money.’
‘I can see that, espèce d’imbécile. Neither have I for the moment but I will have by lunchtime. Let’s go over towards the Champs-Elysées—always plenty of passengers there. If they’re Americans or English you can be my interpreter and your salary will be a decent meal. Allons-y!'
Thereafter, this was a more or less regular routine. Each morning I would take my place in the taxi beside Pierre and we would ply for hire. Towards noon, Pierre would count the takings. ‘Bien, bien, I think we can manage something a bit more succulent than we had yesterday.’
My talents as an interpreter were only rarely required. One day when we had picked up a middle-aged American couple, Pierre decided that it would be amusing if I were to pretend that I was French and had no more English than himself. The idea was that the Americans would talk together freely and that all sorts of scabrous remarks would be made which I would subsequently repeat to Pierre. Nothing in the least scabrous was said, to Pierre’s disappointment. Meantime, the Americans were asking this and that. I interpreted and Pierre would make an effort to reply in his badly broken English. From time to time, I chipped in on my own account but since I had established myself as French, I was obliged to use an English as fragmentary as Pierre’s and to assume a music hall French accent. When the Americans reached their destination, the woman gave judgment. ‘Your friend,’ she told Pierre, ‘understands English better than you do but you speak it much better than he does.’ Pierre was ecstatic. ‘Never forget,’ he would say thereafter, ‘that you may understand English better than I do but I’m the one who speaks it as it should be spoken.’
I was well aware that the amount of interpreting I had to do was a long way from compensating Pierre for the cost of my meals. Pierre promptly found a way of easing my conscience.
‘Well, I’ll tell you what. For a man of my distinction’—a derisive cackle of laughter at this point—‘for a man of my distinction it’s humiliating to have to curse drivers less skilled than myself, not to mention all those pedestrians with suicidal tendencies. Besides, the younger generation looks to me to set certain standards of behaviour. You have no reputation for gentility to preserve. I’ll teach you the basic insults to be delivered and henceforward, when I give the signal, you do the cursing.’
I learnt some superbly foul language under Pierre’s guidance and used it as instructed. ‘Look at that cretin walking right against the lights,’ Pierre would say, ‘let him have it!’ and I would let loose a spate of obscene invective.
George Orwell made it clear that he had greatly disliked being down and out in Paris. There were moments when I didn’t much enjoy the experience myself. Thanks to Pierre and one or two others, though, I had a happier time of it than Orwell.
CHAPTER TWO
I settled into the rabbit hutch on the rue Notre-Dame-desChamps at the beginning of a murderously hard winter. An ill-favoured oil stove provided no comfort since I could not afford to buy oil for it. This may have been just as well. The hutch had no window nor any other ventilation and I would most probably have been asphyxiated. Most of the time I stayed in bed, fully clothed and with an overcoat and a tattered tablecloth to supplement the thin blankets.
But I had no regrets. Twinges of hunger were sometimes accompanied by twinges of self-pity but I was in Paris, my Paris, the great love of my life. That was all that mattered. Being poor in London, as I had been before coming to Paris, was no joke—Orwell would have got no argument from me on that point. You not only felt that passers-by would think it unseemly to notice if you fainted in the street but in addition you were also conscious of a pervasive moral disapproval. Lack of an adequate income in London was regarded as a sure indication of some fundamental flaw in one’s character—not perhaps actually flagitious but nonetheless reprehensible.
You never had to feel guilty about your poverty in Paris. Nor did I. At the worst moments, I could walk confidently along the street with no thought that I should be ringing a bell and wailing, ‘Unclean, unclean’. It was wealth—bourgeois wealth, in particular—which was regarded as unclean. Decent Parisians assumed—and were usually right—that only scoundrels became rich, politicians and people of that kind. Far from being considered suspicious, to be poor in Paris was a mark of respectability. It was nice to feel you were looked on with approval, even if you hadn’t had a square meal for three days.
The vast Coupole brasserie was only a block away from the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Despite its imposing size and although it must have had a couple of thousand customers each day, it had something of the character of a neighbourhood café. There was nothing impersonal about it. Rather than one huge establishment, it was more like fifty or so small establishments housed in the same space. Every regular customer had his own few square yards. He wouldn’t have dreamed of sitting at a table outside his chosen radius. The atmosphere was one of continual bustle but there was nothing hectic about it. You never felt that the waiters were waiting irritably to see you go. It had been a hang-out for artists and writers since its foundation in the early 1920s. The old bohemian atmosphere could still be inhaled there. Habitués were expected to dawdle. Nobody dawdled more consistently than I did.
Whenever I had managed to earn a few francs I would go to the Coupole as soon as it opened at six in the morning. I hadn’t forgotten my personal café, the café I had adopted and that had adopted me, but it was on the other side of the city. In any case, it didn’t have the same facilities. At the Coupole I could wash and shave in deliciously hot water—the only taps available to me in the rue Notre-Dame-desChamps were in the courtyard and in winter frozen solid. For the price of a cup of coffee, I could sit in the Coupole for hours. The day’s newspapers, rolled around wooden rods like Roman scrolls, were set out for the use of customers. I could read these or talk to the waiters (who themselves possessed a bohemian mentality) or scribble away at my impossible book—in those days, every café supplied paper and pen and ink on request.
The scribbling made me a figure of consequence. Nobody knew what I was writing or, for that matter, whether I could write at all (I had doubts myself periodically). But I wrote. That was enough. It made me the equal of Jean-Paul Sartre who used to squat toadlike in a corner where he received his admirers. It made me the equal of Samuel Beckett and Lawrence Durrell who also patronised the Coupole. It made me the equal of Genet, hardly more prepossessing than Sartre, and Jacques Laurent and the ex-convict Papillon. I was in distinguished company.
My great friend among the staff was one of the headwaiters, Monsieur Victor, who had held this position ever since the Coupole first opened. In his behaviour towards me, he mingled the esteem automatically extended in France to anyone claiming to be some sort of artist with a paternal benevolence. Sometimes he would slip me a surreptitious sandwich.
When I had made a bit more money than usual I would treat myself to a full-scale meal at the Coupole. Monsieur Victor would then take complete control. On these occasions he referred to himself, magisterially, in the third person.
‘Voilà ce que vous allez manger,’ he would say. ‘A few oysters to begin with, I think. Yes, that would be best—half-a-dozen claires. Not belons. It doesn’t matter whether you prefer belons or not. They have no character.’
‘Well, I was actually thinking of some pâté, Monsieur Victor, or a slice or two of garlic sausage, perhaps.’
‘Not another word! It is Victor who gives the orders, n’estce pas? And Victor tells you to eat a few oysters. Then a morsel of beef—Victor himself will select it. And a bottle of Chinon. Ecoutez Victor.’
In
