Down and Out in Paris and London: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

Thanks to his Russian connections in Paris, Boris hears of another opportunity for him and Orwell to make money. Many Russians are living in Paris in exile, including a number of Bolsheviks eager to recruit more to their fold. Orwell writes that most of the Russian expatriates are hard-working, but that some, including a number of now penniless Russian aristocrats, are swindlers. They eat out at smart restaurants, impressing waiters with their claims to royalty and wealth, and leave the waiters with the bill.

Boris’s proposal is that they seek out a group of Bolshevik newspapermen who run a communist weekly. Orwell, a writer, might find employment with them writing pieces on British politics. Orwell is leery of writing for a Bolshevik newspaper given the French police’s intolerant attitudes toward communists, but he agrees to the scheme. He and Boris, in the company of a Russian journalist friend of Boris’s, sneak into the newspaper office fronted by a laundromat.

The publisher scolds Orwell for not bringing a load of washing with him as a cover. Boris, the publisher, and the journalist speak in Russian while Orwell imagines their discussion is like that of characters in a Russian novel—intelligent, passionate, wide-ranging. Not so. They want Boris and Orwell to pay a 25 franc entrance fee just to have the opportunity t o write for the newspaper. Boris pays an installment, and Orwell, having convinced the publisher that he has a working knowledge of British politics and sport, agrees to write for the Russian weekly at a rate of 150 francs per article. The publisher tells Orwell to expect word from him by the next day’s post, and Boris, ever the optimist, buys a cigar in celebration.

The mail, however, brings nothing, and when Orwell and Boris return to the secret society headquarters to investigate, the men are gone. Orwell then concludes that they were not communist newspaper publishers at all, but small-time crooks running a profitable scheme in which they charge gullible parties a so-called “membership fee,” only to flee just before they are found out. Orwell has to admit that the scam, while clearly unethical and corrupt, is rather ingenious.