Chubby boa valenti windows#

Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. There were eccentric characters in the hotel. In another room a widower shared the same bed with his two grown-up daughters, both consumptive. One room was let to two different lodgers, one a day worker and the other a night worker. The mother worked sixteen hours a day, darning socks at twenty-five centimes a sock, while the son, decently dressed, loafed in the Montparnasse cafes. In another room lived a Russian woman and her son, who called himself an artist. He was studying for the Church, and books of theology lay face-down on his leather-strewn floor. From six to twelve he sat on his bed, making a dozen pairs of shoes and earning thirty-five francs the rest of the day he attended lectures at the Sorbonne.

In one of the attics there was a Bulgarian student who made fancy shoes for the American market. They were of every trade - cobblers, bricklayers, stonemasons, navvies, students, prostitutes, rag-pickers. The lodgers were a floating population, largely foreigners, who used to turn up without luggage, stay a week and then disappear again. The rent of the rooms varied between thirty and fifty francs a week. It was a dirty place, but homelike, for Madame F. Sometimes when the bugs got too bad one used to burn sulphur and drive them into the next room whereupon the lodger next door would retort by having his room sulphured, and drive the bugs back. Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like columns of soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that one had to get up every few hours and kill them in hecatombs. 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 come loose and housed innumerable bugs. The rooms were small arid inveterately dirty, for there was no maid, and Madame F., the patronne, had no time to do any sweeping. It was a dark, rickety warren of five storeys, cut up by wooden partitions into forty rooms. My hotel was called the HГґtel des Trois Moineaux. It was quite a representative Paris slum.

And yet amid the noise and dirt lived the usual respectable French shopkeepers, bakers and laundresses and the like, keeping themselves to themselves and quietly piling up small fortunes. At night the policemen would only come through the street two together. There was fighting over women, and the Arab navvies who lived in the cheapest hotels used to conduct mysterious feuds, and fight them out with chairs and occasionally revolvers. On Saturday nights about a third of the male population of the quarter was drunk. At the foot of the hotels were tiny bistros, where you could be drunk for the equivalent of a shilling. All the houses were hotels and packed to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and Italians. 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. 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. Not that quarrels were the only thing that happened there - but still, we seldom got through the morning without at least one outburst of this description. I sketch this scene, just to convey something of the spirit of the rue du Coq d'Or. They shut up abruptly ten minutes later, when a squadron of cavalry rode past and people stopped shouting to look at them.

Chubby boa valenti windows#

Thereupon a whole variegated chorus of yells, as windows were flung open on every side and half the street joined in the quarrel. MADAME MONCE: вЂ Salope! Salope! How many times have I told you not to squash bugs on the wallpaper? Do you think you've bought the hotel, eh? Why can't you throw them out of the window like everyone else? Putain! Salope!вЂ™ Her bare feet were stuck into sabots and her grey hair was streaming down. Madame Monce, who kept the little hotel opposite mine, had come out on to the pavement to address a lodger on the third floor. A succession of furious, choking yells from the street. THE rue du Coq d'Or, Paris, seven in the morning.