Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. LOCATION: 43
Or there was Henri, who worked in the sewers. He was a tall, melancholy man with curly hair, rather romantic-looking in his long, sewer-man’s boots. Henri’s peculiarity was that he did not speak, except for the purposes of work, literally for days together. Only a year before he had been a chauffeur in good employ and saving money. One day he fell in love, and when the girl refused him he lost his temper and kicked her. On being kicked the girl fell desperately in love with Henri, and for a fortnight they lived together and spent a thousand francs of Henri’s money. Then the girl was unfaithful; Henri planted a knife in her upper arm and was sent to prison for six months. As soon as she had been stabbed the girl fell more in love with Henri than ever, and the two made up their quarrel and agreed that when Henri came out of jail he should buy a taxi and they would marry and settle down. But a fortnight later the girl was unfaithful again, and when Henri came out she was with child, Henri did not stab her again. He drew out all his savings and went on a drinking-bout that ended in another month’s imprisonment; after that he went to work in the sewers. Nothing would induce Henri to talk. If you asked him why he worked in the sewers he never answered, but simply crossed his wrists to signify handcuffs, and jerked his head southward, towards the prison. Bad luck seemed to have turned him half-witted in a single day. LOCATION: 49
There were plenty of other people who lived lives just as eccentric as these: Monsieur Jules, the Roumanian, who had a glass eye and would not admit it, LOCATION: 64
Laurent the rag-merchant, who used to copy his signature from a slip of paper he carried in his pocket. LOCATION: 66
I am trying to describe the people in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but because they are all part of the story. Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the background of my own experiences. It is for that reason that I try to give some idea of what life was like there. LOCATION: 67
It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty — it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it, is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar LOWNESS of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping. LOCATION: 173
This — one could describe it further, but it is all in the same style — is life on six francs a day. Thousands of people in Paris live it — struggling artists and students, prostitutes when their luck is out, out-of-work people of all kinds. It is the suburbs, as it were, of poverty. LOCATION: 207
For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. LOCATION: 221
A bread and margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne. LOCATION: 226
The clerks are French, and, like most French people, are in a bad temper till they have eaten their lunch. LOCATION: 254
War and soldiering were his passion; he had read innumerable books of strategy and military history, and could tell you all about the theories of Napoleon, Kutuzof, Clausewitz, Moltke and Foch. LOCATION: 271
coffee-bowl LOCATION: 434
I was frightened, but Boris enjoyed these conspiratorial proceedings, and quite forgot that he was about to trade with the slayers of his parents. LOCATION: 607
(Football and Socialism have some mysterious connexion on the Continent.) LOCATION: 633
Their office looked exactly as a secret Communist office should look, and as for that touch about bringing a parcel of washing, it was genius. LOCATION: 653
After knowing him I saw the force of the proverb ‘Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don’t trust an Armenian.’ LOCATION: 962 NOTE: Woooow Orwell
quarrels are a necessary part of the process, for the pace would never be kept up if everyone did not accuse everyone else of idling. LOCATION: 998
At those times there was scarcely a verb in the hotel except FOUTRE. A girl in the bakery, aged sixteen, used oaths that would have defeated a cabman. (Did not Hamlet say ‘cursing like a scullion’? No doubt Shakespeare had watched scullions at work.) LOCATION: 999
The moral is, never be sorry for a waiter. Sometimes when you sit in a restaurant, still stuffing yourself half an hour after closing time, you feel that the tired waiter at your side must surely be despising you. But he is not. He is not thinking as he looks at you, ‘What an overfed lout’; he is thinking, ‘One day, when I have saved enough money, I shall be able to imitate that man.’ He is ministering to a kind of pleasure he thoroughly understands and admires. And that is why waiters are seldom Socialists, have no effective trade union, and will work twelve hours a day — they work fifteen hours, seven days a week, in many cafes. They are snobs, and they find the servile nature of their work rather congenial. LOCATION: 1027
DEBROUILLARD is what every PLONGEUR wants to be called. A DEBROUILLARD is a man who, even when he is told to do the impossible, will SE DEBROUILLER— get it done somehow. LOCATION: 1039
Sometimes half a dozen PLONGEURS would make up a party and go to an abominable brothel in the Rue de Sieyes, where the charge was only five francs twenty-five centimes — tenpence half-penny. It was nicknamed ‘LE PRIX FIXE’, and they used to describe their experiences there as a great joke. It was a favourite rendezvous of hotel workers. The PLONGEURS’ wages did not allow them to marry, and no doubt work in the basement does not encourage fastidious feelings. LOCATION: 1206
There was — it is hard to express it — a sort of heavy contentment, the contentment a well-fed beast might feel, in a life which had become so simple. LOCATION: 1219
the thing that strikes me in looking back is that I was in bed and asleep within three minutes of the murder. So were most of the people in the street; we just made sure that the man was done for, and went straight back to bed. We were working people, and where was the sense of wasting sleep over a murder? LOCATION: 1229
Work in the hotel taught me the true value of sleep, just as being hungry had taught me the true value of food. Sleep had ceased to be a mere physical necessity; it was something voluptuous, a debauch more than a relief. LOCATION: 1231
‘IL A PERDU SES PANTALONS, TOUT EN DANSANT LE CHARLESTON.’ LOCATION: 1242
Everyone was very happy, overwhelmingly certain that the world was a good place and we a notable set of people. LOCATION: 1249
though he was a Communist when sober, he turned violently patriotic when drunk. LOCATION: 1257
He started the evening with good Communist principles, but after four or five litres he was a rampant Chauvinist, denouncing spies, challenging all foreigners to fight, and, if he was not prevented, throwing bottles. It was at this stage that he made his speech — for he made a patriotic speech every Saturday night. The speech was always the same, word for word. LOCATION: 1258
we were still happy, but meditatively, LOCATION: 1280
