1936 On the Continent

small hotels which you will find in any district, and which it would be impossible to enumerate. This category is recommended to those who propose to spend several weeks or months in Paris without paying too much for accommodation. But you will not be paying “too much” if you are charged from £2 to £4 per week—according to district—for a medium room with bath at a medium-class hotel. As regards the various districts, the foreign tourist centres are naturally the most expensive, while the purely Parisian districts are the cheapest. The districts round the Opera and the Madeleine, the Champs Elysées and the Montparnasse, are comparatively expensive. The Quartier Latin, which is inhabited by students with traditionally slender purses, and the Montmartre, which many foreigners visit but few stay at, are somewhat less expensive. The hotels are cheapest in the quarters inhabited by the lower middle-class, such as the 14th and 15th
arrondissements
, that is to say round the Porte de Versailles and in the vicinity of the Porte d’Orleans, where in recent years many modern new buildings have been erected; these are occupied by many artists and intellectuals. The working-class districts round the Ported’Italie, Belleville and the Bastille, are naturally cheap, but are hardly of account to foreigners in the matter of comfort and cleanliness.
    As a general rule the differences in hotel prices in the various districts are accompanied by almost equal differences in standard and quality. If, in a “cheap” neighbourhood, you wish to have a fairly decent bed and bathroom at a fairly decent hotel, the price will go up in proportion with your increased requirements.
Bathrooms
    In particular, the question of a separate bathroom is decisive in this connection. The desire to take a daily bath is regarded by the medium-class French hotel-keeper as a crazy foreign foible, and a separate bathroom as a luxury for which the foreigner must pay a luxury price. There is a large number of new hotels in Paris where every room has a separate “cabinet de toilette” with a wash basin each for the upper and lower parts of the body and a separate W.C. Only the bath tub has been forgotten everywhere. On the other hand, the aforesaid vessel for the hygiene of the southern portion of the anatomy is all the more in evidence, a constant nightmare that pervades every small hotel room and leaps to the visitor’s eye—and olfactory organs—immediately upon his entry, but which the small hotel-keeper obviously regards as an important ornament.
Burning Fireplaces
    And this brings us to the atmosphere of the small hotel. Many thousands of Englishmen of limited means live at these small Paris hotels, in tiny, loudly wall-papered rooms characterised by a remarkable idyllic hideousness. “
Comfort moderne, Gaz, Electricité, Eau Courante
,” reads the proud legend on the signboard outside. And within, in the dark hall, ensconced in a glass cage, sit the watch-dogs and dreaded tyrants of the tenants—the concierge and his wife. Another cage, iron-trellised, awaits the visitor further on. It is “L’ascenseur,” the pride of the house, which rises with charming leisureliness up the shaft, wheezing, moaning and creaking as though it were climbing nothing less thanMont Blanc. If there are two passengers in the lift they have the choice of travelling to the upper regions tummy to tummy or back to back—and many a marriage owes its existence to tender beginnings on a journey between the ground floor and the garret. You are disgorged by the lift on to a dark corridor, then you are in your room.
    The first thing that catches your eye is the washbasin, with the aforementioned ominous complement, which is made of enamelled iron and stands on four rickety legs. Then you see the vast French double bed with two pillows, which automatically steer a single person’s thoughts in a certain direction. A third important piece is the false fire-place with the imitation marble mantelshelf and the imitation Venetian looking-glass above it; the awful example of the Englishman who thought that the fireplace was genuine and tried to light a fire in it, whereupon the whole hotel went up in smoke, should serve as a serious warning to the inexperienced.
Gay Wall-paper
    Finally, we must mention the walls of the room. They are made of plaster and covered with paper, so that, on the one hand, every sneeze in the adjacent room causes your own to shake as though from a