The workman registered and livreted, how does he live, work, and sleep? He is not a great traveller; for, unless forced into exile, the utmost notion of travel that a French workman has, is the removal—if he be a provincial—from his native province to Paris. We pass over the workman’s chance of falling victim to the conscription, if he has no friends rich enough to buy for him a substitute, or if he cannot subscribe for the same object to a Conscription Mutual Assurance Company. When Louis Blanc had his own way in France the workmen did but ten hours’ labour in the day. Now, however, as before, twelve or thirteen hours are regarded as a fair day’s work. I and Friponnet, who are diamond jewellers, work ten hours only. My friend Cornichon, who is a goldsmith, works as long as a painter or a smith. Sunday labour used to be very general in France, but extended seldom beyond the half day; which was paid for at a higher rate. In Paris seven in eight of us used to earn money on the Sunday morning. That necessity could not be pleaded for the act, is proved by the fact, that often we did no work on Monday, but on that day spent the Sunday’s earnings. As for wages, calculated on an average of several years, they are about as follows:—The average pay for a day’s labour is three shillings and twopence. The lowest day’s pay known is five pence, and the highest thirty shillings. About thirty thousand of us receive half-a-crown a day; five or six times as many (the majority) receive some sum between half-a-crown and four and twopence. About ten thousand receive higher wages. The best wages are earned by men whose work is connected with print, paper, and engraving. The workers in jewels and gold are the next best provided for; next to them workers in metal and in fancy ware. Workers on spun and woven fabrics get low wages; the lowest is earned, as in London, by slop-workers and all workers with the needle. The average receipts of Paris needlewomen have not, however, fallen below fourteenpence a day; those of them who work with fashionable dressmakers earn about one and eightpence. While speaking of the ill-paid class of women, I must mention that the most sentimental of our occupations earns the least bread. Those who make crowns of immortelles to hang upon the tombs, only earn about sevenpence-halfpenny a day. That trade is, in very truth, funereal. To come back to ourselves, it should be said that our wages, as a whole, have risen rather than declined during
the last quarter of a century. It is a curious fact, however, that the pay for job-work has decreased very decidedly.
And how do we live? it is asked. Well enough. All of us eat two meals a day; but what we eat depends upon our money. We three, who draw up this account, work in one room. We begin fasting, and maintain our fast until eleven o’clock. Then we send the apprentice out to fetch our breakfasts. When he comes back with his stores, he disposes them neatly on a centre table in little groups. I generally have a pennyworth of ham, which certainly is tough, but very full of flavour; bread to the same value; a half share with Friponnet in two-pennyworth of wine, and a half-pennyworth of fried potatoes; thus spending in all threepence-halfpenny. Cornichon spends the same sum generally in another way. He has a pennyworth of cold boiled (unsalted) beef, a pennyworth of bread, a halfpennyworth of cheese and a pennyworth of currant jam. Friponnet is more extravagant. A common breakfast bill of fare with him is two penny sausages, twopennyworth of bread, a pennyworth of wine, a halfpenny paquet de couenne (which is a little parcel of crisply fried strips of bacon rind), and a baked pear. All this is sumptuous; for we are of the aristocracy of workmen. The labourers of Paris do not live so well. They go to the gargottes, where they get threepence halfpennyworth of bouilli—soup, beef and vegetable—which includes the title to a liberal supply of bread. Reeking, dingy dens are those gargottes, where all the poorer classes of Parisian workmen save the beef out of their breakfast bouilli, and carry it away to eat later in the day at the wine-shop; where it will make a dinner with more bread and a pennyworth of wine. Of bread they eat a great deal; and, reckoning that at fourpence and the wine at a penny, we find eightpence to be the daily cost of living to the great body of Parisian workmen.
We aristos among workpeople dine famously. My own practice is to dine in the street du Petit Carré upon dinners for ninepence; or, by taking dinner-tickets for fourteen days in advance, I get one dinner a fortnight given me gratuitously. I dine upon soup, a choice of three plates of meat, about half-a-pint of wine, a dessert and bread at discretion. Our dinner hour is four o’clock, and we are not likely to eat anything more before bedtime; although one of us may win a cup of coffee or a dram of brandy at billiards or dominoes in the evening. Cornichon and Friponnet dine in the street Chabannais; have soup at a penny a portion, small plates of
meat at twopence each, dessert at a penny, and halfpenny slips of bread. Each of us when he has dined rolls up a cigarette, and lounges perhaps round the Palais Royal for half an hour.
