Page 106 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

and ragged families picking over the dustbins. Work-
men, and girls with a piece of chocolate in one hand and a
CROISSANT in the other, were pouring into the Metro sta-
tions. Trams, filled with more workmen, boomed gloomily
past. One hastened down to the station, fought for a place—
one does literally have to fight on the Paris Metro at six in
the morning—and stood jammed in the swaying mass of
passengers, nose to nose with some hideous French face,
breathing sour wine and garlic. And then one descended
into the labyrinth of the hotel basement, and forgot daylight
till two o’clock, when the sun was hot and the town black
with people and cars.
After my first week at the hotel I always spent the af-
ternoon interval in sleeping, or, when I had money, in a
BISTRO. Except for a few ambitious waiters who went to
English classes, the whole staff wasted their leisure in this
way; one seemed too lazy after the morning’s work to do
anything better. Sometimes half a dozen PLONGEURS
would make up a party and go to an abominable brothel
in the Rue de Sieyes, where the charge was only five francs
twenty-five centimes—tenpence half-penny. It was nick-
named ‘LE PRIX FIXE’, and they used to describe their
experiences there as a great joke. It was a favourite rendez-
vous of hotel workers. The PLONGEURS’ wages did not
allow them to marry, and no doubt work in the basement
does not encourage fastidious feelings.
For another four hours one was in the cellars, and then
one emerged, sweating, into the cool street. It was lamp-
light—that strange purplish gleam of the Paris lamps—and

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