Despite this, not a lot has changed as she still concealed her autodidactism lest she be condemned by the building’s tenant. Her husband, however, passed away due to cancer. At the age of seventeen, she got married to a factory worker and eventually moved to the apartment building where they both served as concierges. However, she had to obscure this from her family. In clandestine, she developed into an autodidact, immersing mostly in works of philosophy and literature. However, this handicap did not stop her from learning on her own. She was forced to stop her studies in order to help her family earn a living. Her story began in the French countryside where she was raised in destitution. What secrets lie hidden behind the inscrutable facade that makes her amenable to simply being a wallflower? As the story moved forward, a portrait of Renée, simply referred to as Madame Michel by the residents, started to emerge. She has unimpressionable physical attributes and, as such, described herself: “I am a widow, I am short, ugly and plump, I have bunions on my feet and, if I am to credit certain early mornings of self-inflicted disgust, the breath of a mammoth.” This arrangement, however, did not bother her as she did not want to draw attention to herself.
Despite serving the residents for nearly three decades, Renée often finds herself overlooked. The apartment building, with its courtyard and private gardens, was divided into eight luxury apartments which were all occupied by an eclectic mix of bourgeois families, among them some powerful and influential individuals.
For the past 27 years, she has served as the concierge at a Left Bank apartment building at number 7, Rue de Grenelle, a high-class address in Paris. In French novelist Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, we meet an ordinary woman who often finds herself overlooked. It is these complexities that make each of us unique. If only we learn to see beyond our biases, we will begin to see how each of us possesses deeper and more complex personalities. Behind the unprepossessing feature is a deeper story, a deeper person. It suddenly hits us like a splash of cold water. The one we thought was always composed has vulnerabilities he/she refuses to show. The one who always seemed happy has deeper pains she conceals behind her laughter.
There is more to the individuals we easily dismissed because of how they presented themselves. However, as we get to know them more, the images we have sketched in our minds are slowly proven wrong. We think that our first glimpses into their personalities already make us an authority at understanding human nature. We presume that we fathom every nook and cranny of their profiles. “First impressions never last.” Who hasn’t heard of this ubiquitous string of words? We always like to think that we know and understand the people we encounter on a daily basis.
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