in the world that seems

more than a mere ghost of joy?

‘More and more savagely I renewed the attack. Again

and again the girl tried to escape; she cried out for mercy

anew, but I laughed at her.

‘’Mercy!’ I said, ‘do you suppose I have come here to

show mercy? Do you suppose I have paid a thousand francs

for that?’ I swear to you, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, that if it

were not for that accursed law that robs us of our liberty, I

would have murdered her at that moment.

‘Ah, how she screamed, with what bitter cries of agony.

But there was no one to hear them; down there under the

streets of Paris we were as secure as at the heart of a pyra-

mid. Tears streamed down the girl’s face, washing away the

powder in long, dirty smears. Ah, that irrecoverable time!

You, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, you who have not cultivated

the finer sensibilities of love, for you such pleasure is almost

beyond conception. And I too, now that my youth is gone—

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Down and Out in Paris and London

ah, youth!—shall never again see life so beautiful as that. It

is finished.

‘Ah yes, it is gone—gone for ever. Ah, the poverty, the

shortness, the disappointment of human joy! For in reali-

ty—CAR EN REALITE, what is the duration of the supreme

moment of love. It is nothing, an instant, a second perhaps.

A second of ecstasy, and after that—dust, ashes, nothing-

ness.

‘And so, just for one instant, I captured the supreme

happiness, the highest and most refined emotion to which

human beings can attain. And in the same moment it was

finished, and I was left—to what? All my savagery, my pas-

sion, were scattered like the petals of a rose. I was left cold

and languid, full of vain regrets; in my revulsion I even felt

a kind of pity for the weeping girl on the floor. Is it not nau-

seous, that we should be the prey of such mean emotions?

I did not look at the girl again; my sole thought was to get

away. I hastened up the steps of the vault and out into the

street. It was dark and bitterly cold, the streets were empty,

the stones echoed under my heels with a hollow, lonely ring.

All my money was gone, I had not even the price of a taxi

fare. I walked back alone to my cold, solitary room.

‘But there, MESSIEURS ET DAMES, that is what I prom-

ised to expound to you. That is Love. That was the happiest

day of my life.’

He was a curious specimen, Charlie. I describe him, just

to show what diverse characters could be found flourishing

in the Coq d’Or quarter.

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III

I lived in the Coq d’Or quarter for about a year and a half.

One day, in summer, I found that I had just four hundred

and fifty francs left, and beyond this nothing but thirty-six

francs a week, which I earned by giving English lessons.

Hitherto I had not thought about the future, but I now re-

alized that I must do something at once. I decided to start

looking for a job, and—very luckily, as it turned out—I took

the precaution of paying two hundred francs for a month’s

rent in advance. With the other two hundred and fifty

francs, besides the English lessons, I could live a month,

and in a month I should probably find work. I aimed at be-

coming a guide to one of the tourist companies, or perhaps

an interpreter. However, a piece of bad luck prevented this.

One day there turned up at the hotel a young Italian who

called himself a compositor. He was rather an ambiguous

person, for he wore side whiskers, which are the mark ei-

ther of an apache or an intellectual, and nobody was quite

certain in which class to put him. Madame F. did not like

the look of him, and made him pay a week’s rent in advance.

The Italian paid the rent and stayed six nights at the ho-

tel. During this time he managed to prepare some duplicate

keys, and on the last night he robbed a dozen rooms, in-

cluding mine. Luckily, he did not find the money that was

in my pockets, so I was not left penniless. I was left with just

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Down and Out in Paris and London

forty-seven francs—that is, seven and tenpence.

This put an end to my plans of looking for work. I had

now got to live at the rate of about six francs a day, and

from the start it was too difficult to leave much thought for

anything else. It was now that my experiences of poverty

began—for six francs a day, if not actual poverty, is on the

fringe of it. Six francs is a shilling, and you can live on a

shilling a day in Paris if you know how. But it is a compli-

cated business.

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.

You discover, for instance, the secrecy attaching to pov-

erty. At a sudden stroke you have been reduced to an income

of six francs a day. But of course you dare not admit it—you

have got to pretend that you are living quite as usual. From

the start it tangles you in a net of lies, and even with the

lies you can hardly manage it. You stop sending clothes to

the laundry, and the laundress catches you in the street and

asks you why; you mumble something, and she, thinking

you are sending the clothes elsewhere, is your enemy for life.

The tobacconist keeps asking why you have cut down your

smoking. There are letters you want to answer, and cannot,

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because stamps are too expensive. And then there are your