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The rue du Coq d’Or, Paris, seven in theyells from the street

Madame Monce, who kept the little hotel opposite er on the third floor Her bare feet were stuck into sabots and her grey hair was strea down

MADAME MONCE: ‘SALOPE! SALOPE! How s on the wallpaper?

Do you think you’ve bought the hotel, eh? Why can’t you throw them out of thelike everyone else? PUTAIN!

SALOPE!’ THE WOMAN ON THE THIRD FLOOR: ‘VACHE!’ Thereupon a whole variegated chorus of yells, as ere flung open on every side and half the street joined in the quarrel They shut up abruptly ten minutes later, when a squadron of cavalry rode past and people stopped shouting to look at them

I sketch this scene, just to convey so of the spirit of the rue du Coq d’Or Not that quarrels were the only thing that happened there— but still, we seldo without at least one outburst of this description Quarrels, and the desolate cries of street hawkers, and the shouts of children chasing orange-peel over the cobbles, and at night loud singing and the sour reek of the refuse-carts, made up the atmosphere of the street

It was a very narrow street—a ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse All the houses were hotels and packed to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and Italians At the foot of the hotels were tiny BISTROs, where you could be drunk for the equivalent of a shilling On Saturday nights about a third of theover women, and the Arab navvies who lived in the cheapest hotels used to conduct ht theht the policeether It was a fairly rackety place And yet amid the noise and dirt lived the usual respectable French shopkeepers, bakers and laundresses and the like, keeping the up small fortunes It was quite a representative Paris slum

My hotel was called the Hotel des Trois Moineaux It was a dark, rickety warren of five storeys, cut up by wooden partitions into forty rooms The rooms were small arid inveterately dirty, for there was no maid, and Mada The walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had co lines of bugs ht caet up every few hours and kill theot too bad one used to burn sulphur and drive theer next door would retort by having his roos back It was a dirty place, but hoood sorts The rent of the rooms varied between thirty and fifty francs a week

The lodgers were a floating population, largely foreigners, who used to turn up without luggage, stay a week and then disappear again They were of every trade—cobblers, bricklayers, stone-pickers Some of them were fantastically poor In one of the attics there was a Bulgarian student who made fancy shoes for the A a dozen pairs of shoes and earning thirty-five francs; the rest of the day he attended lectures at the Sorbonne He was studying for the Church, and books of theology lay face-down on his leather-strewn floor In another room lived a Russian woman and her son, who called himself an artist Thesocks at twenty-five centimes a sock, while the son, decently dressed, loafed in the Montparnasse cafes One rooers, one a day worker and the other a night worker In another roohters, both consumptive

There were eccentric characters in the hotel The Paris slu-place for eccentric people—people who have fallen into solitary, half- to be normal or decent Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as ers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words

There were the Rougiers, for instance, an old, ragged, dwarfish couple who plied an extraordinary trade They used to sell postcards on the Boulevard St Michel The curious thing was that the postcards were sold in sealed packets as pornographic ones, but were actually photographs of chateaux on the Loire; the buyers did not discover this till too late, and of course never coiers earned about a hundred francs a week, and by strict econoed to be always half starved and half drunk The filth of their room was such that one could s to Madaiers had taken off their clothes for four years

Or there was Henri, orked in the sewers He was a tall,in his long, sewer-man’s boots Henri’s peculiarity was that he did not speak, except for the purposes of work, literally for days together Only a year before he had been a chauffeur in good e irl refused hiirl fell desperately in love with Henri, and for a fortnight they lived together and spent a thousand francs of Henri’s irl was unfaithful; Henri planted a knife in her upper arm and was sent to prison for six irl fell more in love with Henri than ever, and the two reed that when Henri came out of jail he should buy a taxi and they would irl was unfaithful again, and when Henri caain He drew out all his savings and went on a drinking-bout that ended in another month’s i would induce Henri to talk If you asked him why he worked in the sewers he never answered, but sinify handcuffs, and jerked his head southward, towards the prison Bad luck seele day

Or there was R, an Englishman, who lived six months of the year in Putney with his parents and sixhis time in France he drank four litres of wine a day, and six litres on Saturdays; he had once travelled as far as the Azores, because the wine there is cheaper than anywhere in Europe He was a gentle, domesticated creature, never rowdy or quarrelsome, and never sober He would lie in bed till ht he was in his co While he soaked he talked, in a refined, womanish voice, about antique furniture Except lishman in the quarter

There were plenty of other people who lived lives just as eccentric as these: Monsieur Jules, the Roulass eye and would not admit it, Furex the Liniousin stoneh—old Laurent the rag-nature from a slip of paper he carried in his pocket

It would be fun to write so to describe the people in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but because they are all part of the story Poverty is what I a about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the background of ive some idea of what life was like there

II

Life in the quarter Our BISTRO, for instance, at the foot of the Hotel des Trois Moineaux A tiny brick-floored rooraph of a funeral inscribed ‘CREDIT EST MORT’; and red-sashed work jack-knives; and Madanat peasant woa all day ‘for her stos about ‘LES PRAISES ET LES FRAMBOISES’, and about Madelon, who said, ‘COMMENT EPOUSER Un SOLDAT, MOI QUI AIME TOUT LE REGIMENT?’; and extraordinarily public love- Half the hotel used to s I wish one could find a pub in London a quarter as cheery