Page 109 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

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ith thirty francs a week to spend on drinks I could
Wtake part in the social life of the quarter. We had
some jolly evenings, on Saturdays, in the little BISTRO at
the foot of the Hotel des Trois Moineaux.
The brick-floored room, fifteen feet square, was packed
with twenty people, and the air dim with smoke. The noise
was deafening, for everyone was either talking at the top
of his voice or singing. Sometimes it was just a confused
din of voices; sometimes everyone would burst out together
in the same song—the ‘Marseillaise’, or the ‘Internationale’,
or ‘Madelon’, or ‘Les Fraises et les Fram-boises’. Azaya, a
great clumping peasant girl who worked fourteen hours a
day in a glass factory, sang a song about, ‘IL A PERDU SES
PANTALONS, TOUT EN DANSANT LE CHARLESTON.’
Her friend Marinette, a thin, dark Gorsican girl of obsti-
nate virtue, tied her knees together and danced the DANSE
DU VENTRE. The old Rougiers wandered in and out, cadg-
ing drinks and trying to tell a long, involved story about
someone who had once cheated them over a bedstead. R.,
cadaverous and silent, sat in his comer quietly boozing.
Charlie, drunk, half danced, half staggered to and fro with
a glass of sham absinthe balanced in one fat hand, pinching
the women’s breasts and declaiming poetry. People played
darts and diced for drinks. Manuel, a Spaniard, dragged the

10 Down and Out in Paris and London