cannot, because stamps are too expensive. And then
there are your meals-meals are the worst difficulty of
all. Every day at meal-times you go out, ostensibly to a
restaurant, and loaf an hour in the Luxembourg
Gardens, watching the pigeons. Afterwards you smuggle
your food home in your pockets. Your food is bread and
margarine, or bread and wine, and even the nature of the
food is governed by lies. You have to buy rye bread
instead of household bread, because the rye loaves,
though dearer, are round and can be smuggled in your
pockets. This wastes you a franc a day. Sometimes, to
keep up appearances, you have to spend sixty centimes
on a drink, and go correspondingly short of food. Your
linen gets filthy, and you run out of soap and razor-
blades. Your hair wants cutting, and you try to
cut it yourself, with such fearful results that you
have to go the barber after all, and spend the equivalent
of a day's food. All day you are telling lies, and
expensive lies.
You discover the extreme precariousness of your six
francs a day. Mean disasters happen and rob you of
food. You have spent your last eighty centimes on half a
litre of milk, and are boiling it over the spirit lamp.
While it boils a bug runs down your forearm; you give
the bug a flick with your nail, and it falls, plop! straight
into the milk.