milk away and go foodless.
You go to the baker's to buy a pound of bread, and
you wait while the girl cuts a pound for another cus-
tomer. She is clumsy, and cuts more than a pound.
"Pardon, monsieur," she says, "I suppose you don't mind
paying two sous extra?" Bread is a franc a pound, and
you have exactly a franc. When you think that you too
might be asked to pay two sous extra, and would have
to confess that you could not, you bolt in panic. It is
hours before you dare venture into a baker's shop again.
You go to the greengrocer's to spend a franc on a
kilogram of potatoes. But one of the pieces that make up
the franc is a Belgium piece, and the shopman refuses
it. You slink out of the shop, and can never go there
again.
You have strayed into a respectable quarter, and you
see a prosperous friend coming. To avoid him you dodge
into the nearest café. Once in the café you must buy
something, so you spend your last fifty centimes on a
glass of black coffee with a dead fly in it. One could
multiply these disasters by the hundred. They are part
of the process of being hard up.
You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread
and margarine in your belly, you go out and look
into the shop windows. Everywhere there is food in-
sulting you in huge, wasteful piles; whole dead pigs,
baskets of hot loaves; great yellow blocks of butter,
strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyère
cheeses like grindstones.