as
much natural laziness as a piston rod. ‘FAUT ETRE DUR,’
he used to say when anyone complained. You will often hear
PLONGEURS boast, ‘JE SUIS DUR’—as though they were
soldiers, not male charwomen.
Thus everyone in the hotel had his sense of honour, and
when the press of work came we were all ready for a grand
concerted effort to get through it. The constant war between
the different departments also made for efficiency, for ev-
eryone clung to his own privileges and tried to stop the
others idling and pilfering.
This is the good side of hotel work. In a hotel a huge and
complicated machine is kept running by an inadequate staff,
because every man has a well-defined job and does it scru-
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
1
pulously. But there is a weak point, and it is this—that the
job the staff are doing is not necessarily what the customer
pays for. The customer pays, as he sees it, for good service;
the employee is paid, as he sees it, for the BOULOT—mean-
ing, as a rule, an imitation of good service. The result is that,
though hotels are miracles of punctuality, they are worse
than the worst private houses in the things that matter.
Take cleanliness, for example. The dirt in the Hotel X, as
soon as one penetrated into the service quarters, was revolt-
ing. Our cafeterie had year-old filth in all the dark corners,
and the bread-bin was infested with cockroaches. Once I
suggested killing these beasts to Mario. ‘Why kill the poor
animals?’ he said reproachfully. The others laughed when I
wanted to wash my hands before touching the butter. Yet we
were clean where we recognized cleanliness as part of the
BOULOT. We scrubbed the tables and polished the brass-
work regularly, because we had orders to do that; but we
had no orders to be genuinely clean, and in any case we had
no time for it. We were simply carrying out our duties; and
as our first duty was punctuality, we saved time by being
dirty.
In the kitchen the dirt was worse. It is not a figure of
speech, it is a mere statement of fact to say that a French
cook will spit in the soup— that is, if he is not going to
drink it himself. He is an artist, but his art is not cleanli-
ness. To a certain extent he is even dirty because he is an
artist, for food, to look smart, needs dirty treatment. When
a steak, for instance, is brought up for the head cook’s in-
spection, he does not handle it with a fork. He picks it up in
Down and Out in Paris and London
his fingers and slaps it down, runs his thumb round the dish
and licks it to taste the gravy, runs it round and licks again,
then steps back and contemplates the piece of meat like an
artist judging a picture, then presses it lovingly into place
with his fat, pink fingers, every one of which he has licked a
hundred times that morning. When he is satisfied, he takes
a cloth and wipes his fingerprints from the dish, and hands
it to the waiter. And the waiter, of course, dips HIS fingers
into the gravy—his nasty, greasy fingers which he is for ever
running through his brilliantined hair. Whenever one pays
more than, say, ten francs for a dish of meat in Paris, one
may be certain that it has been fingered in this manner. In
very cheap restaurants it is different; there, the same trouble
is not taken over the food, and it is just forked out of the pan
and flung on to a plate, without handling. Roughly speak-
ing, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle
one is obliged to eat with it.
Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because
sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and smartness. The
hotel employee is too busy getting food ready to remember
that it is meant to be eaten. A meal is simply ‘UNE COM-
MANDE’ to him, just as a man dying of cancer is simply ‘a
case’ to the doctor. A customer orders, for example, a piece
of toast. Somebody, pressed with work in a cellar deep un-
derground, has to prepare it. How
much natural laziness as a piston rod. ‘FAUT ETRE DUR,’
he used to say when anyone complained. You will often hear
PLONGEURS boast, ‘JE SUIS DUR’—as though they were
soldiers, not male charwomen.
Thus everyone in the hotel had his sense of honour, and
when the press of work came we were all ready for a grand
concerted effort to get through it. The constant war between
the different departments also made for efficiency, for ev-
eryone clung to his own privileges and tried to stop the
others idling and pilfering.
This is the good side of hotel work. In a hotel a huge and
complicated machine is kept running by an inadequate staff,
because every man has a well-defined job and does it scru-
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
1
pulously. But there is a weak point, and it is this—that the
job the staff are doing is not necessarily what the customer
pays for. The customer pays, as he sees it, for good service;
the employee is paid, as he sees it, for the BOULOT—mean-
ing, as a rule, an imitation of good service. The result is that,
though hotels are miracles of punctuality, they are worse
than the worst private houses in the things that matter.
Take cleanliness, for example. The dirt in the Hotel X, as
soon as one penetrated into the service quarters, was revolt-
ing. Our cafeterie had year-old filth in all the dark corners,
and the bread-bin was infested with cockroaches. Once I
suggested killing these beasts to Mario. ‘Why kill the poor
animals?’ he said reproachfully. The others laughed when I
wanted to wash my hands before touching the butter. Yet we
were clean where we recognized cleanliness as part of the
BOULOT. We scrubbed the tables and polished the brass-
work regularly, because we had orders to do that; but we
had no orders to be genuinely clean, and in any case we had
no time for it. We were simply carrying out our duties; and
as our first duty was punctuality, we saved time by being
dirty.
In the kitchen the dirt was worse. It is not a figure of
speech, it is a mere statement of fact to say that a French
cook will spit in the soup— that is, if he is not going to
drink it himself. He is an artist, but his art is not cleanli-
ness. To a certain extent he is even dirty because he is an
artist, for food, to look smart, needs dirty treatment. When
a steak, for instance, is brought up for the head cook’s in-
spection, he does not handle it with a fork. He picks it up in
Down and Out in Paris and London
his fingers and slaps it down, runs his thumb round the dish
and licks it to taste the gravy, runs it round and licks again,
then steps back and contemplates the piece of meat like an
artist judging a picture, then presses it lovingly into place
with his fat, pink fingers, every one of which he has licked a
hundred times that morning. When he is satisfied, he takes
a cloth and wipes his fingerprints from the dish, and hands
it to the waiter. And the waiter, of course, dips HIS fingers
into the gravy—his nasty, greasy fingers which he is for ever
running through his brilliantined hair. Whenever one pays
more than, say, ten francs for a dish of meat in Paris, one
may be certain that it has been fingered in this manner. In
very cheap restaurants it is different; there, the same trouble
is not taken over the food, and it is just forked out of the pan
and flung on to a plate, without handling. Roughly speak-
ing, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle
one is obliged to eat with it.
Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because
sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and smartness. The
hotel employee is too busy getting food ready to remember
that it is meant to be eaten. A meal is simply ‘UNE COM-
MANDE’ to him, just as a man dying of cancer is simply ‘a
case’ to the doctor. A customer orders, for example, a piece
of toast. Somebody, pressed with work in a cellar deep un-
derground, has to prepare it. How
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