Page 46 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

Francs Bourgeois. You ought to get twenty francs for the
two, with luck. Then go down to the Seine bank and fill your
pockets with stones, and bring them back and put them in
my suitcase. You see the idea? I shall wrap as many of my
things as I can carry in a newspaper, and go down and ask
the PATRON the way to the nearest laundry. I shall be very
brazen and casual, you understand, and of course the PA-
TRON will think the bundle is nothing but dirty linen.
Or, if he does suspect anything, he will do what he always
does, the mean sneak; he will go up to my room and feel
the weight of my suitcase. And when he feels the weight of
stones he will think it is still full. Strategy, eh? Then after-
wards I can come back and carry my other things out in my
pockets.’
‘But what about the suitcase?’
‘Oh, that? We shall have to abandon it. The miserable
thing only cost about twenty francs. Besides, one always
abandons something in a retreat. Look at Napoleon at the
Beresina! He abandoned his whole army.’
Boris was so pleased with this scheme (he called it UNE
RUSE DE GUERRE) that he almost forgot being hungry. Its
main weakness—that he would have nowhere to sleep after
shooting the moon—he ignored.
At first the RUSE DE GUERRE worked well. I went home
and fetched my overcoat (that made already nine kilometres,
on an empty belly) and smuggled Boris’s coat out success-
fully. Then a hitch occurred. The receiver at the pawnshop,
a nasty, sour-faced, interfering, little man—a typical French
official—refused the coats on the ground that they were not