Occurrences of this kind are more rare in England than on the Continent, and the Continent again is freer from them than the countries farther East. Perhaps the worst of all is Egypt, where "backsheesh!" ("a present") is dinned into the traveler's ears from morn till night; it is the word he first hears on his arrival, and the last at his departure, and in after years it haunts his dreams, and is by no means banished from his waking hours. Whatever he does or does not do, he is expected to pay for; services are impudently forced upon him, and then the demand for compensation is as insolent as it is exorbitant. The manner of the Egyptian Arab in this matter of backsheesh is most insulting, and the wonder is he has been allowed to practice it so long. Give him what you consider a fair return for his services, either real or fancied, and he pushes the money back into your hands and lifts his nose into the air; you have been in his estimation a miser, and your coin is unfit for him to touch. But if you drop it into your pocket and turn away, his whole attitude changes; he is no longer the proud descendant of the Mamelukes and the kings of Egypt, but the most cringing suppliant you can imagine. He begs you to give again what he has just refused, and if you persist in keeping it he has resource to tears. Not unfrequently he rolls on the ground and screams like an angry child, and he will follow you for hours in the hope that you will relent. Sometimes, instead of thrusting the money into your hand, he throws it on the ground, knowing that you will be very unlikely to stoop to pick it up; by so doing he endeavors to make sure of the original offer, and takes his chances in shaming or bullying you into giving more.
The question naturally occurs to an American, 'How shall I ascertain what is proper to give when a service has been rendered to me?' No general rule can be laid down, and the traveler must depend often on his judgment. Where it is possible to do so, you can ask any person who is familiar with the subject, and he will tell you; when this cannot be done you have only yourself to rely upon. Remember that in England and on the Continent money has a greater purchasing power than in America, and gauge your fees accordingly. Where you have engaged cabmen, guides, or other individuals whose rate of service is previously arranged, or is regulated by a tariff, you will be about right if you add ten per cent. for a gratuity. Thus a guide whose tariff is five francs a day should be satisfied with half a franc, but, if he has been specially zealous and useful, you can give him a franc with safety. The Paris cabman expects four sous additional on the course or six sous an hour; his fee is obligatory in a certain sense, as his wages are too low for him to live upon without the pour boire. The German cabman expects his trinkgeld as a matter of course, and you will really under-pay him if you do not give it. The same is the case with his class in all parts of the Continent, as well as in Great Britain, and you will fully hit the mark if you augment the regular tariff by fifteen or twenty per cent.
In the restaurants the waiters generally receive nothing in the form of wages; they rely entirely on the donations of patrons for their compensation, and the system is well understood by the public. The money thus obtained is dropped into a box at the cashier's counter, and divided among all the waiters of the establishment at the end of the week. This has been found after long experience the best way to secure uniform attention to all customers,—better than to allow each waiter to pocket the money he receives. In the latter case, a patron known to be liberal would be carefully looked after, while the man who gave only the regulation fee would be neglected. Under the present arrangement a waiter can have no great inducement to neglect the niggardly man to an undue extent, and, on the other hand, he will not be over-serviceable to the generous one. The box for the money is in full view of all the waiters, so as to prevent any frauds on the revenue; it is usually of metal, and a foot or so in height. The shape and material cause the coin to jingle when it falls, and thus the waiters can be taught by the ear as well as by the eye that the donations are properly bestowed.
A French barber shop frequently amuses the stranger on account of the way the pour boire is received. You have whatever tonsorial operation you choose, and when the work is finished you pay according to the tariff. When change has been made you leave a few sous on the counter for the inevitable extra; the cashier drops them in the metal box which stands ready for their reception, and the sound of their fall is followed by a chorus of "Merci, monsieur," from all the barbers in the place, be they few or many. Half a dozen masculine voices pronouncing those words in measured cadence have a strange effect on the ears of a novice.
In many hotels and restaurants in England, and on the Continent, not only do the servants receive no wages, but they even pay something to the proprietor for their places. In the restaurants of Vienna there is a man who is designated the "zoll-kellner," (pay-waiter) who carries a leather sack at his side to hold the coin for making change. Your accounts are settled with him, and not with the waiter who has served you, and it is to the zoll-kellner that you give your gratuities. Out of the gratuities he pays the wages of the waiters, and reimburses himself for his services, so that the attendance costs the establishment nothing. Some of the larger bier-halles in Vienna derive a revenue from the service, as they require the zoll-kellner to pay some hundreds of dollars annually for his privilege, besides giving his time and paying the waiters.
The usual fee in a restaurant on the Continent is a sou on each franc of the bill, or one sou in twenty. Thus, if you have ten francs to pay for your dinner, you give half a franc, or ten sous, to the waiter, and if you have expended only five francs you give him five sous. A sou on a franc is a good general rule; it is followed by the great majority of Frenchmen and other continental people, but you should not adhere to it by giving a single sou when you have only a franc to pay. Never give less than two sous, where you give anything at all, except to the professional beggar of whom you wish to rid yourself. The cashiers of the restaurants always arrange the change, so that you will have the material for the pour boire. Suppose your bill is exactly ten francs, and you put down a twenty-franc piece from which the amount is to be taken. The cashier sends back, not a ten-franc piece, but a five-franc piece, four francs, half a franc, and the rest in copper. Sometimes there is an attempt to cause the stranger to bleed freely by making change so that he will be compelled to give more than is necessary. Thus in the instance described above, the cashier would send back a five-franc piece and five pieces of one franc each, so as to compel a donation of a franc. Whenever this is done you can be entirely sure that it is an effort to extract more than is due; you can meet it by asking change—la monnaie—for one of the franc pieces, or better still, give the exact pour boire from the reserve you should always have in your pocket.
The regulation of the fees necessary for a hotel is more difficult than for a restaurant. The amount given should be proportioned to the time you have been in the house, the services of the waiters, the demands you have made upon them, and the size of your party. It is best to let one person of a party pay all the gratuities, and do it in a systematic way so that each servant receives his or her due. Suppose you are four in number, and have been a week in the house; you pay the concierge from five to eight francs, the chambermaid four to six, the waiter who has brought the coffee in the morning, and otherwise looked after you, five to eight, and the porter who has handled luggage and blacked your boots, five to six francs. These figures are for a fair amount of service, and are liberal enough for most cases. Every traveler must judge for himself whether he has made an undue demand upon the servants, and gauge his gratuities accordingly.
So much has been said about the fee system that some of the hotels have adopted the plan of certain English ones in announcing that the service is all included and nothing more is expected. But the pretence is a very thin one, as the departing traveler will surely ascertain. The servants come to his room while he is putting the finishing touch to his packing, they lie in wait in the halls and on the stairways, and they assemble at the door to see him off. There is often a preconcerted system of signals by which all the servants can be notified of the approaching departure of a patron of a hotel. Bells will be rung, or somebody will be called in a loud voice to bring something either real or imaginary. The writer had the following experience in a hotel in Paris:
He had been in the house nearly a week, and followed the usual custom of leaving his key with the concierge whenever he went out. If he came in in the afternoon he was usually informed that the chambermaid had the key upstairs, and on proceeding to his hall he summoned that damsel by touching a bell at the head of the stairway; the concierge never made any pretence of calling her, but simply indicated that the key was above. One afternoon he came in, asked for his key, and received the usual response that the chambermaid had it. As he turned to go upstairs he asked to have his bill made out, as he was going away immediately.
The half-asleep concierge seemed to have been struck with a shock from an electric battery. She protruded her head from the window of her office, and shouted so that she could have been heard to the uttermost parts of the house:-