Madame Monce
The keeper of the hotel opposite the narrator's, whose shouted quarrel with a third-floor lodger about squashing bugs on the wallpaper opens the book.
To stop her lodgers squashing bedbugs on her wallpaper. In Orwell's account it is the only thing she is ever shown wanting, and she wants it loudly enough to be heard the length of the street.
The book
At a glance
- Keeper of a small hotel in the rue du Coq d'Or, opposite Orwell's own
- A narrow slum street of cheap hotels, packed with Polish, Arab and Italian lodgers
- Orwell renamed the street; he lodged at 6 rue du Pot de Fer, off the rue Mouffetard in the fifth arrondissement
- Chapter I, in the opening paragraphs, and nowhere else
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeGeorge Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933, is his own account of the months he spent washing dishes in Paris hotel kitchens and then tramping the roads of England. Madame Monce is the first person in it. She kept a small hotel in the rue du Coq d'Or, the Paris slum street where Orwell was lodging, directly opposite his own.
The book opens at seven in the morning with a noise from the street. Madame Monce has come out on to the pavement, her bare feet pushed into wooden clogs and her grey hair streaming loose, to shout up at a woman on her third floor. The complaint is that the lodger has been killing bedbugs by squashing them against the wallpaper instead of throwing them out of the window like everyone else. She swears at her and demands to know whether she thinks she has bought the hotel. The woman on the third floor shouts one word back down: cow.
Windows were flung open along the whole street and half the neighbourhood joined in. The row stopped abruptly ten minutes later, when a squadron of cavalry rode past and everyone broke off to watch.
That is her entire appearance in the book. Orwell says he sets the scene down to give a sense of what the rue du Coq d'Or was like, and adds that they seldom got through a morning without one outburst of the kind.
How the book draws them
- The scene that opens the bookThe first thing described in Down and Out in Paris and London is Madame Monce standing in the street at seven in the morning, yelling up at a lodger, before Orwell has introduced himself or explained where he is living.
- How she lookedBare feet stuck into sabots, the wooden clogs then still worn by French country people, and grey hair hanging loose down her back.
- What the quarrel was aboutBedbugs. She had told the woman repeatedly not to squash them on the wallpaper and to throw them out of the window like everyone else. The complaint was not eccentric: in Orwell's own hotel across the road, lines of bugs marched near the ceiling all day and came down hungry at night, and lodgers burned sulphur to drive them into the next room.
- How the row endedHalf the street joined in through its open windows, and then a squadron of cavalry rode past. Everyone stopped shouting to look at the horses, and that was the end of it.
- Why she is in the bookOrwell uses her to establish the character of the street. Quarrels were not the only thing that happened there, he writes, but a morning rarely passed without one.