ences of poverty began-for six francs a day, if not actual
poverty, is on the fringe of it. Six francs is a shilling,
and you can live on a shilling a day in Paris if you know
how. But it is a complicated business.
It is altogether curious, your first contact with
poverty. You have thought so much about poverty - it
is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you
knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so
utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be
quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You
thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and
boring. It is the peculiar
lowness of poverty that you
discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the
complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.
You discover, for instance, the secrecy attaching to
poverty. At a sudden stroke you have been reduced to an
income of six francs a day. But of course you dare not
admit it-you have got to pretend that you are living
quite as usual. From the start it tangles you in a net of
lies, and even with the lies you can hardly manage it.
You stop sending clothes to the laundry, and the
laundress catches you in the street and asks you why;
you mumble something, and she, thinking you are
sending the clothes elsewhere, is your enemy for life.
The tobacconist keeps asking why you have cut down
your smoking.