We perceived that we were not splendid inhabitants of a splendid world, but a crew of underpaid workmen grown squalidly and dismally drunk. LOCATION: 1289
For many men in the quarter, unmarried and with no future to think of, the weekly drinking-bout was the one thing that made life worth living. LOCATION: 1294
Proud and lazy men do not make good waiters. LOCATION: 1376
‘Well, after three days I began to get dreadful pains in my belly, and I went to the doctor. “What have you been eating?” he said. I said: “I drink four litres of milk a day, and half a litre of cream.” “Four litres!” he said. “Then stop it at once. You’ll burst if you go on.” “What do I care?” I said. “With me principle is everything. I shall go on drinking that milk, even if I do burst.” LOCATION: 1388
the surest sign of a bad restaurant is to be frequented only by foreigners. LOCATION: 1551
Sharp knives, of course, are THE secret of a successful restaurant. LOCATION: 1552
I am trying to consider the social significance of a PLONGEUR’S life. LOCATION: 1568
I think one should start by saying that a PLONGEUR is one of the slaves of the modem world. Not that there is any need to whine over him, for he is better off than many manual workers, but still, he is no freer than if he were bought and sold. LOCATION: 1569
His work is servile and without art; he is paid just enough to keep him alive; his only holiday is the sack. He is cut off from marriage, or, if he marries, his wife must work too. Except by a lucky chance, he has no escape from this life, save into prison. LOCATION: 1570
One cannot say that it is mere idleness on their part, for an idle man cannot be a PLONGEUR; they have simply been trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible. LOCATION: 1573
The question is, why does this slavery continue? People have a way of taking it for granted that all work is done for a sound purpose. They see somebody else doing a disagreeable job, and think that they have solved things by saying that the job is necessary. Coal-mining, for example, is hard work, but it is necessary — we must have coal. Working in the sewers is unpleasant, but somebody must work in the sewers. And similarly with a PLONGEUR’S work. Some people must feed in restaurants, and so other people must swab dishes for eighty hours a week. It is the work of civilization, therefore unquestionable. This point is worth considering. LOCATION: 1576
Is a PLONGEUR’S work really necessary to civilization? We have a feeling that it must be ‘honest’ work, because it is hard and disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish of manual work. We see a man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a social need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he may only be cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue. I believe it is the same with a PLONGEUR. He earns his bread in the sweat of his brow, but it does not follow that he is doing anything useful; he may be only supplying a luxury which, very often, is not a luxury. LOCATION: 1581
Their work expresses itself in a sort of equation — whip plus food equals energy; generally it is about sixty per cent whip and forty per cent food. Sometimes their necks are encircled by one vast sore, so that they drag all day on raw flesh. It is still possible to make them work, however; it is just a question of thrashing them so hard that the pain behind outweighs the pain in front. LOCATION: 1591
These are instances of unnecessary work, for there is no real need for gharries and rickshaws; they only exist because Orientals consider it vulgar to walk. They are luxuries, and, as anyone who has ridden in them knows, very poor luxuries. They afford a small amount of convenience, which cannot possibly balance the suffering of the men and animals. LOCATION: 1594
Similarly with the PLONGEUR. He is a king compared with a rickshaw puller or a gharry pony, but his case is analogous. LOCATION: 1597
He is the slave of a hotel or a restaurant, and his slavery is more or less useless. For, after all, where is the REAL need of big hotels and smart restaurants? They are supposed to provide luxury, but in reality they provide only a cheap, shoddy imitation of it. Nearly everyone hates hotels. Some restaurants are better than others, but it is impossible to get as good a meal in a restaurant as one can get, for the same expense, in a private house. No doubt hotels and restaurants must exist, but there is no need that they should enslave hundreds of people. What makes the work in them is not the essentials; it is the shams that are supposed to represent luxury. LOCATION: 1598
Smartness, as it is called, means, in effect, merely that the staff work more and the customers pay more; no one benefits except the proprietor, who will presently buy himself a striped villa at Deauville. Essentially, a ‘smart’ hotel is a place where a hundred people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they do not really want. If the nonsense were cut out of hotels and restaurants, and the work done with simple efficiency, PLONGEURS might work six or eight hours a day instead often or fifteen. LOCATION: 1602
Suppose it is granted that a PLONGEUR’S work is more or less useless. Then the question follows, Why does anyone want him to go on working? I am trying to go beyond the immediate economic cause, and to consider what pleasure it can give anyone to think of men swabbing dishes for life. For there is no doubt that people — comfortably situated people — do find a pleasure in such thoughts. A slave, Marcus Gato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is needed or not, he must work, because work in itself is good — for slaves, at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery. LOCATION: 1606
I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. LOCATION: 1611
‘We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a, cat with the mange, but we will fight like devils against any improvement of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.’ LOCATION: 1614
This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the substance of it in a hundred essays. Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four hundred pounds a year, and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty. LOCATION: 1619
It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions. LOCATION: 1623
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. LOCATION: 1625
‘NE PAIN NE VOYENT QU’AUX FENESTRES’ LOCATION: 1630 NOTE: Bread does not see as windows.
From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. ‘Anything,’ he thinks, ‘any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.’ He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and — in the shape of rich men — is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as ‘smart’ hotels. LOCATION: 1632
A PLONGEUR is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. LOCATION: 1636
He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. LOCATION: 1637
And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him. LOCATION: 1638