Big Louis

The English writer George Orwell published Down and Out in Paris and London in 1933. It is his own account of the months he spent washing dishes in Paris hotel kitchens and then tramping the roads of England. Big Louis belongs to the Paris half. He was a bricklayer who drank in the bar at the foot of the cheap hotel where Orwell was lodging, and the book never gives him any more of a name than that.

The bar was a brick-floored room about fifteen feet square, half underground, and on a Saturday night twenty people were packed into it. Orwell was by then working as a plongeur — the dishwasher and general drudge of a French kitchen — at a large hotel near the Place de la Concorde, which left him thirty francs a week to spend on drink. Everyone in the room was singing or shouting at the top of his voice. Men played darts and threw dice for drinks.

Two of Big Louis's children were in the room. Orwell describes them as his illegitimate children, and they sat in a corner sharing one glass of sirop, a sweet fruit cordial drunk with water, while the adults got through litre bottles of wine.

The chapter is really about how the evening ended. By one in the morning the pleasure had gone out of it. Madame F., who kept the hotel and served behind the bar, had begun watering the wine. Men were turning quarrelsome, and the girls left when hands were thrust into their clothes. Big Louis was drunk by then and crawling about the floor, barking and pretending to be a dog. The others had had enough of him and kicked at him as he went past.

By half past one, Orwell writes, the last drop of pleasure had evaporated and left nothing but headaches, and the company could see what it actually was: a crew of underpaid workmen grown squalidly and dismally drunk. He adds that he thought the two hours of wild happiness worth the headache, and that for a lot of men in the quarter the Saturday drinking bout was the one thing that made life worth living.