For three weeks I kept pounding away on my clacking typewriter. It was costing us a small income in stamps, and economy of the most rigid kind had to be practised in other ways. We gave up eating ordinary meat and took to patronising the Boucherie Chevaline. I came to appreciate a choice mule steak, and considered an entrecôte of ass a special delicacy. We made salads of poiret, which is called the poor man’s asparagus. We drank vin ordinaire at eight sous a litre and our bread was of the coarsest. Down there in the rue Mouffetard it was no trouble to purchase with economy, for everything was sold from that standpoint.
I think the rue Mouffetard deserves a special page of description, because it contains the elements of all Paris slumdom. From the steep and ancient rue St. Geneviève de Montagne branches the dismal rue Descartes. It runs between tall, dreary houses, growing gradually more sordid; then suddenly, as if ashamed of itself, it changes its name to the rue Mouffetard, and continues its infamous way.
The street narrows to the width of a lane and the houses that flank it grow colder, blacker, more decrepit. The pavement on either side is a mere riband, and the cobbled way is overrun with the ratlike humanity spewed forth from the sinister houses. The sharp gables and raking roofs, out of which windows like gaping sores make jagged openings, notch themselves grotesquely against the sky. Their faces are gnawed by the teeth of time and grimy with the dust of ages. Their windows are like blind eyes, barred and repulsive. The doors that burrow into them are nothing but black holes, so narrow that two people passing have to turn sideways, so dark that it is like entering a charnel house.
Nearly every second shop is a chope, a buvette, a saloon. At one point there are four clustered together. Some of these drinking dens are so narrow they seem mere holes in the wall, scarcely any wider than the width of their own door, and running back like dark cupboards. And in them, with their heads together and their elbows on the tiny tables you can see the ferret-faced Poilo, and Gigolette, his gosse, of the greasy and elaborate coiffure. Hollow-cheeked, glittering of eye, light as a cat, cunning, cynical, cruel, he smokes a cigarette; while she, brazen, claw-fingered, rapacious, sips from his Pernod.
At the butchers’ only horse-meat is sold. A golden horse usually surmounts the door, overlooking a sign—Boucherie Chevaline, or sometimes Boucherie Hyppagique. The meat is very dark; the fat very yellow; and there are festoons of red sausages, very red and glossy. One shop bears the sign “House of Confidence.” There are other signs, such as “Mule of premier quality,” “Ass of first choice.”
As you descend the street you get passing glimpses of inner courts of hideous squalor, of side streets, narrow and resigned to misery. Daring odours pollute the air and the way is now packed with wretchedness. Grimy women, whose idea of a coiffure is to get their matted hair out of the way, trudge draggle-skirted by the side of husky-throated, undersized men whose beards bristle brutishly. Bands of younger men hang around the bars. They wear peaked caps and have woollen scarfs around their throats. They look at the well-dressed passer-by with furtive speculation. They live chiefly on the brazen girls who parade up and down, with their hair coiled over their ears, clawed down in front, sleek with brilliantine and studded with combs.
Then, as the narrow, tortuous street plunges down to the carrefour of the Gobelins it becomes violently commercial, a veritable market jammed with barrows, studded with stalls, strident with street cries of all kinds.
Here it is that Anastasia does her marketing. It is wonderful how much she can bring home for a franc, sometimes enough to fill the net bag she carries on her arm. She never wears a hat on these expeditions; it is safer without one.
Three weeks gone; twenty stories written. I throw myself back in weariness and despair. It is hard work doing three thousand words a day, especially when one has to make a second copy for the clean manuscript. I began at eight in the morning and worked till ten at night. My face was thin, my checks pale, my eyes full of fag and stress. How I despised the work I was doing! the shoddy, sentimental piffle, the anæmic twaddle, the pandering to the vulgar taste for stories of the upper circles. Ordinary folk not being sufficiently interesting for a snobbish public my heroes were seldom less than baronets. It got at last that every stroke of my typewriter jarred some sensitive nerve of pain in me—“Typewriter nerves” they call it. Then one night I gave up.
“I won’t do another of these wretched things,” I cried; “I’m worked out. I feel as if my brain was mush, just so much sloppy stuff.”