Similar to the chambre de bonne, the concierge lodge holds a romantic, almost mythic quality in the rich history of Paris. The idea that life here for some is so lavish that apartment buildings have live-in caretakers has always both amused me and made me want to roll my eyes deep into their sockets. The reality these days of course is a little different and the job is threatened by private companies and cost-cutting. Whilst my building does have a concierge lodge it is used to store kids bikes and prams and the building maintenance guy comes once a week and most likely looks after several buildings. And yet there are apartments in the city (particularly in more affluent areas, ahem, 7th and 16th I’m looking at you) where the lodges are inhabited full-time. I have wondered previously how this arrangement works and now the door off the lobby has been opened, but just a crack.
Photographer Nadège Abadie photographed and interviewed 7 concierges for her project ‘La Lodge’. You can listen to the recordings in French here or keep reading for the translated summaries.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Manuela has been concierge here for 14 years, and lives in the lodge with her husband and two children. “That’s already a lot of years,” she sighs. She also replaces other concierges when they take time off, including her aunt who works “at number 34” of the same street. They also take turns in replacing Manuela on her days off. Her day begins at 8a.m. and Manuela keeps her lodge open until 9 p.m. “They all get up late here in the morning,” she says. “On the other hand, they all go to bed late at night. So I live at the same rhythm.” She pays no rent and earns 1,000 euros per month, but has to pay the electricity – “300 euros” – and other utilities. Both she and her husband must work to make ends meet. “Often they don’t want children in the caretaker’s lodge,” she says. Manuela’s children have never played in the courtyard because it is forbidden “even with a foam ball”. She is happy to be in an upmarket part of Paris where “everything is calm” after living in the more modest 18th arrondissement but “where the baguette cost 70 centimes” instead of 1 euro and 10 centimes. “I wanted this neighbourhood” she says. “It’s true that for the education of the children it’s best to be here.”
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Marie-José has lived and worked in this lodge for seven years, taking it over from her parents. She has two stairways to clean and five stories of apartments to which she delivers the mail every day “like the old way”. She arrived in France from Portugal as a young child, after her parents had finally found a studio in Paris to house the growing family. Before that, her grandmother had raised her. Her family roots are in a part of the Alentejo region of central Portugal where, she laments, the local economy has wound down and where “there are only retired folk now”. Marie-José worked as a chocolate seller before taking over the lodge. “My mother was the concierge, my father worked for a company that had nothing to do with the building, and she was here for 11 years,” she explains. “They took retirement and as I had a little boy – I still do but now he’s 14-years-old – it was easier for me to bring him up. That’s the advantage of being a caretaker, our work is at home.”
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Mariela is from Colombia. “I love France, it’s my adopted country” she says. She hasn’t been back to Colombia for six years. “I’m a foreigner in my own country,” she reflects. “My life is more here, in France, than at home in Colombia.” She came to France after she lost her job in a bank and her marriage fell apart. Her sister was already in France, working for a religious order, and suggested to Mariela that she should join her to start a new life. But her sister warned her she would have to get by with odd-jobbing. She found it hard at first. “I wasn’t used to doing house-cleaning work, things like that”, she says and recalls how “it was very difficult, very hard, I cried day and night, all the time”. When she found the job as concierge she was delighted. Beyond the usual chores of cleaning, looking after the mail and tending to the rubbish, she takes pleasure in helping the elderly who live in the building, dropping in to play cards with them or offering to do their shopping. She introduced the plants that line the courtyard and she talks to them every morning. “Before, it was dead, there wasn’t one flower,” she says.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Paula arrived in France from Portugal at the age of 23,“I knew nothing of it, I didn’t speak French or anything”, and first lived at her mother-in-law’s home, in the distant suburbs north of Paris. She has been concierge here for seven years, and has worked for the same building management company for 21 years. Before, she was in a lodge in another part of Paris where she lived in cramped conditions, sleeping on a sofa, typical of so many concierge lodges. She applied for the job here, in the capital’s chic 7th arrondissement, because the lodge allowed her daughter, then aged 13, to finally have her own bedroom. She says she found the people here “snobbish” compared with those in the more modest surrounds of the 14th arrondissement where she was previously. There are 12 apartments in the building, “they’re 200 square meters all the same”, some used by the diplomatic staff of an embassy. At her old address, the building she looked after contained 30 households. Her working timetable is from 7 a.m. to midday, and from 4p.m. to 8 p.m. She says her mornings are taken up with “lots of parcels, letters, there are always people who come to read the gas meters, the electricity meters, and companies come for this and for that”. She says she would like to find a job with easier working hours, but holding her back is that her daughter is so happy here.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Cybèle’s motherwas the concierge here before her. At first, Cybèle came to help out when her mother became seriously ill and when “some in the building wanted to get rid of her”. After her mother’s death Cybèle’s marriage soon began to fall apart. With two young teenage sons to look after she decided to give up her job and rented flat in the suburbs and to move in as the full-time concierge. “I could be closer to my sons,” she says. “Even if I’m a big dreamer I’m also very pragmatic” she says, remembering when she made the choice 22 years ago. She was young when her family moved to France from Portugal where her father was a journalist and opponent of the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar. Unlike her, Cybèle’s sisters were born in France and thus had the automatic right to French nationality. She recalls how her demand for French nationality took three years, an unusually long time. Yet, she says, “my culture is French, and profoundly French,” adding that she suspects her father’s political activism was the reason for the bureaucratic delays. She gets up early but enjoys not having “lots of stress, like lots of people, being shoved around in the metro, the bus, the street”. She says she talks to the residents a lot; “we can complain about things together, we can laugh, we can joke”. The building was recently equipped with three separate digital lock entrance systems. “I told them ‘go and live in the bank of France, you’ll be much safer there’, because it was beginning to be ridiculous,” she says, recalling that the only time she had witnessed the presence of an intruder in the building he had got in via the roof.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Elisabeth was born in Colombia and came to France “at the right moment”. That was shortly after the 1981 election of socialist president François Mitterrand “and the amnesties”. The lodge where she first began working as a concierge was made up of one room, with outside toilets. Here, she has “a living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms, a bathroom” and she reckons that it is “one of the loveliest lodges in Paris”. The building belongs to three brothers who live in Mexico but who have each kept apartments here. On top of her daily chores, Elizabeth is also in charge of making sure the brothers’ apartments are “impeccable” for when they return to visit.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Abder, the only man to feature here, used to work as the manager of a supermarket in the Paris suburbs “with 18 check-outs”. After he was the victim of an assault he became severely depressed. The opportunity to take on the job of caretaker here came by chance. “It allowed me to stabilize myself, but I have receded mentally,” he says. “Management of a building is technical, not intellectual […] but there are people more unfortunate than me.” He says there are only “charming people” in the building he looks after, but he regrets not having succeeded in getting them to have closer relations between themselves.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
