In one passageway, the
narrator discovered stacks of blank recipe cards. She briefly tried to be like Sara Crewe in
A Little Princess, who pretended she was imprisoned in the Bastille to make life bearable. But the narrator couldn’t do it. She still got to take the cards with her in exchange for letting the cook touch her breasts; she avoided assault by telling the cook she belonged to
von Linden. Guards then made her watch von Linden torture a French boy for an hour, and after that, von Linden asked if the narrator had ever read Orwell’s
Down and Out in Paris and London. They argued about the book and Orwellian socialism for a while, and then the guards threw the narrator back in her cell.