extraordinary disagreeable man, who used to fall into
furious rages at the sight of a client. From his manner
One would have supposed that we had done him some
injury by coming to him. « Merde! » he used to shout,
'you here again? What do you think this is? A soup
kitchen?" And he paid incredibly low prices. For a hat
which I had bought for twenty-five shillings and.
scarcely worn he gave five francs; for a good pair of
shoes, five francs; for shirts, a franc each. He always
preferred to exchange rather than buy, and he had a
trick of thrusting some useless article into one's hand
and then pretending that one had accepted it. Once I
saw him take a good overcoat from an old woman, put
two white billiard-balls into her hand, and then push
her rapidly out of the shop before she could protest. It
would have been a pleasure to flatten the Jew's nose, if
only one could have afforded it.
These three weeks were squalid and uncomfortable,
and evidently there was worse coming, for my rent
would be due before long. Nevertheless, things were not
a quarter as bad as I had expected. For, when you are
approaching poverty, you make one discovery which
outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and
mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but
you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty:
the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain
limits, it is actually true that the less money you have,
the less you worry.