The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Almost the whole novel is held inside one grand bourgeois apartment building on the Left Bank, at 7 rue de Grenelle. A concierge who hides her learning, a wealthy set of tenants, and a girl planning her own disappearance share its lodge, stairwell and flats, with a café and the surrounding streets of the 7th arrondissement just beyond the door.

Renée Michel

7 rue de Grenelle

The building

Everything turns on this one address: an elegant Left Bank apartment house of eight grand flats, a courtyard and a private garden, with a concierge's lodge by the entrance. The building is the whole world of the book, and every other point here is a room or a doorstep within a few metres of it.

Setting, throughout

explicit The novel names the address, 7 rue de Grenelle, as the hôtel particulier that holds nearly all its scenes. The real number 7 sits at the eastern, Saint-Germain end of the street, on the 6th and 7th arrondissement line rather than deep in the 7th; the coordinates mark that real doorway.

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