Page 128 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

the wash, as the bill was not paid. We were in trouble with
the inspector of labour, who had discovered that the staff
included no Frenchmen; he had several private interviews
with the PATRON, who, I believe, was obliged to bribe him.
The electric company was still dunning us, and when the
duns found that we would buy them off with APERITIFS,
they came every morning. We were in debt at the grocery,
and credit would have been stopped, only the grocer’s wife
(a moustachio’d woman of sixty) had taken a fancy to Jules,
who was sent every morning to cajole her. Similarly I had to
waste an hour every day haggling over vegetables in the rue
du Commerce, to save a few centimes.
These are the results of starting a restaurant on insuffi-
cient capital. And in these conditions the cook and I were
expected to serve thirty or forty meals a day, and would later
on be serving a hundred. From the first day it was too much
for us. The cook’s working hours were from eight in the
morning till midnight, and mine from seven in the morn-
ing till half past twelve the next morning—seventeen and a
half hours, almost without a break. We never had time to
sit down till five in the afternoon, and even then there was
no seat except the top of the dustbin. Boris, who lived near
by and had not to catch the last Metro home, worked from
eight in the morning till two the next morning—eighteen
hours a day, seven days a week. Such hours, though not usu-
al, are nothing extraordinary in Paris.
Life settled at once into a routine that made the Hotel X
seem like a holiday. Every morning at six I drove myself out
of bed, did not shave, sometimes washed, hurried up to the

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