As for our lodging the poorest of us live by tens in one room, and sleep by fours and fives upon one mattress; paying from twopence to tenpence a night. The ordinary cost of such lodging as the workman in Paris occupies is, for a whole room for one person, nine or ten shillings a month; for more than one, six or seven shillings each; and for half a bed, four shillings. Cornichon lives in room number thirty-six on the third floor of a furnished lodging house in the street du Petit Lion. You must ring for the porter if you would go in to Cornichon; and the porter must, by a jerk at a string, unlatch the street door if Cornichon wishes to come out to you. In a little court at the back are two flights of dirty stairs of red tile edged with wood. They lead to distinct portions of the house. Cornichon’s room is paved with red tiles, polished now and then with beeswax. It is furnished with the bed and a few inches of bedside carpet, forming a small island on the floor, with two chairs, a commode with a black marble top, a washing-basin and a water-bottle. Cornichon has also a cupboard there in which he stores his wood for winter, paying twenty-pence per hundred pounds for logs; and as the room contains no grate, he rents a German stove from his landlord, paying four-and-two-pence for his use of it during the season.
Friponnet rents two unfurnished rooms up four pair of stairs, at the back of a house in the street d’Argenteuil. He pays ten shillings a month. They are furnished in mahogany and black marble bought of a broker, and I think not paid for yet. Fidette visits him there. She is a gold and silver polisher, his bonne amie. She has her own lodging; but she and Friponnet divide their earnings. They belong to one another: although no priest has blessed their voluntary contract. It is so, I am pained to say, with very many of us.
I have a half-bed in a little street, with a man who is a good fellow, considering he is a square-head—a German. The red tiles of my staircase are very clean, and slippery with beeswax. My landlord rents a portion of the third floor of the house, and under-lets it fearfully. One apartment has been penned off into four, and mine is the fourth section at the end. To reach me one must pass through the first pen, which is occupied by Monsieur and Madame.
There they work, eat, and sleep; as for Madame, she never leaves it. Monsieur only goes away to wait upon the griffe, his master, when he wants more work; his griffe is a slop tailor. Monsieur and Madame sleep in a recess, which looks like a sarcophagus. A little Italian tailor also sleeps in the same pen; but whereabouts I know not—his bed is a mystery. The next pen is occupied by two carpenters, seldom at home. When they come home, all of us know it; for they are extremely musical. In the third pen live three more tailors, through whose territory I must pass to my own cabinet. But how snug that is! Although only eight feet by ten, it has two corner windows; and, if there is little furniture and but a scanty bed, there is a looking-glass fit for a baron, and some remains of violet-coloured hangings and long muslin curtains; either white or brown, I am not sure. I and the German pay for this apartment fifteen shillings monthly.
There is a kind of lodgers worth especial mention. The men working in the yards of masons, carpenters, and others—masons especially—frequently come from the provinces. They are not part of the fixed population; but are men who have left their wives and families to come up to the town and earn a sum of money. For this they work most energetically; living in the most abstemious manner, in order that they may not break into their hoard. They occupy furnished lodgings, flocking very much together. Thus the masons from the departments of la Creuse and la Haute Vienne occupy houses let out in furnished rooms exclusively to themselves, in the quarters of the Hotel de Ville, the Arsenal, Saint Marcel, and in other parts of Paris. The rigid parsimony of these men is disappointed terribly when any crisis happens. They are forced to eat their savings, to turn their clothing and their tools into food, and, by the revolution of eighteen hundred and forty-eight, were reduced to such great destitution, that in some of the houses occupied by them one dress was all that remained to all the lodgers. They wore it in turn, one going out in it to seek for work while all the rest remained at home in bed. The poor fellows thanked the want of exercise for helping them to want of appetite—the only kind of want that poverty desires.