That place, “Life in the quarter"
The place the protagonist would never forget was the “Bistro,” at the foot of “the Hotel des Trois Moineaus.” It was “a tiny brick-floored room, half underground, with wine-sodden tables,” and “a photograph of a funeral.” That was a favorite place of “red-sashed workmen craving sausage with big jack-knives,” “a splendid Auvergnant peasant woman with the face of strong-minded cow,” and lots of other interesting people who would never be allowed in a respectable restaurant. There were “songs,” “games,” and “extraordinary public love-making.” The protagonist wished he could find a pub in London “a quarter as cheery.” This imagery is supposed to evoke a feeling of nostalgia.
The beginning of a disaster
It is “altogether curious,” “your first contact with poverty.” You have “thought so much about poverty,” for it is a thing “you have feared all your life.” It is the thing you “knew would happen to you sooner or later,” and it is all “so utterly and prosaically different.” You thought it would be “terrible,” but it is “merely squid and boring.” The first thing you are going to discover is “the peculiar lowness of poverty.” It is “the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.” This imagery evokes a feeling of disorientation.
In exile
Boris became “a captain at twenty.” He was the captain “in the Second Siberian Rifles” and his father was “a colonel.” “The ups and downs” of his life were unpredictable. “A captain in the Russian Army, and then, piff!” The Revolution started and “every penny gone!” In 1916 he stayed a week at “the Hotel Edouard Sept.” In 1920 he was trying for a job “as night watchman there.” He has been “night watchman, cellarman, floor scrubber, dishwasher, porter, lavatory attendant.” He has tipped waiters, but he has never been tipped by waiters. This imagery evokes a feeling of fascination and fear.
