Remnants

Down and Out in Paris

The first book I read for our class was Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell. Published in 1933, this vivid memoir, written in two parts, details Orwell's life as a penniless writer living among the poor and destitute of society, first in Paris then in London. The book documents in painstaking detail the squalor of the lives of those of the poor underworld--washing dishes in a grungy hotel kitchen, staying alive on scraps and stolen loaves of bread and starving in between, pawning every last coat and pair of trousers just to scrounge enough money to pay the next month's rent. Orwell's account of what it is really like to be down and out is desperately touching and sadly familiar looking at modern Paris; the number of homeless in Paris is staggeringly high, and it is all too obvious walking around the streets of the city. Every corner is home to a beggar man and his dog. Every street is another poor man's territory. Their signs all read the same sad lines: "S.V.P. J'ai faim." Please. I'm hungry. A few coins in a tattered old hat, a moth-eaten coat, faces buried in thin dusty blankets. As I go through my weekly routine, I pass the same homeless people, over and over again. The woman outside the Sorbonne, her face as brown and tired as beaten leather. The hunched old grey-haired man outside the Passy subway who's constantly clutching his arms around him to keep warm.

Each time I see them, walk by and look at them, a certain part of Orwell's memoir comes to mind. He is discussing a Russian friend of his he met in the public ward of a hospital who, once a waiter making a hundred francs a day, had since become bed-ridden and therefore as poor as Orwell himself. A war veteran, this friend Boris often entertained Orwell with stories of his glorious fighting days. He had since been forced to pawn almost everything in his possession just to buy food. The few things he had kept, refused to sell regardless of their potential value, were his old war medals and photographs, which he treasured with all his heart. Almost every day, he'd lie them across his bed and talk about them proudly with a glaze in his eye. They were the things he deemed too important to let go of, the few remnants of his past life, the few things he still had that belonged to his person. I think of this each day I walk by a certain homeless man on Rue St. Jacques. He is a dirty-faced man with a long grey beard and a sharp chin with black pirate eyes. He sits on a crude brown blanket with his spotted dog, and reads a tattered old book whose title I've never seen. Sprawled around him on the blanket is a collection of various trinkets, photographs, and books. There is a mint green oval tin, worn and rusted on the edges, inside which are a few coins and crumbs of dirt. There is a photograph of a grand two-masted ship, its edges curling and tea colored worn. There is a stack of flaking paperbacks at his feet, pieces of paper (letters? lists? wind carried flyers?) stuck throughout as bookmarks. He is there every Thursday and Friday afternoon, and every day I walk by, I look, and I wonder about this man and his collection. These things he's chosen to save are perhaps mementos of a past life, a past real life, full of things, family, purpose. This tin, did it once hold his mother's stamps, or his wife's jewelry, or his own life savings? The ship, did it belong to his father, did it take him across the world, is it merely a dream he refuses to let go of? These books, were they gifts from a best friend, did they comfort him in summer nights of his youth, or once accompany him across vast oceans of travel?

Each Thursday and Friday afternoon I walk past him, southbound to my job where I stay well into the evening. Walking back at the grey twilight of dusk, he is always gone, the rusty square outline of his blanket the only evidence of his presence. I wonder where he goes. Does he have a home, a friend, as Orwell did? Does he have a family, a circle of companions? I sigh and walk on, down the hill towards the Seine, and don't look back. I know I will see him tomorrow.