Page 40 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

are passing, I assure thee, very difficult days.
Courage, my little wolf, always the courage! Remember
that the bad days are not for ever, and the trouble which
seems so terrible will disappear at last.
Rest assured, my dear one, that I will remember thee al-
ways. And receive the most sincere embraces of her who has
never ceased to love thee, thy
Yvonne
This letter disappointed Boris so much that he went
straight to bed and would not look for work again that day.
My sixty francs lasted about a fortnight. I had given up the
pretence of going out to restaurants, and we used to eat in
my room, one of us sitting on the bed and the other on the
chair. Boris would contribute his two francs and I three or
four francs, and we would buy bread, potatoes, milk and
cheese, and make soup over my spirit lamp. We had a sauce-
pan and a coffee-bowl and one spoon; every day there was
a polite squabble as to who should eat out of the saucepan
and who out of the coffee-bowl (the saucepan held more),
and every day, to my secret anger, Boris gave in first and
had the saucepan. Sometimes we had more bread in the
evening, sometimes not. Our linen was getting filthy, and
it was three weeks since I had had a bath; Boris, so he said,
had not had a bath for months. It was tobacco that made ev-
erything tolerable. We had plenty of tobacco, for some time
before Boris had met a soldier (the soldiers are given their
tobacco free) and bought twenty or thirty packets at fifty
centimes each.
All this was far worse for Boris than for me. The walking