I lived in the Coq d'Or quarter for about a year and a half.
One day, in summer, I found that I had just four hundred
and fifty francs left, and beyond this nothing but thirty-six francs
a week, which I earned by giving English lessons.
Hitherto I had not thought about the future, but I now
realized that I must do something at once.
I decided to start looking for a job, and--very luckily, as it turned out--I
took the precaution of paying two hundred francs for a month's rent
in advance.
With the other two hundred and fifty francs, besides the English
lessons, I could live a month, and in a month I should probably find
work.
One day there turned up at the hotel a young Italian who called
himself a compositor.
Madame did not like the look of him, and made him pay a week's rent in advance.
During this time he managed to prepare some duplicate keys, and
on the last night he robbed a dozen rooms, including mine.
Luckily, he did not find the money that was in
my pockets.
I was left with just forty-seven francs--that is, seven shillings and ten pence.
This put an end to my plans of looking for work.
I had now got to live at the rate of about six francs a day, and
from the start it was too difficult to leave much thought for anything
else.
It was now that my experiences of poverty began--for six francs
a day, if not actual poverty, is on the fringe of it.
Six francs is a shilling, and you can live on a shilling a day in Paris if you know how.
But it is a complicated business.
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 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.
You discover, for instance, the secrecy attaching to poverty.
At a sudden stroke you have been reduced to an
income of six francs a day.
But of course you dare not admit it--you got to
pretend that you are living quite as usual Every day at meal-times
you go out, ostensibly to a restaurant, and loaf an hour
watching the pigeons.
Afterwards you smuggle your food home in your pockets.
Your food is bread and margarine.
Sometimes, to keep up appearances, you have to spend
sixty centimes on a drink, and go correspondingly short of food.
Your linen gets filthy, and you run out of soap and razor-blades.
You discover the extreme precariousness of your six francs a day.
Mean disasters happen and rob you of food.
You have spent your last eighty centimes on half a litre of milk, and are
boiling it over the spirit lamp.
While it boils a bug runs down your forearm; you give the bug a flick with
your nail, and it falls straight into the milk.
There is nothing for it but to throw the milk away and go foodless.
.
You go to the greengrocer's to spend a franc on a kilogram of
potatoes.
But one of the pieces that make up the franc is a Belgian piece,
and the shopman refuses it.
You slink out of the shop, and can never go there again.
One could multiply these disasters by the hundred.
They are part of the process of being hard up.
You discover what it is like to be hungry.
With bread and margarine in your belly, you go out and look into the shop
windows.
Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge, wasteful piles;
whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings
of sausages, vast Gruyere cheeses.
You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times
when you have nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in
nothing.
For half a day at a time you lie on your bed
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.
I continued in this style for about three weeks.
The forty-seven francs were soon gone, and I had to do what
I could on thirty-six francs a week from the English lessons.
Being inexperienced, I handled the money badly, and sometimes I was a day without food.
When this happened I used to sell a few of my clothes, smuggling them out
of the hotel in small packets and taking them to a secondhand shop in the
rue de la Montagne St Genevieve.
These three weeks were squalid and uncomfortable, and evidently there
was worse coming, for my rent would be due before long.
Nevertheless, things were not a quarter as bad as I had
expected.
For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery
which outweighs some of the others.
You discover the fact that it annihilates the future.
Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less
you worry.
When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable
to the most craven panics.
When you have only three francs you are quite indifferent;
for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think
further than that.
You are bored, but you are not afraid.
And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty.
I believe everyone who has been hard up has
experienced it.
It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing
yourself at last genuinely down and out.
You have talked so often of going to the dogs--and well, here
are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it.
It takes off a lot of anxiety,