Furex
A stonemason from the Limousin who works steadily all week and drinks himself into a paroxysm on Saturdays. A Communist sober, a patriot drunk.
To be heard on the war. He makes a patriotic speech every Saturday night, the same one word for word, and it ends with him showing the wound he took at Verdun.
The book
At a glance
- Furex, a Limousin stonemason, one of the eccentrics of the narrator's quarter
- Blond and red-faced, with a fine bass voice
- Communist when sober, violently patriotic when drunk
- Wounded at Verdun; remembers nothing from before the war
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeFurex lives in the same quarter as George Orwell's narrator and turns up in the Saturday night drinking at the little bistro at the foot of the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux. He is a stonemason from the Limousin, blond and red-faced, and he works steadily all week. On Saturdays he drinks himself into what Orwell calls a kind of paroxysm.
He has lost his memory and can remember nothing from before the war. He is also a fixture of the neighbourhood in a way that is not kind to him: a well-known spectacle, with people coming in from other bistros to watch once his fit has started.
How the book draws them
- How the book describes himA blond, red-faced workman, first shown on his feet at a bistro table banging a bottle for silence. Beyond that the book records only the wound he partly undressed to show, and the way his colour changed as the evening went on.
- The turnSober he is a Communist. He starts the evening on good Communist principles, and after four or five litres he is a rampant chauvinist, denouncing spies, challenging every foreigner in the room to fight, and throwing bottles if nobody stops him.
- The speechAround midnight he shouts "Citoyens!", knocks a chair over and bangs a bottle on the table, and the word goes round that Furex is starting. The speech is identical every week, each sentence doubling back on itself with "in effect" wedged into the middle, and it ends with him partly undressing to show the Verdun wound. Orwell says they thought nothing could be funnier.
- The baitingSomeone calls for silence and asks him to sing the Marseillaise. He sings it well, in a fine bass, with real tears running down his cheeks and no idea the room is laughing at him. Then two workmen pin his arms while a girl shouts "Vive l'Allemagne!" just out of his reach and the whole bistro takes it up, until he turns pale, is sick on the table, and Madame F. hoists him up to bed.
- Kept from his wagesOrwell writes that he would have gone to pieces through drink if Madame F., who keeps the hotel, had not taken care of him. At about five on Saturdays she tells someone to catch him before he spends his pay, then takes the money and leaves him enough for one good drink. The week he got away he was run over by a car in the Place Monge, rolling blind drunk, and badly hurt.
- The morning afterHe reappears quiet and civil, and buys a copy of L'Humanité.