Read Down and Out in Paris and London for Free Online Page A

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
    Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com

    and sleeping on the floor kept his leg and back in con-
    stant pain, and with his vast Russian appetite he suffered
    torments of hunger, though he never seemed to grow thin-
    ner. On the whole he was surprisingly gay, and he had vast
    capacities for hope. He used to say seriously that he had a
    PATRON saint who watched over him, and when things
    were very bad he would search the gutter for money, saying
    that the saint often dropped a two-franc piece there. One
    day we were waiting in the rue Royale; there was a Russian
    restaurant near by, and we were going to ask for a job there.
    Suddenly, Boris made up his mind to go into the Madeleine
    and bum a fifty-centime candle to his PATRON saint. Then,
    coming out, he said that he would be on the safe side, and
    solemnly put a match to a fifty-centime stamp, as a sacrifice
    to the immortal gods. Perhaps the gods and the saints did
    not get on together; at any rate, we missed the job.
    On some mornings Boris collapsed in the most utter
    despair. He would lie in bed almost weeping, cursing the
    Jew with whom he lived. Of late the Jew had become restive
    about paying the daily two francs, and, what was worse, had
    begun putting on intolerable airs of PATRONage. Boris said
    that I, as an Englishman, could not conceive what torture it
    was to a Russian of family to be at the mercy of a Jew.
    ‘A Jew, MON AMI, a veritable Jew! And he hasn’t even
    the decency to be ashamed of it. To think that I, a captain
    in the Russian Army—have I ever told you, MON AMI, that
    I was a captain in the Second Siberian Rifles? Yes, a cap-
    tain, and my father was a colonel. And here I am, eating the
    bread of a Jew. A Jew …
    0
    Down and Out in Paris and London
    ‘I will tell you what Jews are like. Once, in the early
    months of the war, we were on the march, and we had halt-
    ed at a village for the night. A horrible old Jew, with a red
    beard like Judas Iscariot, came sneaking up to my billet. I
    asked him what he wanted. ‘Your honour,’ he said, ‘I have
    brought a girl for you, a beautiful young girl only seventeen.
    It will only be fifty francs.’ ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘you can take
    her away again. I don’t want to catch any diseases.’ ‘Dis-
    eases!’ cried the Jew, ‘MAIS, MONSIEUR LE CAPITAINE,
    there’s no fear of that. It’s my own daughter!’ That is the
    Jewish national character for you.
    ‘Have I ever told you, MON AMI, that in the old Rus-
    sian Army it was considered bad form to spit on a Jew? Yes,
    we thought a Russian officer’s spittle was too precious to be
    wasted on Jews …’ etc. etc.
    On these days Boris usually declared himself too ill to
    go out and look for work. He would lie till evening in the
    greyish, verminous sheets, smoking and reading old news-
    papers. Sometimes we played chess. We had no board, but
    we wrote down the moves on a piece of paper, and