Heywood Industries' photostream  

Although, I doubt it looked much like this back in 1929.

...cut up by wooden partitions into forty rooms. The rooms were small arid inveterately dirty, for there was no maid... The walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like columns of soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that one had to get up every few hours and kill them in hecatombs. Sometimes when the bugs got too bad one used to burn sulphur and drive them into the next room; whereupon the lodger next door would retort by having his room sulphured, and drive the bugs back. It was a dirty place, but homelike... The rent of the rooms varied between thirty and fifty francs a week."

Going by a PDF I found - in French, so I'm muddling a bit here - in 1929 figures - the year that Orwell left Paris to return to London - the (2008) equivalent of 30 to 50 francs was €16-€27.

Of course, that's a very simple conversion that doesn't take in to account the relative worth over time. And, not surprisingly, it's tricky to work out the actual worth of 1929 francs in today's money.

Further on, though, Orwell talks of his financial situation: earning 36 francs a week giving English lessons; he's paid 200 francs for a month's rent in advance; and he has 250 francs in savings. And then, thankfully, he makes my calculations a whole lot easier: "Six francs is a shilling."

Therefore, using the same calculations as in the notes on the last photograph, I'm able to work out - in terms of average earnings - how much, relatively, things cost.

Six 1929 francs = one 1929 shilling = £9.60 or €9.84 (2009)

Which means in real terms, 30-50 1929 francs is more like €50-€82. Which is a bit different to €16-€27.

So Orwell was earning roughly €60 a week giving English lessons, had paid €328 for a month's rent in advance and had €410 saved. That is, before an "ambiguous" Italian broke in to his room and stole all but the 47 francs - or €77 - he had in his pockets.

Down and out, indeed.

...lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been froze in the act of collapse. All the houses were hotels and packed to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and Italians. At the foot of the hotels were tiny bistros, where you could be drunk for the equivalent of a shilling."

George Orwell's description of the Rue du Coq d'Or, at the start of Down And Out In Paris And London.

Parisians, however, know the street as Rue du Pot de Fer.

While the buildings no longer look like they're collapsing, the bistros are still there, but there is no way you could get drunk for a shilling. Even using the most generous indicator of purchasing power - average earnings - at measuringworth.com, one shilling in 1930 is worth £9.60 today. Which converts to just over €11.

That's hardly enough to get a drink in Paris these days, let alone drunk.