Setting of the story
Down and Out in Paris and London
The pawnshop the overcoats are taken to, and found shut until four in the afternoon.
Boulevard de Port-Royal
Still standing
Walk straight in
Someone else
A long boulevard along the southern edge of the Latin Quarter. In Down and Out in Paris and London it holds the pawnshop where George Orwell took his overcoats — and found it shut, on the day he had gone sixty hours without eating.
- Boulevard de Port-Royal, 75005 Paris
- Orwell pawned clothes here in 1929
The place, briefly
The boulevard de Port-Royal runs east–west along the bottom of the fifth arrondissement, past the Val-de-Grâce. It is a wide, busy street of the kind Haussmann's rebuilding produced, and nothing about it looks literary.
In Down and Out in Paris and London it is where the money runs out. George Orwell and Boris are reduced to pawning their overcoats, and because Boris's identity papers are out of order — he had stopped renewing them to avoid the tax — the coats cannot be pawned in his name. So Orwell goes.
"All we could do was to trudge up to my room, get the necessary papers, and take the coats to the pawnshop in the Boulevard Port Royal. I left Boris at my room and went down to the pawnshop. When I got there I found that it was shut and would not open till four in the afternoon. It was now about half-past one, and I had walked twelve kilometres and had no food for sixty hours."
The pawnshop is the machinery of the book. Orwell describes the mont-de-piété system in detail elsewhere — the queueing, the valuations, the way the poor are processed — and a great deal of the Paris section is the arithmetic of what can be pawned and for how much. This boulevard is where that arithmetic actually happened.
Walking back from it, empty-handed, is when he found the coin on the rue Broca.
Key facts
- Along the southern edge of the Latin Quarter, past the Val-de-Grâce
- The pawnshop Orwell used in Down and Out in Paris and London
- Overcoats — pawned in Orwell's name, because Boris's papers were out of order
- He arrived to find it shut until four in the afternoon
- The boulevard remains; the pawnshop is not identifiable
Timeline
Orwell walks here to pawn overcoats and finds the pawnshop closed until four.
Down and Out in Paris and London is published.
On the map
Questions before you go
What is the boulevard de Port-Royal's connection to Orwell?
It holds the pawnshop in Down and Out in Paris and London. Orwell walked there with overcoats to pawn — in his own name, because his friend Boris had let his identity papers lapse to avoid a tax — and found it shut until four in the afternoon, having already walked twelve kilometres on sixty hours without food.
Can you still find the pawnshop?
No. The boulevard is still there and largely unchanged in shape, but the municipal pawnshop Orwell used cannot be identified on it today. The street is worth walking as part of the route between the Val-de-Grâce, the rue Broca and the Jardin des Plantes.
Related books
Writers who knew this place
George Orwell
Visited by · 1929
As Down and Out has it, Orwell walked here to pawn the overcoats — in his own name, since Boris had stopped renewing his identity papers to avoid the tax — and found the pawnshop shut until four in the afternoon.
Within walking distance
Rue Broca
A quiet street in the lower Latin Quarter, running down from the Val-de-Grâce towards the Gobelins. In Down and Out in Paris and London it is where George Orwell — sixty hours without food and twelve kilometres into a wasted walk — spots a five-sou piece glittering on the cobbles.
Visit the placeHôpital Cochin
The public hospital in the 14th arrondissement where George Orwell spent several weeks with pneumonia in 1929, in a ward of sixty beds. He wrote it up seventeen years later as "How the Poor Die" — one of the harshest things he ever published — and disguised the hospital as the Hôpital X in the fifteenth arrondissement.
Visit the placeÉcole normale supérieure
The grande école on the rue d'Ulm, behind the Panthéon — France's most selective humanities institution, and the building where Jean-Paul Sartre studied for the agrégation and Samuel Beckett arrived from Dublin in 1928 as a young English lecturer.
Visit the place
6 rue du Pot de Fer (Hotel des Bons Amis)
The cheap Latin Quarter lodging house where Eric Blair lived for eighteen months before he was George Orwell, and the raw material for the Paris half of Down and Out in Paris and London.
Visit the placeThe Friday Letter
Paris, one address at a time.
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.