Orwell’s first published work, La Censure en Angleterre, appeared in Henri Barbusse’s paper, Mode, a highly regarded French literary journal, in the autumn of 1928 and not to be confused with the daily newspaper of the same name. It was a dark, rickety warren of five storeys, cut up by wooden partitions into forty rooms”. On Saturday night about a third of the male population was drunk… My hotel was called the Hotel des Tres Moineaux.
At the foot of the hotels were tiny bistros, where you could be drunk for the equivalent of a shilling. All these house were hotels and packed to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and Italians. “a ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse.
Orwell took up residence in rue du Pot de Fer, a dingy, cobbled street in the Latin Quarter and fictionalised as the rue de Coq d’Or in his first published book, Down and Out in Paris and London, and which he describes as: One pound sterling was then worth 120 francs which meant what little money he had would stretch much further in Paris. A plummeting exchange rate made the British pound and the American dollar strong against the French franc. Apart from the obvious literary draw, there was another reason why Paris attracted him and so many would-be artists and writers. His mother, Ida Limouzin, was born in England to a French father and an English mother. His aunt Nellie Limouzin lived in the city. Orwell spoke French fluently and already had familial connections with Paris. Much to the disapproval of his parents, Orwell had, after five years of service, resigned from his commission with the Burma Police and declared his intentions to become a writer. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway and hoping to join their illustrious ranks, 25-year-old George Orwell (or Eric Blair – as he was called then) arrived in Paris in February 1928.
Following a well-trodden literary path taken by authors such as F.
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