A cultured Japanese man takes the apartment and shares Paloma's fascination with Renée. The upstart girl and the concierge are drawn together when the celebrated restaurant critic upstairs dies. 'To 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.' So she pretends to be far more stupid than she is. Plus, Renée just wants to be left alone and has no desire to become the eccentric object of everyone's curiosity. The inhabitants of 7 Rue de Grenelle would, apparently, be scandalised if they found out that their lonely, dowdy concierge was getting up to all these intellectual high jinks. But Renée must maintain her lowly position in the pecking order so that she can keep her job: she is an autodidact who adores Tolstoy, is a devotee of Japanese cinema and listens to Mahler. The reader knows from the beginning that the two of them have more in common than they realise.
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