‘Attention, un Français! See that he gets a double portion of all vegetables.’

While the Frenchman ate, the patron’s wife stood behind the grille of the kitchen door and watched the expression of his face. Next night the Frenchman came back with two other Frenchmen. This meant that we were earning a good name; the surest sign of a bad restaurant is to be frequented only by foreigners. Probably part of the reason for our success was that the patron, with the sole gleam of sense he had shown in fitting out the restaurant, had bought very sharp table-knives. Sharp knives, of course, are the secret of a successful restaurant. I am glad that this happened, for it destroyed one of my illusions, namely, the idea that Frenchmen know good food when they see it. Or perhaps we were a fairly good restaurant by Paris standards; in which case the bad ones must be past imagining.

In a very few days after I had written to B. he replied to say that there was a job he could get for me. It was to look after a congenital imbecile, which sounded a splendid rest cure after the Auberge de Jehan Cottard. I pictured myself loafing in the country lanes, knocking thistle-heads off with my stick, feeding on roast lamb and treacle tart, and sleeping ten hours a night in sheets smelling of lavender. B. sent me a fiver to pay my passage and get my clothes out of pawn, and as soon as the money arrived I gave one day’s notice and left the restaurant. My leaving so suddenly embarrassed the patron, for as usual he was penniless, and he had to pay my wages thirty francs short. However, he stood me a glass of Courvoisier ’48 brandy, and I think he felt that this made up the difference. They engaged a Czech, a thoroughly competent plongeur, in my place, and the poor old cook was sacked a few weeks later. Afterwards I heard that, with two first-rate people in the kitchen, the plongeur’s work had been cut down to fifteen hours a day. Below that no one could have cut it, short of modernising the kitchen.

Chapter XXII

XXII

FOR WHAT THEY ARE WORTH I want to give my opinions about the life of a Paris plongeur. When one comes to think of it, it is strange that thousands of people in a great modern city should spend their waking hours swabbing dishes in hot dens underground. The question I am raising is why this life goes on–what purpose it serves, and who wants it to continue, and why. I am not taking the merely rebellious, fainéant attitude. I am trying to consider the social significance of a plongeur’s life.