A fond look at a Parisian tradition.
THE CONCIERGE IS A DISAPPEARING INSTITUTION, THOUGH THE memory of this domestic Cerberus and spy remains potent for most Parisians. If someone becomes really detailed, spiteful, and petty in his gossip, he’s likely to be upbraided with the rhetorical question “What are you, a concierge?” For the French protect their privacy with a sacred fury and prefer the permissiveness of sophisticated silence to the pleasure of spicy gossip (or “crusty,” as they say—croustillant).
We have a concierge, Madame Denise, who is sweet, funny, and, above all, discreet. She lives in her little loge at the rear of the courtyard. Her windows are bedecked with impeccably white lace curtains in which swans and swains are picked out in eyelets.
Everyone in the neighborhood likes her. The Indian restaurant a block away gives her curries too strong for her stomach—but not for Fred’s [the author’s dog]. The nearby funeral parlor gives her slightly faded flower arrangements; on some days our narrow, rainy courtyard is carpeted with anthuriums or gladioli or mountains of chrysanthemums denuded of their satin sashes spelling out the name of the deceased. At Christmas time she receives a prematurely browning and shedding pine tree, which she decorates with a string of lights she runs on a cord out from under her door into the part of the courtyard sheltered from the rain.
Madame Denise takes in packages for us but also shipments for the bookstore on the street level, cleverly named Mona Lisait (“Mona was reading,” not a bad name for a store selling art books); the boys who work there in return trundle out the garbage can for her every night. But Madame Denise’s greatest admirer is the coiffeuse in the shop next to Mona Lisait, a stunning young beur (a French-born Arab) who tries out all the latest hairstyles on Madame Denise. One day our concierge will look like a Roman matron, the next like a Neapolitan tart, then a week later she’ll become a Tonkinese princess or a cabaret singer of the 1940s, startlingly resembling the imposing, throaty, lesbian chanteuse Suzy Solidor. Of course constant variety is the very source of the parisienne’s power to bewitch us, but it’s somewhat disconcerting to see your motherly (and normally brunette) concierge coiffed with a bright red punk’s coxcomb at eight in the morning (or—to be more honest—at ten).
Madame Denise lives with her son, who looks so solid, so ageless that at first I mistook him for her husband. In fact he looks a bit like the cowardly criminal in a Jean Gabin gangster film, with his pencil-thin mustache, sleeveless yoke-necked t-shirt and surprisingly silent way of walking (or rolling by), as if on casters. To be sure, he’s not at all a gangster; on the contrary, he has a medal for 25 years of faithful service sweeping up at the town hall, the gleaming white Hôtel de Ville just two blocks away, and his mother showed it to me proudly. We’ve never seen him with another human being except his mother. “I’ve tried to persuade him to marry,” she says with the cooing regret and feigned annoyance of the Triumphant Mom, “but he’s a quiet boy, a real loner, and he’s comfortable here.”
One of his relations, or “contacts,” at the Hôtel de Ville is a strange little burn victim with a molting wig and a crablike gait, an old monsieur who works as a bookkeeper for the mayor; he comes once a year to the loge to sort out Madame Denise’s taxes, and she in turn prepares for him skate and capers in black butter.
Loge is the word not only for a concierge’s apartment but also for an actor’s dressing room, and Madame Denise, in her modest, smiling way, has a flair for the theatrical. An excitable French photographer, sent over by British Vogue, wanted to set up a shot in which Madame Denise would open her door slightly and with a smile hand me my morning mail while Fred looked on approvingly. We had to repeat this little scene twenty times but each time Madame Denise was just as natural, unaffected, gay—a born star. One day she showed me a glossy German photographic study of the concierges of Paris in which she figures prominently as the genuine French article (most of the few remaining concierges are Portuguese, which means their entryways smell of salted cod, their national dish, instead of raie au beurre noir).
Even better, Madame Denise is from the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, considered the best breeding ground for conscientious, hardworking concierges. She was born in Lille and brought up there, in a boisterous, sentimental, accordion-playing café, and she “descended on” Paris 28 years ago with her husband, who promptly died. Luckily she found her position as a concierge and has held on to it tenaciously ever since. She has never traveled and doesn’t seem to approve of it; she shakes her head tragically whenever we take off for Italy or Nice or London or the States. “Never a moment of repose,” she laments. Of course she does her own traveling, through stamp-collecting, and she has my permission to cut out with a big pair of scissors the canceled stamps on my mail from Greece, Austria, Thailand, and other exotic places (she loves the Porgy and Bess commemorative stamps from the States).
In the afternoon she begins to socialize. She’ll stand at the bar of Les Piétons just next door with the whores, all of whom she knows by name. If she’s not at Piétons, she’s at the other corner bar, the Royal St-Martin. Sometimes, when we catch her coming back from the bar, she tells us of the famous movie star who used to live in our apartment, and of her many loves. We exchange stories about some of the gallant adventures of our handsome landlord and new “crusty” details about his cheapness; like all French he fancies himself a bricoleur, a weekend Mr. Fix-it, and would rather attempt five times in a row to repair our leaking hot-water heater than call in a proper plumber.
She knows we’re gay and says nothing, but does not resort to the polite fiction used by the restaurateur on the corner of referring to Hubert as my “son” (votre fiston), a particularly difficult lie to sustain given my American accent. She also knows Hubert is ill, and when he’s in a bad way she’ll offer to shop or cook for us; she asked only once what was wrong with him, and I, in my best French way, became evasive, giving her her cue to retreat into her usual discretion.
She has seen everything in her work and has a name for most of her observations. One day she was washing up some human merde left in the entryway, by one of the local bums no doubt. Bright-eyed and uncomprehending, I said, “What’s that you’re cleaning up, Madame Denise?”
“Une sentinelle, Monsieur” (a sentry).
“What’s a sentinelle, Madame Denise? I don’t know that word.”
She turned on me a weary, faintly superior and terminally sophisticated face: “Just think about it another little moment, Monsieur White.”
Edmund White has taught literature and creative writing at several universities including Yale and Johns Hopkins. He is the author of several books including Forgetting Elena, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, States of Desire: Travels in Gay America, and the award-winning Genet: A Biography. This story was excerpted from his book, Our Paris: Sketches from Memory, which was illustrated by Hubert Sorin who died of AIDS in 1994. He currently teaches at Princeton and lives in New York.
More and more landlords are deciding to eliminate the concierge. The escalating cost of construction provides an excellent argument for the termination of an ongoing contract. Selling the ground floor apartment to finance renovation makes perfect sense—on paper. Won’t a maintenance crew be more efficient in keeping the building clean? Why not install a row of mailboxes, instead of having letters hand-delivered? And a digicode? Is it really necessary to pay a concierge to keep watch when modernization has transformed the apartment building into a fortress with locks and security systems?
The concierge appears to be an anachronism as we approach the 21st century. Well, perhaps. But, she remains that extra dimension that makes urban life more pleasant. It is the concierge who gives each building its soul. Once she is eliminated, the human factor will be lost forever.
—Alexandra Grabbe, French Graffiti