Down and Out in Paris and London Read Online Free

here again? What do you think this is? A soup kitch-
    en?’ And he paid incredibly low prices. For a hat which I had
    bought for twenty-five shillings and scarcely worn he gave
    five francs; for a good pair of shoes, five francs; for shirts,
    a franc each. He always preferred to exchange rather than
    buy, and he had a trick of thrusting some useless article into
    one’s hand and then pretending that one had accepted it.
    Once I saw him take a good overcoat from an old woman,
    put two white billiard-balls into her hand, and then push
    her rapidly out of the shop before she could protest. It would
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    Down and Out in Paris and London
    have been a pleasure to flatten the Jew’s nose, if only one
    could have afforded it.
    These three weeks were squalid and uncomfortable, and
    evidently there was worse coming, for my rent would be due
    before long. Nevertheless, things were not a quarter as bad
    as I had expected. For, when you are approaching poverty,
    you make one discovery which outweighs some of the oth-
    ers. You discover boredom and mean complications and the
    beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great re-
    deeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the
    future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less
    money you have, the less you worry. When you have a hun-
    dred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven
    panics. When you have only three francs you are quite in-
    different; for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and
    you cannot think further than that. You are bored, but you
    are not afraid. You think vaguely, ‘I shall be starving in a
    day or two—shocking, isn’t it?’ And then the mind wanders
    to other topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some
    extent, provide its own anodyne.
    And there is another feeling that is a great consolation
    in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has ex-
    perienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at
    knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have
    talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the
    dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It
    takes off a lot of anxiety,
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    1
    IV
    One day my English lessons ceased abruptly. The weath-
    er was getting hot and one of my pupils, feeling too
    lazy to go on with his lessons, dismissed me. The other
    disappeared from his lodgings without notice, owing me
    twelve francs. I was left with only thirty centimes and no
    tobacco. For a day and a half I had nothing to cat or smoke,
    and then, too hungry to put it off any longer, I packed my
    remaining clothes into my suitcase and took them to the
    pawnshop. This put an end to all pretence of being in funds,
    for I could not take my clothes out of the hotel without ask-
    ing Madame F.’s leave. I remember, however, how surprised
    she was at my asking her instead of removing the clothes
    on the sly, shooting the moon being a common trick in our
    quarter.
    It was the first time that I had been in a French pawn-
    shop. One went through grandiose stone portals (marked,
    of course, ‘LIBERTE, EGATITE, FRATERNITE’ they write
    that even over the police stations in France) into a large,
    bare room like a school classroom, with a counter and rows
    of benches. Forty or fifty people were waiting. One handed
    one’s pledge over the counter and sat down. Presently, when
    the clerk had assessed its value he would call out, ‘NUME-
    RO such and such, will you take fifty francs?’ Sometimes it
    was only fifteen francs, or ten, or five—whatever it was, the

    Down and Out in Paris and London
    whole room knew it. As I Came in the clerk called with an
    air of offence, ‘NUMERO 83—here!’ and gave a little whis-
    tle and a beckon, as though calling a dog. NUMERO 83
    stepped to the counter; he was an old bearded man, with an
    overcoat buttoned up at the neck and frayed trouser-ends.
    Without a word the clerk shot the bundle across the