trade-cobblers, bricklayers, stonemasons, navvies,
students, prostitutes, rag-pickers. Some of them were
fantastically poor. In one of the attics there was a
Bulgarian student who made fancy shoes for the Ameri-
can market. From six to twelve he sat on his bed, making
a dozen pairs of shoes and earning thirty-five francs; the
rest of the day he attended lectures at the Sorbonne. He
was studying for the Church, and books of theology lay
face-down on his leather-strewn floor. In another room
lived a Russian woman and her son, who called himself
an artist. The mother worked sixteen hours a day,
darning socks at twenty-five centimes a sock, while the
son, decently dressed, loafed in the Montparnasse cafés.
One room was let to two different lodgers, one a day
worker and the other a night worker. In another room a
widower shared the same bed with his two grown-up
daughters, both consumptive.
There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris
slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people -people
who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and
given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them
from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees
people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived
lives that were curious beyond words.
There were the Rougiers, for instance, an old, ragged,
dwarfish couple who plied an extraordinary trade.