“Writing is bosh. There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher’s daughter. But you would make a good waiter if you shaved that moustache off. Wait till I can bend this accursed leg, mon ami. And then, if you are ever out of a job, come to me.”
Boris (the Russian Captain) – Down and Out in Paris and London
In April 1929, while the two men were laid up in hospital, Boris had aired his views on the writing profession but also regaled Eric with stories of easy work in cheerful French restaurants. Following his demobilisation from the Russian army at the end of WWI, a string of menial jobs (porter, lavatory attendant, night watchman & floor scrubber) had eventually led him to the hotel and restaurant trade where he would work for the rest of his days in Paris, and even for a short period abroad. Until his arthritic knee got so bad that he’d had to give up his post, Boris had been working at the upmarket Hotel Scribe just off the Place de L’Opera. Given to outbursts of nostalgia about life in the Russian army and of pride at having been a Captain at twenty, Boris had since then fallen on hard times.
A few months had passed since their hospital days, and by the time Eric set out – optimistically – from his hotel in the Latin quarter, his Russian friend had not got back on his feet and was in desperate straits himself. This was not at all the “influential friend to fall back on” that Eric had hoped to find at the end of his walk.
“He was a big soldierly man of 35 and had been good-looking, but since his illness had grown immensely fat from lying in bed.”
The Russian’s living conditions were dismal and he was managing to keep off the streets only by taking part in what was known as the “warm mattress” system, where labourers would take it in turns, sharing one bed in eight-hour shifts to save on rent. The hotel hallways stank of sweat and cheap stock cubes (Bouillon KUB) and Eric realised that Boris’s day-to-day and his hotel on the rue du Marché des Blancs Manteaux were no better than his own.
Although the conditions at Boris’s hotel and the state of his Russian friend were, in all probability, accurately described, two things should be taken into account: there was no hotel on the Rue du Marché des Blancs Manteaux, and the Russian Captain who shared Eric’s travails in his last months in Paris was not called Boris. Eric would change both these details (and many others) at the request of his publisher Victor Gollancz who feared libel action due to the less-than-savoury depictions of Parisian kitchens. Gollancz insisted that everything and everyone be concealed and masked. Pseudonyms were given, establishments were re-named and addresses were changed; sometimes radically, sometimes subtly.
In reality, there were no hotels, or even boarding houses, on the tiny Rue du Marché des Blanc Manteaux. The most probable location was just around the corner, on the Rue des Blancs Manteaux, where a Pax hotel (a low-cost chain) was packed full of manual labourers, nearly all immigrants, most of them Russian.
The real people & places from Down and Out in Paris and London are revealed in the forthcoming book, Orwell in Paris – Down & Out with the Russian Captain.
To be published first in French: Orwell à Paris – Dans la dèche avec le capitaine russe. By EXILS éditions, Paris on the 24/04/2024