Numéro 83

George Orwell's English lessons stopped without warning — one pupil dismissed him, the other left his lodgings owing twelve francs — and he was left with thirty centimes and no tobacco. After a day and a half without food he packed his remaining clothes into his suitcase and carried them to the municipal pawnshop. It was the first French pawnshop he had been inside.

The procedure was public. You went through stone portals marked Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité into a large bare room like a school classroom, with a counter and rows of benches and forty or fifty people waiting. You handed your pledge over and sat down, and when the clerk had assessed it he called out your ticket number and the figure, so that the whole room heard what your possessions were worth. Sometimes it was fifty francs. Sometimes it was five.

As Orwell came in, the clerk called with an air of offence for number 83, and gave a little whistle and a beckon, as though calling a dog. Numéro 83 stepped up to the counter: an old bearded man with his overcoat buttoned at the neck and his trouser-ends frayed. Without a word the clerk shot the bundle back across the counter. It fell to the ground and came open, showing four pairs of men's woollen pants, and nobody in the room could help laughing. He gathered them up and shambled out, muttering to himself.

Orwell's own clothes had cost over twenty pounds and were in good condition. He was offered seventy francs, took the money without arguing, and learned afterwards that it is wiser to go to a pawnshop in the afternoon, because the clerks are in a bad temper until they have had lunch.

The man returns once. Later in the book, having eaten nothing for sixty hours, Orwell went back to the same room with two shabby overcoats in a cardboard suitcase. He sat on the front bench so as not to see the other customers laughing when the sum was called, and the thing he was most afraid of was being refused altogether, like poor Numéro 83 on the previous occasion.