EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNAL
September 19, 1999
A Good Room
Lying here, on a bed and not the ground, not the Thermarest, not
sweating, not shivering, not camping, looking at the whole room -- the
kitchen, the bathroom, the dormer. No kidding -- an old woman sits on a
crate on the street corner below and cranks out "La Vie en Rose"
on her accordion while the people around her bustle with shopping and
selling. The vegetable sellers shout their prices. Beyond that there's the
traffic noise, the city noise. We're in Paris.
On the table there's a current fashion magazine. The cover announces the
feature article: I Live In A Chambre de Bonne. Who Am I?
In the last century, and a few before that, the wealthy Parisian middle
class built a series, a plethora of handsome rowhouses in the central
districts of the city. These houses were large enough for
entertaining, accommodating families and their servants. The young
maids lived on the top floors of these houses in what is now known as
chambres de bonne, or a "good rooms". Each was only a little
room. Each maid would have a tiny slanted space in the attic where she
could sleep, keep her things, stand up near the dormer window. There would
be one bathroom for everyone on that floor and no kitchen. The only saving
grace of climbing a servant's staircase of roughly seven flights, with no heat
or fan and no privacy - for the walls are thin enough to hear a
neighbour's early morning throat-clearing - was that from this height, with
a dormer window each, the young maids had the most spectacular views of
the city -- to the Eiffel Tower, the Siene, the Bois de Bologne. While
visiting in Seville, Suzanne told me of her unobstructed view of the
Eglise St. Sulpice, one of the largest Romanesque churches in Paris,
complete with hourly chiming bell. In the 20th century, with
astronomical rents and almost zero vacancy, creative students and
foreigners wishing for their piece of Parisian life begged landlords and
modern bourgeois homeowners to allow them to rent these pitiful rooms for
a pittance. They renovated small bathrooms and brought in hotplates and
installed tiny refrigerators. They showered at the gym and ate in the
cafes. Today Paris's thousands of chambres de bonne -- for there are
dozens for every rowhouse-lined street - are inhabited by single mothers
and foreign exchange students and middle-class teenagers lucky enough to
have been granted a little space from their parents. When you walk along
the boulevards of Paris look up. You'll see the tiniest of windows; tucked into a
mansard roof, crowning a centuries-old residence with a flower pot.
