''Le hérisson'' (2009) by Mona Achache

follows events in the life of a concierge, Renée Michel, whose deliberately concealed intelligence is uncovered by an unstable but intellectually precocious girl named Paloma Josse. Paloma is the daughter of an upper-class family living in the upscale Parisian apartment building where Renée works.

The story revolves mainly around the characters of Renée Michel and Paloma Josse, residents of an upper-middle class Left Bank apartment building at 7 Rue de Grenelle – one of the most elegant streets in Paris. Divided into eight luxury apartments, all occupied by distinctly bourgeoisfamilies, the building has a courtyard and private garden.

The widow Renée is a concierge who has supervised the building for 27 years. She is an autodidact in literature and philosophy, but conceals it to keep her job and, she believes, to avoid the condemnation of the building's tenants if they were to discover how cultured she is. Likewise, she wants to be alone to avoid her tenants' curiosity. She effects this by pretending to indulge in concierge-type food and low-quality television, while in her back room she actually enjoys high-quality food, listens to opera, and reads works by Leo Tolstoy and Edmund Husserl. Her perspective is that "[t]o be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one, in our society, to a dark and disillusioned life, a condition one ought to accept at an early age".^[1]

Twelve-year-old Paloma lives on the fifth floor with her parents and sister whom she considers snobs. A precocious girl, she hides her intelligence to avoid exclusion at school. Dismayed by the privileged people around her, she decides that life is meaningless, and that unless she can find something worth living for, in her words, beyond the "vacuousness of bourgeois existence",^[2] she will commit suicide on her 13th birthday on June 16. She steals her mother's pills, and she plans to burn down the apartment before dying. For the time being she journals her observations of the outside world, including her perceptions of Renée.

Paloma is the only one of the educated tenants who suspects Renée's refinement, and for most of the novel, the two "cross each other but don’t see each other" in the words of Time Outreviewer Elisabeth Vincentelli.^[3] Although they share an interest in philosophy and thoughts about literature, nothing much happens to them until the death of a celebrated restaurant critic who had been living upstairs. A cultured Japanese businessman named Kakuro Ozu, whom Renée and Paloma befriend, then takes a room in the same apartment building, and Ozu comes to share Paloma's fascination with Renée: that the concierge has the "same simple refinement as the hedgehog".^[4]

Towards the end of the novel, Barbery brings Renée out of her internal seclusion, and the older woman guides young Paloma toward realizing that not all adults pursue vanity at the expense of their intelligence and humanity. However, only shortly after Renée realizes that the beauty of life and her connections with the world makes life worth living, she dies in the same way that Roland Barthes did. This leaves Paloma and Ozu devastated but leads Paloma not to commit suicide.^[4]

Cast
Renée Michel - Josiane Balasko
Paloma Josse - Garance Le Guillermic
Kakuro Ozu - Togo Igawa

Muriel Barbery is the writer of ''The Elegance of the Hedgehog'' (L'Élégance du hérisson) that was eventually adapted into a film directed by Mona Achache & released in France, July 2009.