The dining room might appear to be a bastion of elegance, but just behind a door is the kitchen where the cooks often spit in the food and vermin are not uncommon.

Likewise, Orwell describes Hotel X as a perfect example of a restaurant that obtains its reputation for luxury through cutting corners and overcharging. Customers are attracted to the this “elegance,” which is in fact a sham, while workers like Orwell, Boris, and the restaurant’s long-suffering cook, slave away in horrible and unsafe conditions. And yet, the Auberge is successful, in large part because of the “Norman” decorations: fake beams on the walls, “peasant” pottery, and erotic paintings over the bar. In the kitchen, the floor is an inch-deep in old food, the garbage can is overflowing, and the outdoor shed where the meat and vegetables are stored is overrun with rats. When Orwell works at the Auberge, for example, he finds that the restaurant is poorly run, maintained on a system of bribes, and filthy. To add insult to injury, Orwell claims that at “high end” establishments, what passes for elegance is, upon closer inspection, actually shoddy and awful. Orwell concludes that such luxury is pointless, and that the brutal lives forced upon the plongeurs are thus completely unnecessary. Orwell then contrasts this joyless existence of the plongeur to the few hours of flimsy opulence that the rich experience at the restaurants where the plongeurs work. Rather, plongeurs live like indentured servants, often until they die. As such, there is not enough time in the day for a plongeur to even consider getting an education or starting a family. The plongeur then wakes up and does it all over again. At the end of a shift (which is typically 11 hours but sometimes more), one only has time to rush home, eat a hurried meal, and go to bed. Orwell, who himself worked as a plongeur at Hotel X in Paris, describes the life of the plongeur as one of long hours, bad pay, and mind-numbing, frenetic activity. He does this by contrasting the life of the poor with the luxurious lives of those who employ poor people.

One way that Orwell attacks the logic of poverty is to weigh its costs against its benefits. People live in poverty only because of selfishness and greed, the norms of consumption, and the social hierarchies that structure the world. Orwell argues that there is no reason for poverty to exist.

George orwell down and out