Page 110 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

girls to the bar and shook the dice-box against their bel-
lies, for luck. Madame F. stood at the bar rapidly pouring
CHOPINES of wine through the pewter funnel, with a wet
dishcloth always handy, because every man in the room
tried to make love to her. Two children, bastards of big Lou-
is the bricklayer, sat in a comer sharing a glass of SIROP.
Everyone was very happy, overwhelmingly certain that the
world was a good place and we a notable set of people.
For an hour the noise scarcely slackened. Then about
midnight there was a piercing shout of ‘CITOYENS!’ and
the sound of a chair falling over. A blond, red-faced work-
man had risen to his feet and was banging a bottle on the
table. Everyone stopped singing; the word went round, ‘Sh!
Furex is starting!’ Furex was a strange creature, a Limousin
stonemason who worked steadily all the week and drank
himself into a kind of paroxysm on Saturdays. He had lost
his memory and could not remember anything before the
war, and he would have gone to pieces through drink if Ma-
dame F. had not taken care of him. On Saturday evenings at
about five o’clock she would say to someone, ‘Catch Furex
before he spends his wages,’ and when he had been caught
she would take away his money, leaving him enough for one
good drink. One week he escaped, and, rolling blind drunk
in the Place Monge, was run over by a car and badly hurt.
The queer thing about Furex was that, though he was
a Communist when sober, he turned violently patriotic
when drunk. He started the evening with good Commu-
nist principles, but after four or five litres he was a rampant
Chauvinist, denouncing spies, challenging all foreigners to

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