Page 121 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

not pay the bills. Evidently he was almost penniless, for he
refused the smallest charges, and he had a trick of swiftly
disappearing when asked for money. His blend of shiftiness
and aristocratic manners made him very hard to deal with.
Melancholy duns came looking for him at all hours, and by
instruction we always told them that he was at Fontaine-
bleau, or Saint Cloud, or some other place that was safely
distant. Meanwhile, I was getting hungrier and hungrier.
I had left the hotel with thirty francs, and I had to go back
immediately to a diet of dry bread. Boris had managed in
the beginning to extract an advance of sixty francs from
the PATRON, but he had spent half of it, in redeeming his
waiter’s clothes, and half on the girl of sympathetic tem-
perament. He borrowed three francs a day from Jules, the
second waiter, and spent it on bread. Some days we had not
even money for tobacco.
Sometimes the cook came to see how things were getting
on, and when she saw that the kitchen was still bare of pots
and pans she usually wept. Jules, the second waiter, refused
steadily to help with the work. He was a Magyar, a little
dark, sharp-featured fellow in spectacles, and very talk-
ative; he had been a medical student, but had abandoned
his training for lack of money. He had a taste for talking
while other people were working, and he told me all about
himself and his ideas. It appeared that he was a Commu-
nist, and had various strange theories (he could prove to
you by figures that it was wrong to work), and he was also,
like most Magyars, passionately proud. Proud and lazy men
do not make good waiters. It was Jules’s dearest boast that

1 0 Down and Out in Paris and London