Down and Out in Paris and London Read Online Free Page B

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    terloo, and answered simply, ‘MERDE!’
    The only things left to Boris by the Revolution were his
    medals and some photographs of his old regiment; he had
    kept these when everything else went to the pawnshop. Al-
    most every day he would spread the photographs out on the
    bed and talk about them:
    ‘VOILA, MON AMI. There you see me at the head of
    my company. Fine big men, eh? Not like these little rats of
    Frenchmen. A captain at twenty— not bad, eh? Yes, a cap-
    tain in the Second Siberian Rifles; and my father was a
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    colonel.
    ‘AH, MAIS, MON AMI, the ups and downs of life! A
    captain in the Russian Army, and then, piff! the Revolu-
    tion—every penny gone. In 1916 I stayed a week at the Hotel
    Edouard Sept; in 1920 I was trying for a job as night watch-
    man there. I have been night watchman, cellarman, floor
    scrubber, dishwasher, porter, lavatory attendant. I have
    tipped waiters, and I have been tipped by waiters.
    ‘Ah, but I have known what it is to live like a gentleman,
    MON AMI. I do not say it to boast, but the other day I was
    trying to compute how many mistresses I have had in my
    life, and I made it out to be over two hundred. Yes, at least
    two hundred … Ah, well, CA REVIENDRA. Victory is to
    him who fights the longest. Courage!’ etc. etc.
    Boris had a queer, changeable nature. He always wished
    himself back in the army, but he had also been a waiter long
    enough to acquire the waiter’s outlook. Though he had nev-
    er saved more than a few thousand francs, he took it for
    granted that in the end he would be able to set up his own
    restaurant and grow rich. All waiters, I afterwards found,
    talk and think of this; it is what reconciles them to being
    waiters. Boris used to talk interestingly about Hotel life:
    ‘Waiting is a gamble,’ he used to say; ‘you may die poor,
    you may make your fortune in a year. You are not paid
    wages, you depend on tips—ten per cent of the bill, and
    a commission from the wine companies on champagne
    corks. Sometimes the tips are enormous. The barman at
    Maxim’s, for instance, makes five hundred francs a day.
    More than five hundred, in the season … I have made two

    Down and Out in Paris and London
    hundred francs a day myself. It was at a Hotel in Biarritz, in
    the season. The whole staff, from the manager down to the
    PLONGEURS, was working twenty-one hours a day. Twen-
    ty-one hours’ work and two and a half hours in bed, for a
    month on end. Still, it was worth it, at two hundred francs
    a day.
    ‘You never know when a stroke of luck is coming. Once
    when I was at the Hotel Royal an American customer sent
    for me before dinner and ordered twenty-four brandy cock-
    tails. I brought them all together on a tray, in twenty-four
    glasses. ‘Now, GUARCON,’ said the customer (he was
    drunk), ‘I’ll drink twelve and you’ll drink twelve, and if you
    can walk to the door afterwards you get a hundred francs.’ I
    walked to the door, and he gave me a hundred francs. And
    every night for six days he did the same thing; twelve bran-
    dy cocktails, then a hundred francs. A few months later I
    heard he had been extradited by the American Govern-
    ment—embezzlement. There is something fine, do you not
    think, about these Americans?’
    I liked Boris, and we had interesting times togeth-
    er, playing chess and talking about war and Hotels. Boris
    used often to suggest that I should become a waiter. ‘The
    life would suit you,’ he used to say; ‘when you are in work,
    with a hundred francs a day and a nice mistress, it’s not bad.
    You say you go in for writing. Writing is bosh. There is only
    one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a
    publisher’s daughter. But you would make a good waiter if
    you shaved that moustache off. You are tall and you speak
    English—those are the chief things a waiter needs. Wait till
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    I can bend this accursed leg, MON AMI. And then, if