Page 136 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

a sense of duty, he said. He called the rest of us JAUNE—
blackleg—when we would not join with him in stealing. He
had a curious, malignant spirit. He told me, as a matter of
pride, that he had sometimes wrung a dirty dishcloth into a
customer’s soup before taking it in, just to be revenged upon
a member of the bourgeoisie.
The kitchen grew dirtier and the rats bolder, though we
trapped a few of them. Looking round that filthy room, with
raw meat lying among refuse on the floor, and cold, clotted
saucepans sprawling everywhere, and the sink blocked and
coated with grease, I used to wonder whether there could
be a restaurant in the world as bad as ours. But the other
three all said that they had been in dirtier places. Jules took
a positive pleasure in seeings things dirty. In the afternoon,
when he had not much to do, he used to stand in the kitchen
doorway jeering at us for working too hard:
‘Fool! Why do you wash that plate? Wipe it on your trou-
sers. Who cares about the customers? THEY don’t know
what’s going on. What is restaurant work? You are carving
a chicken and it falls on the floor. You apologize, you bow,
you go out; and in five minutes you come back by anoth-
er door— with the same chicken. That is restaurant work,’
etc.
And, strange to say, in spite of all this filth and incompe-
tence, the Auberge de Jehan Cottard was actually a success.
For the first few days all our customers were Russians,
friends of the PATRON, and these were followed by Ameri-
cans and other foreigners—no Frenchmen. Then one night
there was tremendous excitement, because our first French-

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